Apparently, according to the email I got from LinkedIn recently, I’ve been on the site for 15 years. How can that possibly be? Feels like I joined only a few years ago.
Of course, this could be because I’ve only become really active on it in the past few years. And since Twitter fell into the slop bucket and Facebook has become a nest of non-stop advertising (both undergoing enshittification, as Cory Doctorow would put it), far more people seem to have turned to LinkedIn as their preferred social media community.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and the original intent was for it to serve as a place where people could post their résumé, hunt for jobs, and network with other professionals. Back when I joined, the site enjoined users to only follow people they knew in real life. Because of these limitations, people didn’t use it like they did other social media platforms. They kept their comments professional and apolitical, not veering into the personal, divisive, or trollish.
That’s what makes LinkedIn such a curious social media creature now.
Use of it seems to have ramped up during the Covid pandemic, which is understandable. People were working from home and couldn’t get together with work colleagues, so LinkedIn helped to fill a social gap. The site is still work-focused, but timeline posts have become more personal. So far they haven’t slipped into divisiveness, and the comments aren’t swarming with trolls, at least from what I’ve observed.
LinkedIn keeps the ads limited and unobtrusive. In my timeline, they seem to be mostly from companies I’m following. In contrast, I’m constantly being prodded by Facebook ads to follow this or that company or page. My husband, in observing how clotted his Facebook timeline was with ads, once counted 97 ads out of 100 consecutive timeline items, which is ridiculous.
Somewhere along the line, LinkedIn dropped the requirement to only connect with people you directly know and added a Follow button. This was one of the beauties of Twitter, allowing users to follow people they’d never have a chance to meet in life.
Some of the more active people on LinkedIn also produce newsletters, making it somewhat like Substack or Medium.
LinkedIn seems to have adopted the best of other social platforms while somehow avoiding many of the unsavory parts.
With any social media platform, users drive changes in the way they interact with and on the platform. It was early Twitter users who created the retweet by typing the letters ‘RT’ into their own tweet and following them with a copy of another person’s tweet. Retweeting became so popular that Twitter developers added a retweet tool. Mastodon users are clamoring for the same functionality. LinkedIn gives users this ability with its function to repost with their own comments.
In addition, I’m seeing some new conventions crop up on LinkedIn lately, typically coming from folks who are trying to build their reputations as thought leaders or influencers. Here are three of them:
- Writing timeline posts so long they could almost be blog posts.
- Writing a post where each line is short and there is a space between each line, giving the post an airy and elongated look.
- Ending each post with a consistent sign-off that explains who the poster is or that appeals to the reader to follow or hire the poster for specific work.
Have you noticed any other new conventions driven by users on LinkedIn? If so, share in the comments here or on LinkedIn, where I’ll share this post. However, I won’t write a long post to go with it.
I still ascribe to the POSSE philosophy of web content. I Publish (on my) Own Site, and Syndicate Elsewhere. Then, if a platform controlled by a giant corporation goes kerflooey, my content doesn’t go with it.