LinkedIn is becoming into a platform where average individuals can exchange personal information in addition to professional information. Can the platform maintain this rise in users’ interest? Is LinkedIn truly hip these days?
I chatted with Sarah Frier, the tech editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, about how LinkedIn became hip for our episode of What Next: TBD airing on September 1. For the sake of clarity, our dialogue has been edited and reduced.
Elizabeth O’Leary What served as the idea for your LinkedIn profile?
Sallie Frier In my own job, I was having a lot of trouble deciding “Where do I publish now? What should I do? I noticed that so many Twitter alternatives were emerging, yet people don’t want to create a network from start. Existing networks greatly increase the power of a location. LinkedIn posts used to disappear into a black hole, but now when I put something there, I really receive responses. I then began to question whether this was actually happening. Are people really just skimming through LinkedIn?
Then, during the summer, we had an intern at our San Francisco office. In her heartbreaking newsletter, she lamented the fact that she would never have a Twitter account because, well, why would you? “Where are you posting instead?” I questioned. She remarked, “Oh, LinkedIn and Instagram.” I thought, “Really? A college student believes that posting on LinkedIn is far more deserving and acceptable than posting anywhere else, right?
What do people there write? Is this the customary, “Congratulate Sarah on her work anniversary,” or something else?
For want of a better phrase, a lot of individuals are “thinkfluencing.” They write about what’s on their minds and then connect it to their jobs. A woman who has been jobless for 82 days recently posted on how emotionally taxing it has been for her and how she could tell it was affecting her children. She also mentioned how her stress was spilling over into her parenthood. In the end, she was trying to convey that while she had indeed received a new position, it was much more intimate than I was accustomed to seeing on LinkedIn.
That appears to be an outdated Facebook post.
It does, in fact.
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Younger generations have grown up blogging and creating their online selves. They don’t remain in the same position for 40 years when it comes to their careers and professional identities. Why is that relevant?
I believe that Gen Z and millennial professionals are much more likely to change jobs every couple of years, perhaps even try out a completely different field or skill set, or to start a side business. People are realising the value of maintaining a separate identity from their employer. They are creating an identity on LinkedIn that is similar to one they would create elsewhere on social media, but with a specific goal in mind.
Reading your account of your conversation with a woman who is, for lack of a better phrase, a LinkedIn influencer truly surprised me. I was unaware that such a thing existed.
The business has actively sought to promote it. Although they took a bit longer than some of the other platforms to really grasp it, they began attempting to woo CEOs, newsreaders, and celebrities like Arianna Huffington to become LinkedIn influencers in 2011.
Every social network functions in the same way over time, with celebrities and high-level users, but also with grassroots influencers who aspire to be like those celebrities and high-level users. A social network, in my opinion, cannot be considered culturally influential until users there have achieved fame as a result of the content they have posted. Because if they do, new people will be able to see them and think, “Oh, I want to be like them; I want to succeed like they do.”
And does it start to reproduce itself?
And it’s capable of reproducing itself. It might encourage further use of that network. Podcasts, newsletters, and audio have all been added to LinkedIn during the last few years. When they implemented LinkedIn Stories, they were made fun of. However, there are some LinkedIn users that invest their professional time there and as a result, they have consulting, mentorship, or advice firms.
LinkedIn has indeed experienced a phenomenal era of growth, but they appear to benefit from a fairly steady structure in the background. Tell me a bit about the business.
Compared to other social networks, their success is almost simpler to understand. What we’re seeing at LinkedIn is some stability, which contrasts with the general state of the advertising market. Meta, Twitter, Snapchat, and Pinterest are all supported by the advertising sector; as a result, they are all dependent on attention. Facebook and Instagram create reels as a result when a competitor like TikTok enters the market and offers a more effective technique to grab users’ attention with quick TikTok videos. Then, in order to make it less about a social network and more about entertainment, they also imitate TikTok’s algorithm.
Because it is not reliant on an advertising company, LinkedIn is unique. They do have one, but it is not their primary activity. They operate a recruiting firm that places people in jobs. They provide a tool called Sales Navigator that can help you identify the proper customers and decision-makers to buy your product if you’re attempting to sell one. And they charge quite a bit for those premium LinkedIn packages, even if people still require that kind of tool when the economy is rocky.
