When Did LinkedIn Become The Dorky Social Network?

I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. The smart, nicely designed site has been great for me and my professional life. The references you can get are invaluable, you can look up almost everyone on it and it’s generally useful to get endorsed for skills. Hell, even some of the news I get via LinkedIn Pulse is pretty good.

But lately I’ve been looking at it and seeing something newer and quite frankly, poorer, emerge. LinkedIn has changed — and not for the better. It’s quickly becoming the annoying, overly dorky and gawky social media site.

Let’s start from the beginning (2012–2013)

When I first logged into LinkedIn, it was a tremendously useful site. I could get endorsements for a range of my skills, could actively seek references from my peers/colleagues and it became increasingly easy to find out who I needed to talk to in a given industry. Updates to my feed were even easier. They gave me a stream of interesting insight, often from influencers who’s opinion I wanted to hear from.

LinkedIn started well. It became my rolodex into a range of professional contacts and I could keep touch with the people I had met. Updates around job titles and similar were pretty handy, and it was a little like listing my resume online.

Funnily enough it was when LinkedIn acquired Pulse for $90 million that their best work began to come in. It became easier than ever to follow Influencers and other people who I was interested in hearing from. LinkedIn fast became a content platform of choice for people looking to read, hear about and understand new business ideas.

The first signs of decline (2014)

LinkedIn opened it’s publishing platform to all users in February, 2014. That meant anyone could now become a publisher within the professional network, sharing their content and ideas.

It was a nice idea, backed up by a vision of LinkedIn as a content company. LinkedIn wanted to own a lot of the (rapidly growing) B2B content marketing space. After all, B2B had always been one of the most profitable media niches (today the former EMAP B2B division, Top Right Group, still enjoys profitable growth) and LinkedIn had an opportunity to become a B2B version of Facebook. Sounds logical, right?

Ryan Roslansky (then Head of Content Products at LinkedIn) put it like this: “One of our big, strategic bets for the company is for LinkedIn to become the definitive, professional publishing platform”.

For users (anecdotally at the time) this seemed like a great change. You could now access colleagues posts, produce your own content and build your professional equity via the publishing platform.

But when you give people access to creating content, something interesting happens. They start creating their own content as well. And as we’re about to find out, all content is not created equal.

It’s a little crowded in here (mid 2014)

It first came in the form of recruiters. A couple here, a couple there began adding you. You also start to realise that they’re creating content. The LinkedIn Pulse feed is full of it, and incidentally, they’re often (somehow) in your network as you’re seeing more of their content.

That would be useful if the purpose of the entire platform was to be hired/recruited. But the reality is, recruitment does play a small (albeit necessary) part of the professional environment. It’s not the be all and end all of your professional existence — which, as Roslansky says above, is what LinkedIn wants to service through media/content.

Here’s the catch, though. Even though you’re increasingly being annoyed by recruiters LinkedIn does little to stop it. Why? Simple — it would cannibalise their own business model.

In their October 2014 results a staggering 61% of revenue came from recruitment-linked sources. LinkedIn’s best source of revenue is typically also it’s most annoying type of user. For a business, this is tough position. Do you piss off your users (and the product you’re selling) or the people paying your bills (or the revenue you’re generating)? Most businesses do exactly what LinkedIn does — a little of this, a little of that.

LinkedIn, by this stage, was a little crowded. But as people generally saw recruiters and other content being produced, something odd happened. In the words of Gladwell — LinkedIn reached a Tipping Point.

The dorky network — or LinkedIn today (late 2014-present)

Logging in, it’s clear that everyone on LinkedIn feels like they’ve got licence to say whatever is on their mind. There’s no filter — just whatever people think will help others in their career.

Some stuff is good. There are some great technology pieces, still some influencer pieces about and some great, up to date contact information available. What’s not so good?

This:

A LinkedIn image doing the rounds. How does this contribute to me professionally?

And this:

An update that most likely belonged on Facebook.

LinkedIn has, in effect, become a bit of a cesspool of bad, naff updates. It feels like the dorky, sanitised version of Facebook (if there was such a thing). Why? LinkedIn went too much after individual content, not enough after company content.

What can be done

Let me preface this LinkedIn execs — if any of you come a calling with a job, I’ll shoot someone.

Here are a couple of (anecdotal, but seem pretty obvious) tweaks you can make. I really want you guys to win — after all, you’re a social network I want to use:

• Think about defining the newsfeed a little better. It’s probably the inverse of Facebook — pages first, people second. Focus on how you can filter through corporate information and updates, rather than people updates.
• As above, I don’t want to see quotes or much individual content. Start bringing up more LinkedIn original content in my Pulse feed and get content syndication back.
• Give people a way to get central updates about their connections separate from the feed. I only want to know who a select number of people are connecting to, not my entire network.
• Start downranking pure images and posts.
• Make recruiters pay for content marketing posts on Pulse. Or just artificially downrank them. They’ll end up giving you more money, and you can do it subtly without telling them. Win-win.
• Fix messaging. It’s clunky.

LinkedIn’s an awesome service. Get it right, and it’s easy to see how it could become the premier B2B publisher in the world. But first it has to do exactly that — start thinking a little more media/content distributor, a little less peer to peer network.