Russia invades Ukraine.
Praggnanandhaa wins against Magnus Carlsen.
India wins the world cup cricket tournament.
Neeraj Chopra wins Olympic Gold for India.
What is the one thing that is predictably bound to happen when events like this occur?
As many people frequently comment on Twitter sarcastically, such events are turned into LinkedIn posts. Sometimes they are couched in ‘leadership lessons’, sometimes as ‘life lessons’, or sometimes they are simply shared like they are being shared on WhatsApp, with no context whatsoever – just news updates.
Beyond these, there is perennial shock, surprise, annoyance, disgust, amazement, and vocal irritation over the kind of content shared on LinkedIn, in particular. The running trope is to rue that ‘LinkedIn has become Facebook’ (or becoming, depending on your level of despondency with the platform).
Even I am guilty of having indulged in this vocal surprise from time to time when I notice specific kinds of content on LinkedIn. A sample:
I try, very, very consciously to not do it, but I do succumb to this from time to time depending on how incredulous my reaction is to seeing something that doesn’t seem to fit LinkedIn.
But that’s the purpose of this post – “doesn’t seem to fit LinkedIn”.
To get there, we perhaps need to define what does fit LinkedIn!
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform by definition, though they make money only from premium users. And these premium users primarily are from the sales and recruitment professions for whom the advanced features are actually useful. Unlike the 99% of the rest of us for whom they are largely pointless.
Most people think LinkedIn is a job search platform like Naukri or Monster. Well, it partly is, since it has job listings, but it goes far beyond Monster-style job search since you can search the company, the company’s other employees, reach out to them if you knew how to go about it in a decent manner and equip yourself with a lot more knowledge about the job and the background details.
Plus, on an ongoing basis, you can equip yourself with a lot of professional updates about your work industry from a whole lot of peers and opinion-makers.
And you can aim to become an opinion-maker yourself, for your industry.
All this… if you knew how.
LinkedIn doesn’t teach you all this, but you can observe others and learn.
But what most people seem to be learning, and aiming for, is visibility. They want to be seen and heard by many people, just like they crave for that on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. And if writing on topical events gives you visibility (Likes, Shares, Comments…), then so be it.
Unlike any other social media platform that has no specific rules on the kind of content allowed, LinkedIn is the only platform where people presume that there is only one kind of content that fits it – ‘professional content’.
Every other social media platform has rules only around content format – Twitter has the famous character restriction, Instagram is visual-first, Facebook has anything-goes, and so on. But people assume that LinkedIn is meant for only professional content. And if someone comments on a political event, others pounce on the post (depending on their political orientation matching with the content of the post) by claiming, ‘this is a professional platform. Don’t make LinkedIn into another Facebook’.
Incidentally, LinkedIn is trying to rid its members’ timelines of political content, at least in the US! I wonder how they could decide whether a piece of content is political or not – what if the Prime Minister of New Zealand posts something about her work? Is that professional (she’s, after all, a professional politician, and sharing about her work is as much professional as I share something about the communications space), or political?
Even within ‘professional’, there is some kind of misunderstanding that it has something to do with ‘office’ and ‘office-like’.
But I have seen professional radio jockeys share their audio interviews with celebs on LinkedIn. I ask them why they do it, and one of them said that since they are RJs who make use of their voice and presence of mind, they get invited to host corporate events as an emcee, and such content sharing helps in being found by corporate HR and admin professionals who are on the lookout!
I have seen football coaches share about their work, with short videos and notes. I ask them why they do it, and they say quite a few parents look for football coaches and such sharing helps build their professional creds among parents!
RJ and football coaching is not about ‘office’… but is perfectly professional.
Bartending is a profession. So is car repair. And winemaking. Or farming. Or teaching music, karate, etc.
In context, a LinkedIn post by the chief of the German army, yesterday!
Any activity that you do to earn a living is a profession, regardless of it happening in an ‘office’ or not.
And anything you write about such a profession fits perfectly on LinkedIn.
This is not to say that a chartered accountant (profession) writing about Praggnanandhaa’s win does not fit his profile or the platform. I (or you) have no clue on what that chartered accountant wants from LinkedIn.
LinkedIn itself doesn’t offer any rules for what goes on the platform, beyond the basic what-not-to-post that are based on legal guidelines.
Even if that post on Praggnanandhaa doesn’t fit the profession of that chartered accountant, that’s entirely her prerogative to share or not to share. What works for them, and for what reason, is entirely their choice.
It is simply my perspective—which they are totally free to ignore and do what they wish—that sharing something outside of their profession, on a professional networking platform, is not adding value to them. If they put that effort in being consistent about saying something about their chosen profession, or a set of select topics, that consistency could help them build their own brand among a dedicated set of followers/audience.
But it is only a perspective. People are free to do what they feel like, using whatever content hooks they prefer to create what they wish to share, and for any kind of objective, whether it is Likes, Shares, Followers, or visibility. If it doesn’t add up to their brand, that’s their choice (which they may not even have thought about in any structured manner or simply don’t care about).
At best, what I can do—you can too; and I do this a LOT—is mark content that I think doesn’t add value to me on LinkedIn using one of the 2 options – ‘mute’ or ‘I don’t want to see this’.
I usually mute the person based on a post that does not work for me based on what I expect in the platform. I have seen this working well in training the LinkedIn algorithm.
And that’s the larger point – no one has any obligation to satisfy your expectation of what or how LinkedIn should be, what you expect in the name of content on LinkedIn.
If someone wants to share ‘good morning’ messages on LinkedIn like how WhatsApp is infamous for, that’s on them – whether you like it or not. Mute them, if you do not.
If someone wants to share ‘news’ on LinkedIn even if it has nothing to do with their profession (for instance, news about Russia invading Ukraine), that’s on them. Mute them, if you do not prefer that.
The ‘follow’ feature on LinkedIn does not work like how it does on Twitter. Twitter is primarily a timeline based on reverse chronology. So the tweets of all the people you follow just keep piling up on your timeline as and when they tweet them.
LinkedIn is completely controlled by its algorithm, like Facebook, because it also shows you content from 2nd level and 3rd level connections (friends of friends, in Facebook parlance) when a direct connection has an action on such content.
Much of the content that I mark as ‘I don’t want to see this’ falls under content that a direct connection of mine has commented on or Liked.
Bottom-line: I curate my LinkedIn experience to make it work for me. It takes effort, but I find tremendous value in a curated LinkedIn experience, every single day, day after day, more than any other platform (including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram). I do succumb to eye-rolling at content that I presume does not fit LinkedIn, from time to time, but I’m actively telling myself to eye-roll in private and not make it public 🙂