5 Things I Dislike About Posting on LinkedIn
I recently had a conversation with a friend about the role of LinkedIn in our careers. She made this fantastic analogy that I have yet to forget: if you went to a supermarket and had to pick between two detergents, which one would you choose — one with a marketing presence or another that no one knows about?
As the new “it” Social Network, a digital identity on LinkedIn has become quintessential. Sharing personal stories, posting, and reposting may have started as a business need, but it has now become an art requiring careful thought, planning, and masterful execution.
I am no stranger to LinkedIn. Whenever I felt tempted, I resorted to LinkedIn to voice my thoughts. However, the proposition of making LinkedIn an indispensable part of my everyday routine is usually met by the five critical thoughts below.
1. Opposite examples: I have interacted with and worked under people who are, by all conventional means, successful but don’t have a strong presence on LinkedIn. I am still figuring out how, but it does take away LinkedIn’s charm, at least for me.
2. Likes vs. Authenticity vs. Connection: I read many posts that make me respect the author and like their content but offer no replacement for the impression I carry after meeting someone in person — which may or may not match someone’s LinkedIn footprint.
3. Self-promotion vs. value creation: Everyone is expected to have a reasonable level of self-promotion skills, but I think with LinkedIn, one runs into the danger of overdoing self-promotion to the extent that no real value may get generated on the platform.
4. What are we trying to prove and to whom: One can take different perspectives when posting on LinkedIn (i.e., healthy and unhealthy). I am concerned about the danger of the “reducing” perspective, which can make people want to prove something about their careers or lives on LinkedIn. Does anyone “in fact” care about the reflections made by someone on a remote patch of land in some remote corner of the world? We may find it an exciting read, but does it prove anything? Maintaining a distance between who we are and our digital identities is essential — the former should influence the latter, but not be defined by or dependent on it.
5. Invisibility: It sounds counter-intuitive. However, the excessive focus on LinkedIn can make other legitimate modes of making an impact relatively invisible, to the extent that not having a LinkedIn presence would be considered self-sabotage. The tendency to compare, which LinkedIn has the propensity to imprint on our brains, can take the focus away from “mastering” to “plastering,” where a person who has published an article feels one-upped (both in their minds and by LinkedIn algorithm) by another who has say, published a book.
The plot twist is this: Despite my misgivings about LinkedIn, I am considering creating a relatively regular presence here. I will include my reasons in my next post.
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