Networking How To Organize Your LinkedIn Inbox

Jules Maregiano Jan 20, 2023

The LinkedIn Inbox is a mess. It’s not a secret, nor up for debate. It’s a fact.

This results in failed conversations, missed opportunities, and a general feeling of being over LinkedIn.

That would be perfectly OK if LinkedIn was not the #1 social network for professionals: LinkedIn is a treasure trove which gathers all your past, present and future employers, coworkers, prospect, clients, employees, partners, investors, and so on.

Benefits of organizing your inbox

Taking control over your LinkedIn inbox requires some upfront investment, but they will deliver major dividends over time. The top 3 benefits of managing your inbox like a boxx are:

• In the short-term: Focus and clarity. Being 100% certain you haven’t missed any important conversation or failed to follow-up on your prospects helps you feel better at the end of the day
• After a few weeks: More opportunities. Answering urgent messages right away and engaging with the connections that matter translates into more opportunities. And it happens sooner than you’d think.
• Over time: Building a reputation. Having a system to nurture your network will turn you into a reliable professional people can count on. That’s what make people entrust you with new business and connections.

This sounds great on paper, but if it were easy, we’d already be doing it. What’s holding us back?

The issue with LinkedIn inbox

Let’s give some credit to LinkedIn: They’ve managed in 20 years to gather all the professionals from around the world under one roof, changing forever the way we find jobs, sell, and network. Bravo!

But longevity comes with a bunch of bad habits that are hard to change. Regarding the inbox, we can see 3 main issues:

• A cluttered interface. LinkedIn inbox takes 30% of your laptop’s screen. Not only does it make any designer shed tears of frustration, but, more importantly, it makes it painful for you to browse through your conversations efficiently.
• Limited tooling. Gmail inbox comes with filters, labels, automations, integrations, 100+ parameters, and a 3rd party developer store. LinkedIn Inbox is limited to a basic search, a couple filters, and the archive. If you’re a professional dealing with 1000’s of people, that’s borderline disrespectful.
• And change in sight. The LinkedIn inbox interface has barely changed for the last 20 years, and doesn’t seem to be planning on doing it. If you want something better you have to options: Forward important conversations to your email (which takes time to do), and purchasing a Premium LinkedIn plan (which doesn’t solve most issues, and is very expensive).

So what can we do with the current LinkedIn inbox to improve things?

Basic of LinkedIn inbox management

Better than doing nothing, here are some good habits you can take to limit the damage:

• Archive/delete. Take back control of your inbox by cleaning it. Most of your LinkedIn inbox is spam: Job offers, sale pitches, outdated conversations. You can safely delete those. When in doubt, or if you know the person, prefer archiving it, just in case.
• Mark unread. “Unread” and “To-do” are radically different concepts. But it’s the only way you’re being given to sort your LinkedIn inbox. Simply right-click on the messages that you need to answer to, but can’t right now, to mark them unread and deal with later.
• Use filters. Filters allow you to zoom on segments of your LinkedIn inbox. A useful one is “Unread” to see at a glance all the messages you have to deal with.

• Use notification to your advantage. If you can’t customize your LinkedIn inbox, at least, you can organize your emails. Ask LinkedIn to notify you by individual email of all new DMs. This allows you to keep track of LinkedIn conversations in your inbox and keep track of your convos.

These tips can help you to a certain extent. But if you already know them and they do not solve the pain of managing a serious professional network, we understand. We’ve felt that pain for years before taking it on ourselves to fix things. Introducing, Superlink:

An opinionated LinkedIn networking interface

SuperLink is a LinkedIn network management tool that turns normal people into networking professionals that’d make a presidential candidate jealous.

Its interface goes on top of your current LinkedIn account, allowing you to browse your LinkedIn network, sort it, and interact with it. It does with 2 main features:

• Network overview. All your X.000s contacts in one, blazingly fast, table, so that you can browse all your contacts and use your already existing network much better.
• Revamped Inbox. We bring all your LinkedIn conversations in a Gmail like interface and make it incredibly easy to answer, follow-up, and nurture every prospect, old friend, and audience member.

But tools are not worth much without a great craftsman, or at least, guidelines to become one.

For that reason, Superlink borrows and remixes the Inbox Zero principles edicted by Marlin Mann in the 2000’s and adapt them for LinkedIn

Inbox Zero for LinkedIn

Inbox Zero is a methodology meant to help you answer process all your inbound conversations efficiently. Emails and Direct Messages are not the same, but here is the idea: Each inbound message ends up in 3 actions you can take now to considered a DM process and removed from your inbox: Delete, do, and defer.

Delete.

Spam, pitch-slap, ill-targeted job offers, and other undesired messages should leave your inbox as fast as possible. SuperLink gives you a shortcut to archive or delete any conversation you’re currently viewing.

There’s dopamine in deleting stuff too.

Do.

If a message can be dealt with in under 2 min, just do it. It’ll be one more win for today. Archive the discussion as soon as you’re done to remove it from your inbox. When your contact will answer, it’ll pop back in your inbox, like in Gmail.

Defer.

When a message requires an action on your part, that’s not just a message, it’s a task. It requires to be added to your to-do and dealt with accordingly.

Snooze it to remove it from your inbox, adding eventually a label to remind you of the thing to do when checking your list of reminders.

Those principles are embedded into Superlink and will help you reach Inbox Zero so that you can be sure that you’ve seen all the inbound messages, and made sure to answer now, or at some point in the future.

We’ve also added a bnch of features that remind you of Gmail, and empower you to nail your networking.

Star important messages

Starring messages is the first level of LinkedIn Inbox management: It lets you keep track of important conversations and give you instant access to them.

Beware, though! Stars should be used rarely and for very limited amount of times. The LinkedIn Inbox Zero Methodology makes them mostly irrelevant.

Customize your inboxes

When reaching inbox zero on all messages is hard, you can inbox zero important. SuperLink tags give you specific inboxes so that you can clear your most important conversations before dealing with the fluff.

Look below: It’s Monday, and we have 37 unread messages. Ouch! But 9 are from our investor. Let’s make sure we nail those before dealing with the others, rather than making them wait.

You can also star recurring conversations to make sure they stand out and stay easily accessible.

Snooze messages

The anti-procastination “2min” rule states that any task taking under 2min should be done immediately. Why 2min? Because longer would cause you to lose the flow of your previous activity.

Your LinkedIn efficiency can benefit from that mindset: Clean all the easy messages first. And when a message requires a task on your part, or an info you don’t have yet, snooze it.

By removing conversations that have been processed, yet not completed, you clear your inbox (and your mind) and make sure to not forget anything.

Stop context-switching

One of the most frustrating ting with LinkedIn is the permanent need to switch between screens: CRM to take notes, Calendar to schedule meetups, Profile page to know who’s who, and so on.

Superlink brings all these on your conversation page so that you have it all at the glance of an eye:

Filter your inbox fast

Two key components of doing your work fast is to find things quickly, and smooth out friction. Superlink lets you browse your inbox fast, and adds new filters to the classic LinkedIn ones:

• Unread. All your unread conversations.
• Unanswered. All the unarchived and unanswered messages that you need to deal with.
• Starred. To see at a glance all your important convos.
• Snoozed. The conversations that you can’t deal with right now, which will pop back in your inbox at some point.
• Archived. Nothing new here, just all the conversations that you’ve dealt with.

All the filters can be combined with another. So, for example, if you’re feeling guilty about all those archived emails you’ve never answered to, you can wash your conscience and answer them all… or delete them all forever 😬

Take private notes on your contacts

Adding on LinkedIn the people met in a professional context has become a reflex. But it’s easy to soon forget the details of the encounter. In the digital world, remembering a person’s name is not the challenge anymore: Remembering the context, is.

For that reason, Superlink lets you take personal notes, right next to your LinkedIn conversations, to always remember how you met, what you talked about, and all these other details that will show the other persons your were there with them when you chatted.

Superlink makes networking fun

Spending time in the LinkedIn inbox can is soul crushing when you’re not properly equipped. That’s why we built SuperLink.

We’re building a better LinkedIn inbox by merging the fast, direct, pace of Direct Messaging, and B2B email battle tested, inbox zero, principle.

Having a powerful network comes down to a few things: Being there, being reliable, and following-up on your words. Not once, but consistently. Over time, it pays off.

If you’re ready to join SuperLink in that mission, click here, and get started right away, or book a call with us, to tell us about your needs, and our tips on how to make the best of SuperLink.