On What People “Want” From LinkedIn…

This article doesn’t go too deep, but I’m always interested in figuring what people “want” from LinkedIn. I’ve struggled with this for a long time. A lot of people post a never-ending stream of pseudo-motivational content that they probably copied-and-pasted from somewhere (OpenAI?), and present it like it’s the most settled, obvious thing in the world. (And, they pretend that, whatever it is, they do it naturally and always have…) I’m not one to police what people post, but that gets a little tiring.

(I would LOVE a browser plugin that hid any post with a “Promoted” or “Suggested” label on it. Those are 99% garbage.)

For years, I tended to just use LinkedIn to promote things (webinars and such…). This always felt a little shady to me – like I was using the platform, but not contributing to it.

In my professional community, Twitter was always THE place to be, and LinkedIn was just this “other” place. (Of course, this was actually the SECOND generation of the community. The first was blogs and RSS, back in the day.)

I started frequenting LinkedIn more and more as Twitter became… well, whatever it is now. So I wondered, is LinkedIn like Twitter? Is it like Facebook? What do people want from LinkedIn?

Then I had dinner with Kelly Goetsch one summer evening in Northern Wisconsin (I ordered fried cheese curds, unironically). He told me, “Just start blogging out there.”

It was good advice. I’ve certainly never had a problem creating content before, so why was I over-thinking it? So, I just started writing what I used to do in blog posts back in the day.

So far, it seems to be going okay. (Don’t fret, POSSE proponents, I publish the same thing over on my own website…)

I don’t know what to do about the “authenticity gap” on LinkedIn. I guess I just keep my mental filters powered up at all times, and discount anything from anyone I’m not familiar with.

(There are some other practical heuristics that help too. I’m automatically skeptical of anything with a bunch of emojis; a series of short, single-sentence paragraphs; anything “Promoted” or “Suggested”; and anything that uses Unicode formatting hacks. I’m not saying that all of it is bad, but it’s just highly correlated with spam-ish posts.)

And such is the nature of any social network, I suppose. A lot of posturing, relatively little authenticity, and a lot of scrolling and filtering to find content that’s actually helpful.