LinkedIn Winners, Losers, and Predictions for 2022

With the new year in full swing now, it is time to look back to what people and myself thought were the best LinkedIn innovations and the biggest frustrations of 2021 as well as some predictions for 2022!

Frustrations

For me, the "biggest frustration" has been LinkedIn’s roll-out process of new features.?I appreciate the fact they need to test run the new functionality but some of it has been taking so long and there seems to be no logic to it! But let's look at what my network said:

1. The biggest frustration is "stupid polls" or people asking irrelevant questions on subjects as "what did you have for breakfast?" or "What is your favorite morning drink?", etc.
2. Closely followed by content considered "Facebook" level or non-professional content. From silly videos and images to unprofessional texts and content. This is a hard one because people decide what they want to share where and who should be the judge whether this content belongs on LinkedIn. We can vote with some button so we never get to see it again.
3. Closely linked to the above point are long stories talking about health, family and personal stories (I'd like to call these the "pity-me" posts). In this set, we can also include the posts fishing for Likes and Comments which frustrates people very much
4. The non-transparency of the algorithm and constant second-guessing of how it works
5. When it comes to content, political and/or covid posts seem to irritate people.
6. Along the same vein, members complain that LinkedIn does not police the platform enough to stop automation and suspend users that abuse the platform's rules.
7. The unpredictable roll-out process does lead to frustration but mainly among the LinkedIn trainer and power user base. Most users don't really care because that means they have to adapt again to something new.
8. The next group of frustration is around the delay in fixing bugs when they are reported. The process of reporting is also quoted as not as user-friendly as it could be.
9. The group of frustrations is all about missing features on LinkedIn such as the ability to filter notifications, the setup of the LinkedIn mailbox, etc. Here we can only hope that LinkedIn will address these requests over the course of 2022!

Now that we have vented our frustrations, it is time to celebrate the innovations

The best innovations

Many people have seen Content Creator Mode as the best innovation of the year even though the extra functionality is not there yet throughout the year.?However, with Newsletters and LinkedIn Live, this has been the game-changer for many. So let's dig into the details of what my network says:

1. Creator Mode is the absolute best innovation of 2021. As part of this innovation, we must also list Newsletters and LinkedIn Live as two main features that make Creator Mode by far the biggest innovation of 2021!
2. "The Bell" (which is still being rolled out) was implemented fairly late in the year to get a standing ovation but comes in as the second most nominated innovation
3. There was also a lot of support for the "Cover Story" (video on your personal profile). Great for personal branding and nicely added to the profile picture.
4. Upgrading company pages has been another big innovation win for LinkedIn over the year. From adding multiple posting types to statistics and more, it seems LinkedIn is seriously making Company Pages worthwhile to invest in.
5. From a feature point of view, two jumped out to me: The 3000 character limit for a post giving content creators more room to do storytelling AND the 100 invitations/week to combat the LinkedIn automation tools.

One innovation that was not mentioned by anyone was the services page on the personal pages and the product page on the company pages. I wonder if that will be discovered during 2022

Predictions

I asked around in my network what some of the predictions could be about LinkedIn in 2022. Here is what the network came back with:

1. Monetization: It seems lots of people including myself think LinkedIn will bring monetization to LinkedIn and possibly to individual users. Content Creator Mode could the vehicle for this. From extra tools, for video/images to "sponsored" content are the buzzwords of the members.
2. There are predictions that relate to LinkedIn Groups. They include monetization of Groups, Bringing audio functionality (Think Clubhouse) to Groups and more and better management of Groups. There is hope that LinkedIn Groups will make a big comeback in 2022
3. Company Pages continue to evolve and get even more functionality. It seems LinkedIn is determined to provide companies with the same functionality as personal profiles including sending messages from the company page and adding Newsletters to the article creation.
4. As mentioned before, LinkedIn will be adding some kind of audio platform to LinkedIn. It could be in Groups, but also elsewhere. Now there are still 2 scenarios possible: LinkedIn buys a platform (e.g. Clubhouse) or they have been working in the background on their own platform. 2022 will tell!
5. In the same vein or as a result of the above point, some people are predicting LinkedIn will add podcasting (and related tools) to its asset of content types completing the set of 4 content types (Text, Image, Video, Audio)
6. Analytics is a pain point for LinkedIn. Many members (hope and) predict that LinkedIn will create tools and analytics for both personal profiles, hashtags, and Groups. Will 2022 be the year of Analytics?
7. One prediction everyone is unanimous about is the further rise of video in many and multiple formats: From long to short video including simple and yet complete editing functionality and even subtitling.

It looks like in 2022 we can look forward to an exciting year on and for LinkedIn. As a final prediction, I would like to see LinkedIn get to magical 1 billion members but realistically I do think that will for 2023!