LinkedIn Growth5 min read
How to Remove Followers From LinkedIn (The Honest Answer)
How to remove followers from LinkedIn: there is no one-click remove button, so here are the three settings that actually work and what each one costs you.
By Animesh Kudake, Co-founder, Apna Project
The short version
- LinkedIn has no button that removes a single follower. Anyone telling you otherwise is describing removing a connection, which is a different thing.
- Switching who can follow you from Everyone on LinkedIn to Your connections removes every follower outside your network at once, and LinkedIn says the change can take up to 24 hours.
- Blocking is the only way to remove one specific follower, and it also cuts off profiles, messages, and any connection between you.
- Removing a connection does not always remove a follower. If your follow setting allows everyone, an ex-connection can keep following you.
- For most people the follower count is not worth surgery. Restricting who can follow you shrinks your reach permanently, which is a real cost for a cosmetic fix.
Option 2: block the specific person
If the problem is one person rather than a category of people, blocking is the only precise tool.
Open their profile, click More, and choose Report or block, then follow the prompts. According to LinkedIn's block overview, after you block someone you will not be able to access each other's profiles, you will not be able to message each other, and if you were connected you are no longer connected. The follow relationship goes with it.
Two details worth knowing before you use it. First, LinkedIn says that in most cases it does not notify the person that you blocked them, though they may work it out from the missing profile. Second, blocking is not invisibility: a blocked member may still see information you make public, including your public profile and your public shares.
Blocking is the right call for harassment or for someone you genuinely do not want reading your work. It is heavy-handed for a follower you simply find annoying.
Option 3: accept the follower and change what they see
The option nobody sells you, and the one we would pick most of the time.
If the worry is a competitor watching your posts, restricting followers does not solve it. They can log out and read your public profile, or read your posts from any other account. Our piece on making your profile publicly visible covers how much of your profile is readable without an account at all, and the answer surprises people.
If the worry is that bot followers are inflating a number you report to a client or a boss, the honest fix is to report engagement rather than followers. Followers is the vanity metric most detached from outcomes, which is part of why we keep pointing people at what actually counts as engagement instead.
What about bulk follower removal tools?
Search for this and you will find extensions promising to clear followers in bulk. Skip them, for a reason that has nothing to do with our product: LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits using software, scripts, or bots to access the service and drive automated actions. Tools that click through your follower list on your behalf are doing exactly that, and the account they put at risk is yours.
We build Commenti, an AI commenting tool, so we are not in a position to be sanctimonious about automation. We sit in that same gray zone and we say so plainly. What we do is build the product to reduce risk rather than pretend it away: daily caps, pacing between actions, skip filters, and an approve mode that keeps a human in the loop. Reduce is the honest verb, and there is no tool, ours included, that can promise a LinkedIn account is untouchable.
The difference with follower-removal extensions is that the tradeoff is worse. You are taking account risk to change a number that does not affect your reach, your inbound, or your credibility with anyone who matters.
Our take, in one paragraph
Use the connections-only setting if you are deliberately making your presence private, and accept that you are trading away reach to do it. Use blocking for individuals who genuinely bother you. For everything else, leave the followers alone. A follower who never engages costs you nothing, and the time you would spend pruning is better spent on the ten comments a day that actually bring the right people in.
Frequently asked questions
Can you remove a follower on LinkedIn?
Not individually. LinkedIn does not offer a remove follower option on a member's profile. Your two real tools are changing your follow setting to connections only, which removes everyone outside your network at once, or blocking that specific person, which severs everything between you rather than just the follow.
How do I remove all followers who are not connections?
Go to Settings and Privacy, then Visibility, then Followers, and change who can follow you from Everyone on LinkedIn to Your connections. LinkedIn states that followers outside your network will be removed when you do this, and that changes can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
Does blocking someone remove them as a follower?
Yes. LinkedIn says that when you block a member you cannot access each other's profiles or message each other, and if you were connected you are no longer connected. The follow relationship goes with it. In most cases LinkedIn does not notify the person that you blocked them.
If I remove a connection, do they still follow me?
They can. Removing a connection ends the first-degree relationship, but if your follow setting is open to everyone, that person is free to keep following you and seeing your public posts. If you want them gone entirely, blocking is the only reliable option.
Written by the team building Commenti on real LinkedIn growth data. Found an error? Tell us and we’ll fix it. Accuracy beats winning.
Co-founder, Apna Project
Co-founder at Apna Project, where he helps founders and agencies turn ideas into products. Writes here on LinkedIn growth and what actually earns attention in a comment section. Commenti is the LinkedIn comment automation tool by Ampliflow.
If you are looking for how to remove followers from LinkedIn because a competitor, an ex-colleague, or a stream of bot accounts is sitting in your follower list, the first thing to know is that the button you are hunting for does not exist. LinkedIn gives you no way to remove one follower and leave everything else intact.
What it gives you instead are three blunter instruments, each with a different cost. Here is what each one actually does, in the order most people should consider them.
Why there is no remove follower button
Following on LinkedIn is deliberately one-directional. Anyone can follow you without asking, which is the entire reason a follower count can grow faster than a connection count. LinkedIn treats that openness as a feature for reach, and the price of the feature is that you do not get to curate the audience person by person.
The help page for follower settings is explicit about your only two states: you can be followable by everyone on LinkedIn, or by your connections only. There is nothing in between and no per-person control. If a guide claims otherwise, it is describing removing a connection, which does something different.
Option 1: restrict who can follow you (the bulk removal)
This is the closest thing to a real remove followers feature, and it works in bulk.
On desktop:
LinkedIn's own documentation says that if you limit followers to your connections, followers outside your network will be removed, and that the change can take up to 24 hours to take effect. So do not panic if the count is unchanged an hour later.
What it costs you is not small. With followers limited to connections, people who find you through a comment or a shared post cannot follow you unless they send a connection request, and connection requests are a much higher bar than a follow. If any part of your LinkedIn use is about reaching people outside your immediate network, this setting works against it every day, in exchange for a one-time cleanup.