What is plaguing Linkedin?

(This is part 1 of the 2 article series)

Last week Linkedin fired more than 900 employees and I saw many posts and comments criticising Microsoft for laying off employees at a time when Microsoft shares touched record highs. *facepalm*

The financial strength of Microsoft does not necessarily mirror that of Linkedin. And for Microsoft it makes sense to treat each BU individually and prune the edges accordingly. And the harsh culling of jobs can be understood better by their financials.

Let’s first take an outsiders’ view on what their recent Q4 filing throws light on (Microsoft flows a July-Sep fiscal year):

• Revenue rose 10% by 181 mn; their quarterly revenue is roughly 2 bn
• Sessions grew by 27%

Also, there was a guidance about Covid-19 related to Linkedin:

LinkedIn was negatively impacted by the weak job market and reductions in advertising spend.

The devil might be in the details.

In the earnings call ppt, there was this slide:

If you focus on the revenue growth, it tapered off in Q4. And what other thing happened in Q4- economic lockdowns, massive job losses and as Microsoft said above- huge reduction on ad spends by businesses. Corollary, Linkedin’s revenue is far more dependant on businesses' hiring related activities than they would like.

Talking about sessions- so sessions is basically the devices you log in from- and not just devices the app through which you access- so if you use Linkedin app and also have opened Linkedin website through Chrome, it will show 2 sessions.

So, increase in sessions DOES NOT necessarily equate to increase in users or even active users (For e.g. I have 4 devices and I myself am being counted as 6 sessions right now- can't quite put a finger on how).

So, although there have been some promising metrics to report, they might not be exactly telling the whole story of what’s going on behind the scenes.

But I’m not a finance student nor do I have the competency to approach it that way. My analysis is completely from a user perspective and what I can observe without even going barely beyond scratching the surface.

I feel there are two issues currently bugging Linkedin and what might help to give a more user-friendly experience. The first one is regarding to more or less their identity.

Linkedin wants us to ‘connect’ with our professional community, learn professional skills, get jobs. That’s all fun and good to write but what is Linkedin essentially? A social media.

And at that, it’s a very confused one. With a very, very ‘sub-standard’ algorithm monitoring our feeds.

Now this is all coming from personal experience, and as a person who has lost a lot (A LOT) of his time in the black hole i.e. the Facebook family of social media- Linkedin feed is very disengaging, very unresponsive to recent user activity and quite un-intuitive to user preferences in general.

 I have noticed FB change its underlying algorithm thrice, Instagram twice, but after a couple of days of strange ‘discomfort’ the feed became relevant (to me) again.

I am a fairly active user of Linkedin (almost a daily user for the past two years), my feed is, put bluntly, boring. I read a lot of articles, share them, I follow quite a few companies, topics, even try to engage (atleast more than FB now) and my feed is still irrelevant. It shows very limited no of posts at a time, requires refreshing the feed to get new content a lot more than should be necessary. I am spending less time on Linkedin than I want solely because I’m not getting relevant content.

Another instance where the shortcomings of the algorithm can be seen is the activity of people it shows on the feed. As in any network, everyone makes many connections which are not direct friends or colleagues. Even more so in Linkedin as everyone usually wants as wide a professional network as possible.

But what happens is the feed starts popping up with ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ of people who I don’t usually interact with, are not from my field or even the content they liked or commented on is something I usually interact with. Again, not a favorable user experience.

This image below will exemplify my point:

 Now, it got right that #management is something I might be interested in. But I’m not at all interested in what the post is and literally tens and tens of hashtags in the post. I also don’t know both the people mentioned in the post and are not even my 2nd connections.

From a user perspective, it’s irrelevant. It becomes off-putting when a user comes across many such posts.

So, what can be a solution?

One possibility could be to introduce the concept of ‘Circles’ (Yes, I’m talking about the concept behind now defunct Google+). The basic concept behind circles was to segregate your connections and interests into different, well circles, as to engage with preferred content. Some people like to keep it strictly professional and some use it more lightly to engage in a more informal way. It would give people more of what they want and more control on what they expect out of the platform.

And not just users, it would eventually become a marketer’s goldmine. You can better target your ads and there’s a far more surety of them hitting home.

Now, I understand many people, unlike me, wouldn’t be looking forward to making Linkedin their preferred social media or even spend more time on it. But a good feed is good feed irrespective of anything else- content will always be the king. That’s the backbone of any social media.

This is the first issue plaguing Linkedin. The second one, I will discuss in my next article.

I would like to discuss more on what the readers think of this. Maybe I'm missing the point or maybe I'm mirroring what others are thinking too.

#Linkedin #socialmedia #marketing #linkedinfeed #layoffs #algorithm