About three years ago, Joel Lalgee started
posting on
LinkedIn. He works in recruiting, so naturally, he spent a lot of
time on the site, where people list their work experience and job seekers look
for their next gig. But he did not just write about work. He wrote about his
personal life: the mental health challenges he faced as a teenager, and his
life since. “Being able to share my story, I saw it as a way to connect with
people and show you’re not alone,” he said.
اضافة اعلان
Something else happened, too. “Six months in, I
started seeing a big increase in engagement, followers, inbound business
leads,” said Lalgee, 35. He now has more than 140,000 followers on LinkedIn, up
from the 9,000 he had before he started posting.
“The way you can go viral is to be really
vulnerable,” he said, adding, “Old school LinkedIn was definitely not like
this.”
LinkedIn, which was started in 2003, was first known
primarily as a place to share résumés and connect with co-workers. It later
added a newsfeed and introduced ways for users to post text and videos. The
site now has more than 830 million users who generate about 8 million posts and
comments daily.
Since the start of the pandemic, as office workers
missed in-person interactions with colleagues, many people turned to LinkedIn
to help make up for what they had lost. They started talking about more than
just work. The boundaries between office and home lives became blurrier than
ever. As personal circumstances bled into workdays, people felt emboldened to
share with their professional peers — and found interested audiences both in
and beyond their networks.
Since the start of the pandemic, as office workers missed in-person interactions with colleagues, many people turned to LinkedIn to help make up for what they had lost.
Users, including some who had left Facebook or felt
guilty about using it during work, found they could scroll through LinkedIn and
still feel that they were working. And for those hoping to make a splash and
build an audience, LinkedIn proved an easier place to get noticed than more
saturated sites. Karen Shafrir Vladeck, a recruiter in Austin, Texas, who posts
frequently on LinkedIn, said the site was “low-hanging fruit” compared with
crowded platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.
During the pandemic, many people also wanted to post
about social justice topics that, while far from the historically staid fare of
the site, affected their work lives: In 2020, Black LinkedIn took off with
posts about systemic racism. “After the murder of
George Floyd, a lot of folks
were like, ‘I know this is unusual LinkedIn talk, but I’m going to talk about
race,’” said Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant. This
summer, after the Supreme Court ruling on abortion, some women posted their own
abortion stories.
Now, users find on a typical day that between job
listings and “I’m happy to announce” posts are viral selfies of people crying,
announcements about weddings and long reflections about overcoming illnesses.
Not all are happy about the changes. Some said they find they cannot use the
site in the same way. A newsfeed crowded with personal posts, they said, can
distract from the information they seek on LinkedIn.
“Early in the pandemic, we started seeing content we
really hadn’t seen before,” said Daniel Roth, a vice president, and the
editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. He said he noticed people posting about mental
health, burnout, and stress. “These were unusual posts for people where they
were being much more vulnerable on LinkedIn,” he said.
It wasn’t as if no one had broached those topics on
the site before but, Roth said, it was “nothing like the volume” that LinkedIn
started seeing in the spring of 2020, and continued seeing over the next two
years.
Over the past couple years, LinkedIn has been trying to encourage content that will keep users engaged on the site.
LinkedIn is not encouraging, or discouraging, the
intimate posts. “In terms of the personal content, I wouldn’t say that we got
too involved there,” Roth said. But it is encouraging influencers to join the
site in the hope that they will post about topics such as leadership. The
company walks a fine line, as it tries to encourage engagement on the site
while protecting the professional context that it says its users expect. Roth
said posts about skills and work accomplishments — more classic office fare —
have seen increased engagement in the past year.
In a survey of about 2,000 employed adults this
year, LinkedIn found that 60% said their definition of “professional” had
changed since the start of the pandemic.
“LinkedIn’s purpose for existing is changing,” said
Zheng, who uses they/them pronouns.
As is true in a workplace, sharing personal
information on LinkedIn can foster a sense of belonging — but it can also lead
to regrets. Zheng, who has more than 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, said
companies are asking, “How much disclosure is allowed under this changing
definition of professionalism? It’s not an answer that exists yet.”
“There is a tension here. On the one hand, we want
to support workers’ self-expression and self-disclosure,” Zheng said. But, at
the same time, they added, workers should feel free to maintain boundaries
between their personal and work lives, including on LinkedIn.
Over the past couple years, LinkedIn has been trying
to encourage content that will keep users engaged on the site: Last year,
LinkedIn started a creator accelerator program to recruit influencers. A
spokesperson for LinkedIn, Suzi Owens, said it was rolling out new tools and
formats for posting.
Last year, Lalgee started to feel ambivalent about
the attention he got from his personal posts. He wondered whether the hope of
reaching a wide audience was leading people to share more than they should, or
even to post emotional stories for attention. “It creates almost a false sense
of vulnerability,” he said. “And then it becomes really hard to know, is this
person genuine, or are they just doing it to go viral?”
Owens said the company plans to continue rolling out product
changes to ensure that people see relevant content in their feeds. “What’s
unique about LinkedIn is that it’s not creation for the sake of entertainment —
it’s about creation for economic opportunity,” she said.
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