LinkedIn Announces Expanded Roll-Out of New ‘Focused Inbox’ Format for InMail

You may have noticed a change to your LinkedIn messaging tab this week.

Today, LinkedIn has confirmed that its new ‘Focused Inbox’ format, which re-routes less valuable messages into an ‘Other’ tab in your LinkedIn message stream, is being rolled out to all users in the app.

Initially announced by LinkedIn back in September, Focused Inbox provides you with two separate InMail tabs – ’Focused’ and ‘Other’. In this context, ‘Other’ could just as easily be labeled ‘Spam’ – but the purpose, essentially, is to filter out the junk, and highlight the most important outreach in the app.

As explained by LinkedIn Product Manager Deepan Mehta:

“We’ve heard from many of you that you want a better way to organize your LinkedIn inbox. So I’m excited to share that we’re now rolling out a new and improved LinkedIn messaging experience to make it easier for our members around the globe to find and respond to the messages that matter most. Focused Inbox offers a dual-tabbed experience that categorizes your incoming messages into “Focused” and “Other.” Focused contains the most relevant new opportunities and outreach, while Other contains the remainder of your conversations.”

Mehta also notes that ‘conversations’ on LinkedIn are up nearly 20% year-over-year, with many people increasingly turning to messaging to connect and engage with each other in the app.

‘Conversations’ is a bit vague, but LinkedIn’s generally pretty unclear with its engagement stats. As a reminder, LinkedIn has reported ‘record levels’ of engagement pretty much every quarter since 2018, shortly after Microsoft acquired the professional networking app.

Microsoft is actually the originator of the new Focused Inbox approach, with the functionality originally launched for Outlook, before making its way to LinkedIn.

How much it improves the experience will come down, mostly, to how many messages you receive – though it’ll be interesting to note where LinkedIn’s paid InMails end up.

You would assume that LinkedIn will still be pushing paid promos into your main inbox, though a promotion from LinkedIn got filtered into my ‘Other’ folder this week. Just one aspect to note.

Mehta says that LinkedIn is gradually rolling out Focused Inbox to all members globally, so if you don’t have it yet, you will soon.