LinkedIn Broke My Heart
As I was reading the new IAB Report on Social Media, I was thinking to myself, “LinkedIn has a problem.” This is not something that I didn’t already know. But now that I have confirmation, maybe it’s time they think about getting back to the basics that made them the most powerful online tool — creating profiles and connections that represented real-world professional relationships.
But let’s start from the beginning.
I created my LinkedIn account back in 2007, my first account in a social network as we know them today. Before LinkedIn, I used to wander around the net using a nickname. After LinkedIn, I became me. During these early times, I remember feeling awkward about telling everybody everything about my working life (now I can’t avoid a smile thinking about it, and seeing how things online have changed.)
We started creating our networks there as we were supposed to, by contacting our ex-colleagues, and colleagues from work, fellow university classmates, or any other connection that we had had.
It used to be the reference network where we all went back to announce our acknowledgements at work, our promotions, the changes in our positions. Everything!
At some point, it also became the reference network for job hunting, and for any kind of exchange between professionals. Good for HR staff. Good for job seekers. Good for salespeople. Everybody was happy with what LinkedIn was offering.
And then, I don’t know exactly at what point, it started to be unfriendly. It didn’t happen in the same way as with the overuse of other networks, such as Facebook, or WhatsApp and its annoying groups, though I must say that the annoyance of groups isn’t exactly because of the network itself. It’s been gradual. They started changing the settings and overloading you with unrequested emails, which we can consider spam.
It was also then that the [12k] appeared, LinkedIn experts specializing in amassing contacts, as if they were growing mushrooms. Experts in leadership. Experts that ask for your contact, and when you give it to them, they automatically send you their last e-book, or a link to their blog, or to their whatever that doesn’t interest you at all!
At the same time, they changed the feed, so you stopped seeing the things you really wanted to see and you started seeing just posts from influencers, or from people whom LinkedIn considers might be influencers, or might interest you, which is not always the case.
LinkedIn’s wall today is a mix of nonsensical chatter, spam (unwanted publications of all kinds), and a sort of competition to see who’s the CEOest CEO of all CEOs. Can everybody be a CEO? Apparently, yes. And thus, LinkedIn is not useful or trustworthy anymore.
Comments about the network are unanimous, and reports seem to reinforce it. People spend less time there. And I can foretell that they will spend even less in the near future. Maybe it’s about time to search and find a good networking professional network, now that LinkedIn has broken our hearts. Don’t you think?
