What Happened To LinkedIn?

When I first joined LinkedIn, I remember explicitly someone telling me that I should be very careful what I post on there. If I joined groups, to keep it strictly business and nothing else. Apparently people got a bit twitchy if the conversation turned away from business and on to others matters like sport and food.

At first, this was very much sound advice. I used it to promote DGB content to my connections and various industry groups that I had joined. Kept it strictly business and the content relevant to my audience. Then it all started to go a bit south.

“Inspirational” quotes

One of the most annoying aspects of both Twitter and Facebook is the increasing amounts of “inspirational” quotes being posted. They’re irritating, quite sickly to read and there needs to be much less of it. They certainly don’t inspire me!

Now I’ve started to see them creep into my LinkedIn timeline. Why? Are all the other social media platforms not enough? Do they have to be on LinkedIn too?

Then there is the click bait. Headlines to posts that read along the lines of “this woman fell down a hole, what happens next will amaze you”. Posts which are 95% made of bulls**t and leave you significantly under-amazed and time wasted you won’t get back. I don’t want to see that on LinkedIn. It has nothing to do with business at all.

To round things off, I have started to see a fair few posts with images of women wearing less and less. Why is this on LinkedIn now? Who is posting this kind of stuff? There is the rest of the internet for that, it doesn’t need to be on there. The team at LinkedIn I think are losing grip on their platform and need to start implementing some kind of procedure to clear some of the aforementioned crap before regular users of the site turn away from it.

Some good

It’s not all bad. I have made a really good number of connections. The LinkedIn Pulse app is a great way of keeping up to speed on what your connections are posting and saying. If you’re looking for a new job or looking to recruit it’s probably the best platform on which to do so.

But I fear all these USPs will start to be drowned out by the noise of the click-baiters and “inspiration” garbage accounts and it will turn into smaller version of Facebook.

Room for a new business platform?

Personally, I think LinkedIn has had it’s best days. And who pays to use their Premium service? Would you really pay just to see who has been looking at your profile? No me neither.

Now, like a good old fashioned business nerd, I watch a lot of the business-based media i.e. Bloomberg TV and CNBC. These are two purely business focused TV sites with huge audiences in the business arena. They provide data, analysis, interviews, special features and so on. I personally believe that if either of these companies felt inclined to, they could come up with their own business-based social media platform and start to take away some of LinkedIn’s dominance.

I know that I would probably use it, and I suspect that many in our industry would use it as well.