If you have decided to spread your professional presence across more than one platform, the order of operations matters. Doing it in the wrong sequence is how people lose contacts they meant to keep.
Everything here is reversible and costs nothing.
Request a copy of your profile, connections and posts before touching any settings.
Exports can take time to generate, and you want the file in hand before anything changes.Pick the twenty or thirty relationships you would actually want to keep and record an email address for each.
An export lists connections. It does not give you a way to reach most of them off the platform.Write down the concrete actions you took in the last month rather than your impression of them.
This determines whether one alternative can cover you or whether you need two.Look at ten organisations you would work for and see where their current openings appear.
Twenty minutes here beats any comparison article, including this one.Test before you commit to anything.
A half-finished profile on a new platform will underperform, and you will wrongly conclude the platform is the problem.
Give the comparison a fair chance by matching the effort you already invested elsewhere.Long enough to cover a full cycle of applications, replies or posts in your field.
Shorter tests mostly measure novelty rather than fit.Replies received, interviews booked or enquiries arrived. Pick whichever matches your actual goal.
Platform preference is easy to form and hard to check without a number attached.If you plan to be less active somewhere, say so there before you go quiet.
Silence reads as unavailability, which is the opposite of what a move is meant to achieve.The point at which a change becomes permanent.
Leaving a current, accurate profile in place costs nothing and keeps you findable.
In fields where recruiters search one platform first, removing the profile removes the thing doing that job.Add a link so anyone who finds the old profile can reach the new presence.
This is the single cheapest step and the one most often skipped.Check renewal dates, since annual plans continue until the term ends.
Paid tiers keep billing whether or not the account is active.Platforms change, and so does what you need from them.
A decision made during a job search often does not fit the period after it.Most people who describe themselves as having moved away from a general professional network have in fact reduced their use of it while keeping the profile. That is a legitimate outcome and usually a lower-risk one than a full exit.
Nothing in this checklist predicts a result. Whether a change helps depends on your field, region, seniority and existing network, and the same steps produce different outcomes for different people. No platform mentioned here is recommended or discouraged.