How to Block Someone on a LinkedIn Business Page

Managing your brand’s LinkedIn presence means fostering a professional community, but sometimes you need to remove someone who detracts from that environment. Whether you're dealing with spam comments, harassment, or persistent negativity, knowing how to block someone is an essential tool in your page management kit. This guide walks you through the exact steps for blocking an individual from your LinkedIn Business Page, explains what happens next, and offers strategies for proactive community management.

Why Block Someone on a LinkedIn Business Page?

Blocking is a definitive step, and it's helpful to know when it’s the right tool for the job. While you want to encourage open conversation, you also have a responsibility to maintain a safe and professional space for your followers. You're not shutting down criticism, you're curating a productive community.

Here are a few common scenarios where blocking is the most appropriate action:

• Persistent Trolling or Harassment: This is the most obvious reason. If an individual is consistently leaving abusive, insulting, or harassing comments directed at your page, your employees, or other followers, blocking is a necessary step to protect your community.
• Spam and Unrelenting Self-Promotion: Every page manager has seen it: the same user dropping irrelevant links to their own services on every single post. If you’ve tried hiding their comments or asking them to stop and they persist, blocking cleans up your comments sections for good.
• Disgruntled Former Employees: Unfortunately, some professional separations don’t end amicably. If a former employee is using your page to air grievances or spread misinformation, blocking them can prevent further disruption while the situation is handled through proper channels.
• Bad-Faith Competitors: Healthy competition is one thing, but a competitor who actively bad-mouths your company, asks loaded questions in bad faith, or attempts to poach your audience in the comments is creating a toxic environment. Blocking can put a quick stop to these tactics.
• Spreading Misinformation: If a user continually posts false or misleading information on your page and refuses to engage constructively, removing their ability to do so protects the integrity of your page and the information you share.

The goal isn't to create an echo chamber where only positive feedback is allowed. It's about drawing a line between constructive criticism and destructive behavior that harms the community you've worked hard to build.

Understanding Your Options: Block vs. Remove vs. Report

Before you hit the block button, it’s useful to understand the different levels of control you have. Blocking is the strongest option, but it isn’t the only one.

Blocking a Person

This is the most direct and permanent solution for removing a disruptive individual from your page's sphere.

• What it does: When you block someone, they are immediately removed as a follower. They will no longer be able to find, see, or follow your page. Their past comments and reactions are hidden, and they cannot interact with your content in any way going forward. To them, your page will essentially cease to exist on LinkedIn.
• When to use it: Use this for clear-cut cases of harassment, spam, trolling, or any situation where you want to completely sever the connection between that person and your business page.

Removing a Follower

This is a softer, less permanent action.

• What it does: Removing a follower simply unfollows them from your page. They will no longer see your updates in their main news feed. However, they can still navigate directly to your page, see all your content, and choose to comment or even follow you again.
• When to use it: This can be useful for page cleanup if you're trying to refine your audience, but it's not an effective tool for dealing with negative behavior, as the person can easily post on your page again.

Reporting a Person or Comment

This action involves LinkedIn directly.

• What it does: When you report a comment or a person’s profile, you are flagging it for review by LinkedIn's safety team for violating their Professional Community Policies. They will review the content and take action if it violates their rules, which could range from removing the content to suspending the user’s account.
• When to use it: You should report any content that involves hate speech, threats, impersonation, severe harassment, or other clear violations of LinkedIn’s terms. You can both block and report a person if their behavior is particularly egregious.

How to Block Someone from Your LinkedIn Business Page: The Step-by-Step Guide

LinkedIn has made this process more straightforward over time. The most direct way to block a member is from your follower list. Here’s how you do it:

1. Navigate to Your Page as an Admin: First, head to the LinkedIn homepage and click on your profile picture in the top right. Under the "Manage" section, select your Company Page to go to its admin view.
2. Open Your Analytics: On your page's left-hand navigation menu, click on Analytics and then select Followers from the dropdown.
3. Find the Follower: You will now see a list of your most recent followers. You can scroll through this list to find the person you wish to block. LinkedIn's interface here is designed for browsing recent followers, so if the person followed you a long time ago, you may need to use the method in the next section.
4. Initiate the Block: Once you locate the individual in the follower list, click the three dots (...) to the right of their name. This will open a small menu.
5. Select "Block member": From the menu, click on "Block member."
6. Confirm Your Decision: A pop-up window will appear asking you to confirm. It will say something like, "Block [User's Name]? They won’t be able to see or interact with your Page." Click the blue Block button to finalize the action.

That's it. The person has now been blocked from your page.

Alternative Method: Blocking from a Comment

If you have trouble finding the user in your follower list, you can still block them directly from any comment they have left on your page posts.

1. Find the user's comment, post, or mention.
2. Click the three dots (...) in the top right corner of their comment.
3. From the dropdown menu, select "Hide comment and block [User's Name]."
4. Confirm the action in the pop-up window.

This achieves the same result and is often quicker if the toxic behavior is recent.

What Happens After You Block Someone?

Understanding the full impact of blocking helps you manage your community effectively. When you block a member from your LinkedIn Business Page:

• They Are No Longer a Follower: The block immediately and automatically removes them from your follower count.
• Your Page Becomes Invisible to Them: They will not be able to find your page through search, direct links, or any other means on LinkedIn. For them, it is effectively removed from the platform.
• All Past Interactions Are Hidden: Any previous comments, likes, or reactions they made on your page content will be removed. This helps clean up your threads retroactively.
• They Cannot Interact with Your Page: They cannot comment, react, share, or @mention your page. Likewise, your page cannot @mention them.

How to View Your Block List and Unblock Someone

Mistakes happen, or situations change. If you ever need to reverse a block, you can easily access your page's block list.

1. Go to Page Settings: In your Company Page admin view, click on Settings in the left-hand navigation menu.
2. Find Member Blocking: In the Settings menu, you’ll find an option labeled Member blocking. Click it.
3. Manage Your Block List: You'll see a list of every member you have blocked. You can search this list by name to find a specific individual.
4. Unblock the Member: Next to the user’s name, simply click the Unblock button. They will be immediately unblocked.

Important: Unblocking someone does not automatically make them a follower again. They would need to navigate to your page and manually click "Follow" to resubscribe to your updates.

Beyond Blocking: Building a Proactive Community Strategy

Blocking is a reactive tool, but the best community management is proactive. Here are a few strategies to build a healthier, more self-regulating community so you have to use the block button less often.

Set Clear Community Guidelines

Don't make your followers guess what's acceptable. Write a set of simple, clear community guidelines outlining what is encouraged (constructive feedback, relevant questions) and what will be removed (spam, personal attacks, hate speech). You can publish this as a document or a post and occasionally link back to it in the comments when taking moderator action.

Use Comment Moderation Tools

In your Page Settings under "General," you can find a "Manage comments" section. This allows you to set filters that automatically hide comments containing specific keywords or phrases you define. While it's not foolproof, it can help catch low-level spam or predictable profanity before it goes public.

Don't Feed the Trolls

It's old internet advice for a reason: it works. Arguing with someone acting in bad faith only amplifies their voice and drags your brand into the mud. When you identify a troll, the best response is often no response at all. Simply hide their comment, block them, and move on. Your energy is better spent engaging with your positive community members.

Final Thoughts

Knowing how to block someone is a vital skill for anyone managing a LinkedIn Business Page, acting as a crucial tool for protecting your brand and fostering a positive community. By using it wisely alongside a thoughtful, proactive approach to community management, you can create a professional space where valuable conversations thrive.

While blocking is a necessary tool, a huge part of community management is catching every comment and message across all your platforms before they require moderation. That's where we found our old tools falling short, which is why we built our unified social inbox into Postbase. It lets our team see and reply to everything from one spot, allowing us to connect with our community instead of just putting out fires.