LinkedIn - The lost opportunity

LinkedIn’s mission statement is, “Connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful.” The mission is great but where is LinkedIn from this mission? 

If we go back to the basis, Linkedin is a social media business targeting working professionals. As the mission statement mentions, the idea is to establish a platform where working professionals visit on a frequent basis to connect and get something to increase their productivity and success. Such a platform can be monetized by generating revenue to LinkedIn by multiple means such as ads, subscriptions, etc. 

LinkedIn lost opportunity is its failure in making a true knowledge base echo system for the professionals. It is clear that the Linkedin team knows that knowledge sharing is the healthy and sustainable way to grow this ecosystem and this was perhaps the main reason for acquiring Lynda.com and integrating that with LinkedIn as Linkedin learning. 

However, the decision to acquire Lynda.com and make it as Linkedin learning is a catastrophe at the strategic level. Instead of adding such courses, LinkedIn should have established a platform where it opens up the opportunity to its users/professionals to create and share the content themselves. What LinkedIn did is similar to if Youtube creates videos to attract users to the platform instead of leaving it to the content creators to do so. This old school of thoughts shows how the current LinkedIn team after the acquisition failed to understand how social media ecosystems are supposed to be built.

Below are the top 5 lost opportunities:

1. Making LinkedIn a global knowledge platform that connects people across the relevant dimensions (Corporations, Industries, sectors, job functions, etc).
2. Introduce the concept of followers/connections based on the content produced by individuals or corporations. Who are the LinkedIn influencers today, no one knows? 
3. Replace/update the unuseful likes and hashtag system with an AI system that builds intelligence that pushes relevant content to professionals with the ability to manage content preferences based on industry, job function, and other dimensions.
4. Revamp that useless connection system. What should connect people with each other is their common areas of interest rather than a commercial interest as it is today. A Facebook connection is a friendship connection. What is a LinkedIn connection? 
5. Once the above is done well, the lifecycle of content will be as long as it makes sense to the users. See how videos on youtube stay alive for a long time as people search and find videos in addition to getting recommendations. On LinkedIn you publish something and it dies after a few hours disregards who does the posting. People feel happy and when their posts go viral. How does that align with LinkedIn’s mission of helping working professionals become more productive and successful?

The above are a few of LinkedIn’s lost opportunities. What about your business’s lost opportunities?

Thanks.

Imad Choucair

Match 10, 2021