Is LinkedIn morphing into Facebook?

Let me begin by saying that I love LinkedIn. It's a great business tool that allows us to create and manage our online professional brand, as well as facilitating networking, having access to jobs as well as being found by recruiters and large organisations for potential roles.

What I don't like about LinkedIn (and am becoming increasingly concerned about) is that the boundaries about what should and should not be shared on LinkedIn are beginning to blur...Significantly.

LinkedIn is one of many social media sites and it's particular domain is in the 'business/professional space'. Let me repeat that: the business/professional space. It is not Facebook, it is not Instagram, Snapchat or any other number of frivolous social media sites out there.

LinkedIn's mission, it is to:

'...connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.'

The key words for me here are 'productive' and 'successful'. Anyone who 'likes', 'comments', 'shares', posts or writes their own articles needs to keep this in mind. More importantly, all LinkedIn users should ensure that their activity actually benefits others in a business sense. If not, it's really just self-aggrandizement, right?

When I go to my LinkedIn home page, I want information and insights that will benefit me in some way. What I don't want is unfettered, self-promotional and inappropriate content that should reside elsewhere.

I am old enough to recall the derogatory term 'yellow press' which was used in the past to describe ...'journalism that does not report much real news with facts. It uses shocking headlines that catch people's attention to sell more newspapers.' (Wikipedia).

LinkedIn is in danger of becoming the 'yellow press' of the online world, so perhaps the new definition of 'yellow press' ('yellow media?') should reflect,

'...LinkedIn members that share inappropriate and largely worthless content and instead, use attention gathering headlines (and large spaced out text beneath) to catch other LinkedIn members attention purely for self-promotion purposes.'

Over the last few days, I've noticed the following posts on LinkedIn which have the stench of 'yellow press' about them:

• Selling a luxury car
• Announcing a birth (Great! Wonderful! Joyous! But not on LinkedIn!)
• Removing an unfortunate bird stuck in a car grill
• A video of someone waxing lyrical about the joy of playing with balloons
• A 19-second video of a chameleon doing what it does (changing colours and nothing much else)
• A video of a steam train pulling out of a station
• Someone shrieking with joy while sitting in a hairdressing salon and contemplating whether or not to update their LinkedIn profile photo

There are a plethora of other social media sites that would welcome this sort of fatuous content and on these sites, people who would appreciate it and obtain great value from it...but it is not LinkedIn!

One lone voice won't make a significant difference to what gets posted on LinkedIn. In fact, I regularly report 'inappropriate content', which removes the offending article from my home page, but which I assume then goes into a large black hole and may only see the light of day if thousands or perhaps tens of thousands or even millions of LinkedIn users report it.

On a related note, if I connect with people I don't know or have never actually met, worked with or had any sort of personal interaction with, then sharing inappropriate content on LinkedIn is less of an issue. I only ever connect with people I actually know and I would never sully their LinkedIn home page with anything I believed was inappropriate or irrelevant.

What do you think? Is LinkedIn in danger of morphing into Facebook? Am I being too Scrooge-like?

Perhaps the hashtag #LinkedInisnotFacebook can be used when we see inappropriate LinkedIn content.

A less confrontational (and somewhat easier) action may be to simply disconnect from, or to 'unfollow' the guilty individual such that I no longer receive their gratuitous posts.

As I often lament, life was much simpler back in the 'good old days' which is a sure indication of my increasingly mature years!

#LinkedInisnotFacebook #LinkedInisabusinesstool

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Paul Di Michiel is an experienced Human Resources executive having held senior regional and global roles in Australia, Singapore and the United Kingdom. He has also personally experienced job loss during his career and now works as a career coach with his own business, The Career Medic. He is the author of 'Fired to Hired, The Guide to Effective Job Search for the Over 40s' and regularly speaks to community groups and contributes to websites and local newspapers on job search topics. You can find out more about Paul here.