Can LinkedIn Solve the "Time Well Spent" Paradox?
The "time well spent" paradox
In early January, Mark Zuckerberg wrote, "One of (Facebook's) big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent." It was both a pronouncement for the coming year and a response to the criticism that built to a crescendo as its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election came into focus. In the ensuing months, Facebook has tried to provide evidence it's been living up to this decree, citing new features to help users identify fake news, feed modifications to prioritize personal posts over 3rd party content, and a SMB job postings service. A quick scan of my Facebook feed shows the press and public remain unconvinced.
The use of the phrase "time well spent" was no accident. The Time Well Spent movement has been popularized over the past two years by Tristan Harris, Google's former "design ethicist" and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Harris has levied criticism at his former employer, Facebook, and other social platforms, acknowledging the good they've contributed to the world but also citing the harm they've done to mental health, our children, social relationships, and democracy.
Harris and the Center point out that no matter how genuinely good the intentions of Zuck, Larry, Jack, or Evan may be, they face an existential challenge in embracing time well spent: their businesses are based on "attention-extraction." That is, with each being nearly entirely advertising dependent, revenue growth is almost perfectly correlated with keeping users using longer. Highlighting the contributions to the bottom line from objectively negative things (e.g., bots, micro-targeting to spread conspiracies), the Center states matter-of-factly "Profiting from the problem, platforms won't change on their own."
I don't believe any of these companies or leaders have bad intent. However, I do think institutions and individuals tend to optimize against their incentives. You could argue that the sustainable long-term position will push them to consider user welfare... but in the short to mid-term, the demands of investors, the livelihood of employees (heavily dependent on equity and bonus-driven compensation), and the need to keep momentum going are difficult to overcome. And so, the ambition to focus on "time well spent" can easily revert to simply maximizing "time spent."
LinkedIn's unique position
In many ways, LinkedIn looks, feels, and operates like the other social platforms. An algorithmically populated feed delivers an endless stream of user and 3rd party-generated content. Notifications trigger the Pavlovian response to come back to the app, and they often feel manufactured (e.g., you might not have a new interaction or invite... but there's always a birthday or work anniversary to alert you to). Braggadocious posts about work accomplishments or the sweet shot of the new gelato machine in the company cafe are the FOMO-inducing stuff today's social platforms are built on.
However, a few things differentiate LinkedIn from the other platforms today:
1.A concrete and (relatively) narrow set of objectives for users. Most users (or as LinkedIn calls them, "members") joined because they wanted to get a job. They realized that being present on the network would help them be found and/or present the best professional face to those that were considering them. Over time, other use cases emerged: networking tool, company and organizational due diligence, personal and corporate branding, business news. But still, the reasons individual users are on LinkedIn remain more focused and more concrete than for say Facebook or Twitter, which have tried to be many things to many people. It all fits into the broad bucket of "creating professional opportunity," either directly or as an enabler.
2.Advertising as one of many revenue streams. LinkedIn tellingly divides its business into Talent, Marketing, and Sales Solutions. Its biggest drivers are recruiter seat licenses and job slots. Learning, sales navigator, and premium member licenses are also important sources of revenue; and they're now also pushing into providing self-serve data insights for licensing fees. While advertising is meaningful and by reports growing quickly, it is only part of LinkedIn's story.
3.User, client, and owner objectives are satisfied without daily engagement. Given users' objectives (per #1) and client use cases and LinkedIn revenue streams (per #2), LinkedIn doesn't need the vast majority of users to visit the network multiple times / hours a day to make its business work. Its principal value (as a standalone business and as an asset for Microsoft) is not in manufactured ad slots; it's in its data, or as LinkedIn calls it, "the Economic Graph" (of members, companies, jobs, skills, and the connections between them). Of course, LinkedIn needs broad user engagement in order to ensure its data is as current and complete as possible. But the frequency required to be useful is not as great as if advertising were its lifeblood.
Taken together, these points of differentiation break LinkedIn's inherent reliance on time spent as the governing metric. And in the "time well spent" era (if that's really what we've found ourselves in), it presents LinkedIn with an intriguing set of options.
A critical choice for LinkedIn
Over the past few years, LinkedIn has made strides in driving greater user engagement; it's likely no coincidence that this started around the time Jeff Weiner reclaimed chief product officer responsibilities. They launched content creation capabilities (multi-photo posts, videos, filters) that have shown to be popular on other social platforms. And they invested heavily in their own content (daily news aggregation, trending stories, podcasts, expert training videos) to draw users back more regularly and make visiting a habit.
LinkedIn have trumpeted increased update views (+60%) and MAUs, as indicators that the efforts are working. They've also spoken about their platform being seen by users as a sort of antidote to the venom infecting other social platforms today; the Digital Trust Report from BI Intelligence showed respondents rate LinkedIn as a significantly safer environment to participate in and post on than other popular platforms.
The results are great, and I'm sure LinkedIn are collectively proud of them. There's a natural temptation to make a hard push down the consumer attraction route now- continuing to add features that have shown themselves to be popular with the general set of users / usage (e.g., Stories) and marketing LinkedIn as a more general purpose site. Their recent branding campaign ("in it together") has trappings of the latter.
The efforts to date can be justified by the ambition to strengthen the Economic Graph - make it more robust by attracting people and jobs that weren't included previously or were on the fringes with incomplete / outdated data.
It's from this point forward where LinkedIn faces a choice about how (and why) they're going to push next. Do they... A) try to broaden out even more and grab a bigger piece of the social sphere - addressing space where FB, Twitter, Instagram, and Snap currently reside (and the associated jobs to be done for users)? OR B) stay true to their positioning as a professional network and focus on related jobs to be done for users?
It's a somewhat nuanced choice. In either scenario, you need to be running a healthy network (people who sign up actually use and provide truthful information) and still address professional needs.
However, it's a real choice, as option A would have you invest in and promote features where the professional benefits are unclear and attract / curate a broader set of content, and put a greater amount of focus on advertising as a revenue stream to enable and benefit from it.
And that's where LinkedIn can find itself falling into the "Time Well Spent paradox," doing whatever it can to juice usage and time spent, in the name of continued growth in profits.
How LinkedIn can deliver on "time well spent"
The alternate and better path, I believe, is for LinkedIn to embrace "time well spent," and make that part of an expanded mission: "build out the Economic Graph and maximize time well spent across it." Revisiting the points of differentiation raised earlier, LinkedIn is well-positioned to do this. It has a clear and fairly aligned definition of what "time well spent" leads to amongst users (#1), isn't completely beholden to reach-based advertising (#2), and doesn't require people being on all day, every day in order to fulfill user and client expectations and needs (#3).
Using "time well spent" as a north star would mean focusing product development on things that create or aid professional opportunity, and deprioritizing the rest. Do Stories and filters make the cut? Perhaps... but the way to test it would change from seeing whether they're popular (e.g., likes) and increase dwell time, to whether they take users further down the path toward opportunity (e.g., meaningful interactions). I'm not advocating for a boring and unpopular social platform (Metcalfe's law would make that unwise)... but it does need to be a demonstrably useful one.
I also believe advertising has a very meaningful role to play for LinkedIn as a business. However, for it to be accretive to the mission, the metrics of success would need to shift from commonplace industry measures (impressions, clicks) which have a direct tie to "time spent," to ones that get at real value creation (e.g., applications and hires, exposure to thought leadership and ideas, product / service inquiries and sales). Flipping to measures of opportunity creation for individual users and companies would properly optimize the advertising for and align LinkedIn's incentives with "time well spent." It puts LinkedIn in a place where it needs to both recognize the point of diminishing returns for its users and make the time they do spend rewarding. That's feels like a good place to be.
But like all things that sound better, this is easier said than done. Optimizing for impact requires getting access to the systems that capture this information: candidate and prospect CRMs, and ATS's and LMS's. LinkedIn is better positioned on the former due to its Microsoft relationship (e.g., Dynamics) and has invested in integrations and experimented with building its own solutions for the latter. A potential stopgap measure: have clients (agencies, advertisers, employers) provide the information directly to them to close the loop. Passing that kind of valuable and confidential data in the near-term and letting LinkedIn inside of internal systems in the long-term will require the strong trust of companies and by extension their customers and employees.
How can LinkedIn engender the necessary trust with clients and its user (member) base? Publicly committing to maximizing "time well spent," and clearly communicating how it's trying to do that and what is / isn't working. Tristan Harris' Center is defining "humane design standards, policy, and business models"... LinkedIn has an opportunity to explore and co-create with them. Product releases that trumpet features and functionality can also include authentic messaging on how it intends to make user time spent worthwhile and create opportunity. While LinkedIn no longer is bound to external results reporting as part of Microsoft, it can regularly disclose performance against time well spent-relevant metrics.
In short, LinkedIn needs to do what other social platforms are getting lambasted for not doing: own the problem and the solution.
The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my current or past employers. If you would like to read more of my writing, you can follow me here on LinkedIn and/or on Twitter at @chrislouie.
You can also read a few of my other LinkedIn posts: