LinkedIn – Rapidly losing its professional relevance?

What triggered this…

My LinkedIn feed recently featured a video carousel titled “A day in the life”, in which people (“influencers”) shared videos of their day: waking up, brushing teeth, the coffee shop they get their morning jolt from, etc., etc. Personally, I have absolutely no interest in the composition of your “professional day”, what your office space looks like, etc. Just put down the phone and do some damn work!

Confession: My anti-social-media bias

Knowing that this topic may be controversial, let me start by telling you where I’m coming from. First off, I am a devout “anti-social-media” person: I don’t have a Facebook account or a Twitter (or whatever you want to call it now, it’s still Twitter to me) account. You certainly will never find me publishing on YouTube or TikTok! I do have an Instagram account, which I only created so I could see other people’s Instagram feeds (for some people, it’s the only way you can keep up with what they’re doing!); It uses an alternative email account limited to Instagram only and I only log into it using a Private browser window, in a desperate attempt to skirt Meta’s draconian tracking and database technology.

Now, before anyone starts calling me a Luddite; not joining in on this part of the social media fray is my personal decision alone, nothing else. I’m not trying to make a statement (well….maybe 😉), and certainly don’t look down on people who do participate, as that is their personal choice also. I just don’t particularly need more fodder to feed my personal “screen affliction”: like everyone else in this modern world, I spend far too much time looking at various display screens, and I just see these forms of social media as a black hole waiting to suck me in deeper.

Social media: different requirements for B2B versus B2C

I also want to establish that, from a marketeer’s standpoint, I completely understand how important all social media channels are to the B2C marketplace: all of them are absolutely necessary to use as a part of an overall content marketing strategy in the B2C world. So, if you’re in the B2C world, you absolutely must use all of these channels.

My contention is that, in the B2B marketplace, the “mainstream” social media channels (Facebook, X, Instagram) are, at best, of only minor importance, if not even a necessary part of the overall content marketing mix. Let me further qualify that statement from a price standpoint to be clear: in this instance I am talking about B2B offerings that represent capital expenditures (CapEx) as opposed to revenue expenditures (which do require mainstream social media presences). A B2B buyer can be influenced by Facebook or X when shopping for commodities (light bulbs, kitchen supplies, etc., which would still be considered B2B), but I find it highly unlikely that a buyer would be similarly influenced when looking at an expensive piece of laboratory equipment, for instance.

How is LinkedIn different?

LinkedIn launched in 2003, and really became what it is today in 2006, when it allowed people to create public profiles and “connect” with other professionals. Initially, the major emphasis on the platform was on job searching and recruitment, allowing users to post resumes and employers to post job openings. I personally joined Linked in back in those days, so have watched it grow and change over time.

As LinkedIn added “groups”, it continued down the professional development path by offering users the ability to connect with people with the same interests; note these “interests” were confined to professional interests, specific groups of people within the same market/industry topic. LinkedIn began generating revenue as early as 2005, with business lines for Jobs and Subscriptions (that allowed access to more advanced features).

In the same time frame, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were also launched. The new sites clearly differed from LinkedIn in that they were focused on personal as opposed to professional connection and communication.

So far, so good!

LinkedIn’s identity crisis

The new personal social media sites were completely free for all to use, and therefore grew exponentially in number of users. These sites monetized by selling advertisements. However, since they were so large, they needed a way for advertisers to target specific groups of users. There’s an expression used: “if the product is free, you are the product”. This refers to the fact that these sites were assembling massive datasets on each user’s behavior, likes/dislikes, hobbies, political viewpoints, etc., allowing the advertisers to target specific subsets of the population.

LinkedIn began offering advertising as early as 2005 with display ads, and started offering targeted advertising (using user demographics) in 2008. As the company grew, it continued to acquire new technologies and add new features that cemented its lead as a professional connection/marketplace site. The growth continued, as it went public in 2011, leading to a spree of acquisitions that were specifically oriented toward monetization. This culminated in LinkedIn being acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion. That figure is often expressed as approximately $60/user, emphasizing that Microsoft was buying not just the social network, but, more importantly the database!

It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact timeframe, but those of us long-time LinkedIn users began to notice the platform changing dramatically over the last several years. An “influencer-like” culture seems to be replacing the old “peer-to-peer” underpinnings of LinkedIn. Beyond that, marketeers have seemed to have decided that the same techniques they have used on other social media sites are now to be used on LinkedIn. Unsolicited InMails, connection requests from people you have absolutely nothing in common with, irrelevant content and marketing messages have become the majority of user’s daily feeds. The entire experience has trended to superficiality.

How did it happen?

In one sense, this shift in LinkedIn’s focus and content was an inevitable “keeping up with the Joneses” result of competing for attention in an increasingly crowded social media marketplace. Sometime around 2013, LinkedIn added the “like” feature, following in Facebook and Twitter’s footsteps. This is really the point when everything changed, as now content is essentially scored, and the algorithm for one’s feed becomes heavily influenced by “popularity” (or “engagement”) as opposed to “relevancy”. So now LinkedIn users are competing for exposure based upon an algorithm that rewards “engagement”.

This “engagement” model leads to an “influencer” culture, where people and companies become beholden to “main character syndrome”: the only thing that is important is attention, the more, the better! So, people and companies become content factories trying to game the algorithm for attention. Content is produced “for content’s sake”, with a resultant decline in the quality of the content, thrown out in favor of quantity. Attention spans of users get shorter, which is met by production of more content that inherently is “click-baity” in nature, desperately competing for likes and measured time-span (an important part of the algorithm).

I personally use UpWork as a potential source of consulting work, and can tell you that the majority of “gigs” now offered for marketing and writing services are companies and individuals (CxO’s) looking for someone to write bi-weekly LinkedIn posts for them (and many expect AI to do the bulk of the work for these writers). It’s absurd: the people are too lazy to write something relevant themselves, but their marketing department is telling them they “have to have a prominent LinkedIn presence”. It’s another race to the bottom for content mills!

We’ve gone from a place for professionals to have intelligent dialogue on work-related topics to just another cesspool of influencer videos (why are they always broadcasting from cars?) and self-promotion.

Is there a solution?

Unfortunately, I personally do not believe there is a solution to the increasing lack of relevance of LinkedIn. Even as a job seeker’s site, it’s not all that much better than all of the other aggregators out there (Indeed, etc.) anymore. Yes, you can get more out of the platform with paid plans, but they start at $30/month, which I feel is excessive compared to the actual “value” offered. And you still have to wade through the sea of junk, regardless! Once a site has gone this way, there really is no turning back.

The basic problem comes down to monetization: in order to be successful in the long term, any site has to produce revenue. The early social sites developed without a clear strategy of how they were going to pay the bills; they were new and experimental and initially completely free to use. Using the old-school, tried and true advertising model of other media (newspapers, radio….you remember those things 🤣), they initially sold display ads.

However, they soon realized that as an electronic media they had the distinct (and new) advantage of being able to deliver a completely individualized experience to each user based upon the data they had gathered over time. From a marketing standpoint, at long last, the individualized experience espoused by Don Pepper and Martha Rogers in 1993, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time was finally reality. The new media companies became Wall Street darlings, and their value (on paper) soared as a result of this powerful consumer database they now possessed.

However, this shift from freewheeling social connection to monetization brings about a self-destructive shift: the content delivered to the user has to be optimized with the advertiser in mind rather than the end user. It’s a fine line to walk, satisfying the advertisers versus satisfying the users. In the end, we end up with all the platforms being dominated by “influencers”, who are not necessarily the people with the most profound things to say, they merely produce more content than others and tailor it to the site’s algorithms.

Get real: take the money up-front!

I think the only way to get back to a realization of what LinkedIn initially intended to be is to model it after a “professional society”. That means “pay to play”: pay upfront to use the platform at all. Not just pay up front, but only accept annual subscriptions; you have to want to be part of the community.

Yes, I know that sounds “elitist”, but if it’s free, or allows short term participation, then it’s just going to follow all the other platforms into irrelevance. Since you have to pay to participate, the revenue stream starts right at the beginning. The site can afford to pay its bills, and more importantly, can build in strict moderation of content from the start: content has to be relevant, factual and informative. If you violate the moderation protocols, you can be kicked off at any time, with a pro-rated refund of your annual fee. I know that sounds very “closed”, but that’s the only way to keep control to prevent the inevitable descent to mediocrity that has claimed other social media.

The biggest issue is getting started: some momentum is needed just to get some traction with the site, and since there’s an up-front cost, that’s difficult. I would propose an initial founder’s group, followed by “invitation-only” early access. By making it invitation only, the hope is to invite like-minded people who want something better than LinkedIn. Invited partipants get a limited time access (30 days?) to try it out and decide if they want to subscribe. If not, they’re off after the trial period. And they also can be booted off during the trial period for violating the moderation protocols.

I know this all sounds closed-minded and against everything that social media has stood for in the past, but I honestly feel that there is a market here for professionals that want to engage in professional-only (career-related) dialogue. If there’s anyone out there with the financial backing that wants to give it a try, you’re welcome to use my ideas! Please send me an invitation to a trial and I will gladly check it out….

All I can tell you is that LinkedIn just doesn’t cut it for me anymore…..