Why I hate LinkedIn.
I’ve had enough. I’m giving up on LinkedIn. I’ve seen too many inspirational speakers (read: salesperson) posting rubbish life changing messages about how they kept cold calling and it eventually worked. Normally formatted with double spacing between each meaningless sentence. You know the ones:
I have over 2,000 connections on there — many of whom I know well and respect. I genuinely spent a lot of time crafting a network of useful connections. I know they (generally) are interesting people and I connected with them in good faith to hear what they have to say. However now all I get is bullshit posts like the above. I barely ever see insights from my actual connections.
My relationship with LinkedIn has soured gradually. I used to find it a necessary evil for sales -in my previous role at Campus Media I had a pretty significant new business target and LinkedIn served a purpose in providing me with very crude knowledge of who worked where. Essentially who was I going to pester next.
In short there were two reasons to use LinkedIn, useful information and sales.
So why now to leave LinkedIn? Firstly, my prospective clients stopped updating their LinkedIn so the sales part kinda became a waste of time.
Secondly, I found a much better alternative for getting useful info. It came in the shape of an unlikely social media which I left long ago. Previously I derided it for being too dominated by my mum and her friends posting pictures of their Labradors. Now I’m back using… Facebook.
The groups specifically have given the platform a renaissance. They are specific enough to be useful and generally the moderators create rules that serve the greater good of the members.
I started using them loads when driving a camper van from London to South East Asia (subtly dropped that in here) getting up to date info about the latest visa/border rules.
Now I’m back and running Hype I found my awesome video whizz Emily on there, promoted my launch to an entirely new crowd (still a few tickets left btw) and got introduced to some awesome new agencies like The Elephant Room. This is what I had originally wanted from LinkedIn — real connections, insights and a professional network.
I don’t envisage Facebook will be a huge driver of new clients, but I do think it is an awesome environment to find like minded people, get tips and share info.
So, to finish it off — a few of my favourite groups:
This is number one for me. I’ve used it a lot and also made a lot of referrals. I know it is a gold mine for freelancers looking for work. I’ve hired from this group.
Clue is in the name. This one is absolutely huge, 37k members so if you need a certain skill or piece of knowledge it is probably in this group. A lot of it is tech chat which to be honest flies over my head but interesting crowd that is highly engaged. If you are considering buying a bit of of the shelf tech see what people in here think about it first. As this one is so big I’ve turned off the notifications since it can dominate your timeline a little. I then make time to have a quick read through once a week or so.
In truth this is more than just a FB group, it is a regular networking event hosted by Bright a highly sociable Shoreditch experiential agency. However since the community was built in real life there is more of a familiarity with the members which you don’t get with the other groups.
Ok, guilty — this is self-promotion, but hey if you’ve read this far why not? We’ve set up this group for 16–25 year olds who want to benefit from Hype opportunities or others we stumble across around the net. It is at the early stages right now but we’ll be increasing the opportunities we share in there and doing a big marketing push for it before next year’s freshers.
So there it is, Facebook is my primary professional social network. What do you think? Am I wrong? Do you work for LinkedIn? Let me know… just not on LinkedIn.
