Digital strategy advisors will tell you that LinkedIn was always the most reserved of the social networks. Founded as early as 2002 - way before its upstart competitors like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, LinkedIn has quietly grown to become the dominant force in professional networking. According to media reports, over half a billion people have their professional details safely captured by Linked In – with more than 13.6 million active users in the UK alone.
It’s powerful stuff, and it’s a no brainer to me that LinkedIn should have become the social platform of choice for the global business community. Surely we would want to interact on a personal level with like-minded people and cut out the nutters, the spam and the bots … and the endless kitten videos?
And yet it hasn’t happened. Despite best efforts to position itself as a hub for user generated content, spawning a whole generation of enthusiastic business bloggers, (most, including me, with tiny readerships), active users of LinkedIn remain a low proportion of their total subscriber numbers. In layman’s terms this means most people don’t use LinkedIn regularly, unless they are looking for a new job, or to contact someone whose email they have lost. Like any other people, those in business and professional services continue to turn to the mainstream social media platforms for their daily (and in my case hourly) dose of random content.
Why should this be I wonder?
LinkedIn’s problem is that it is all a tiny bit worthy, and dare I say it dull. As Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite writes in Forbes magazine:
“The button-downed business platform has never attracted the drama or hype of other social networks. There’s no movie about its founder. It’s not in the crosshairs of Congressional investigations. And its “influencers” are more likely to be boring business leaders (myself included) than Kylie Jenner wannabes.”
It’s not just the boredom. LinkedIn feels like too public a place to expose our true personalities behind the starchy business personas we build up on the site … to do so would be to serve ourselves up for judgement and ridicule by our professional peers. People tend not to express political views, or actually personal views about anything on LinkedIn because, unusually, we are actually ourselves on this platform – fixed in reality by our real names, our employers, the countries we live in and where we went to school. This is a real contrast to the handles and aliases that we adopt on the mainstream social networks. I wouldn’t dream of asking a question on LinkedIn to my followers for example – it would feel professionally dangerous to expose my (copious) lack of business knowledge in this way to people who actually know who I am. It’s interesting in this regard that generalist Q&A sites like Quora are hoovering up the business audience and their chatter that LinkedIn should be owning.
People rarely use social networks to improve their knowledge. They use them to be entertained and to share content that is entertaining and often anarchic and to ask dumb questions and to post content that they find funny. The rough and tumble world of Twitter, and the calm visual world of Instagram are better places for this than the dark suited world of LinkedIn. I think this is a shame.
Tom Buchanan is a Founding Partner of Paternoster Communications. He can be found on Twitter @tb_or_not_tb when he is being serious and @Frdidymus when he is trying lamely to be funny and anarchic.