When Did LinkedIn Become Facebook?

“Kait, do I have to post a glamorous or silly selfie on LinkedIn to get traction? I came to this platform to provide value to others and to learn from professionals. Now, I feel like LinkedIn is replacing Facebook. I don’t like it.”

A new client asked me this in earnest. I could see the angst on their face, and I see this question posed all the time on the newsfeed…

When did LinkedIn get so damn personal?

What once was a platform with sparse posts linking to a Forbes article or a quote from Simon Sinek has now become a place to share frustrations, seek coaching on wellbeing, and provide a sobering glimpse into the fast-dissolving barriers that used to separate home and work.?

The answer to this shift is multi-faceted and yet straightforward. The first wave of the new LinkedIn happened with millennials entering the workforce. This unmodest bunch of digital natives grew up sharing their lives on MySpace and Facebook. We scoffed at adults telling us to delete “party photos,” which may hinder our job prospects because we sought social validation. (Said as an “elder millennial who is now haunted by her “posts of Facebook past”– #IYKYK, wince)

Nevertheless, we migrated this oversharing attitude to our new digital platform of LinkedIn, which some college professor or another told us we needed to secure a job in the real world. We hopped on, polished up our resume, and became disoriented by the newsfeed we saw around us. “What is this drab corporate content?” a professional millennial thought circa 2010 as we wondered how we would pay for student loans and secure a mortgage simultaneously. So, we did what any good perplexed and pained quarter-life crisis content creator would do. We wrote long-form content to unpack our newfound anxiety and accompanying learning lessons paired with, you guessed it, a selfie. Et voila, it worked! The audience ate it up. How refreshing to skip over a Stephen Covey quote and get to the heart of the matter. Finally, a permission slip to show that we are human beings, not just human doings, was printed en masse, and the early adopters (Michaela Alexis, anyone?) ran with it.

The next decade crawled along as many discovered this new social media space race. Yes, there was land available to conquer and monetize on LinkedIn – you just had to be a bit more “authentic” and a bit less “corporate-washed” to grab it. LinkedIn trainers (yours truly included) started to grab actual, viable results and ROI as we pleaded with followers to just tip-toe into vulnerability and observe what happens when you’re so brave as to say it like it is. We showed case study after case study that proved customers would read and relate to refreshingly real content and turn to you as you built your “know, like, and trust” factor at scale instead of on the golf course.

And then, dear readers, came the tipping point of a once-in-a-century lifetime, COVID-19. Let’s all be honest with ourselves– two years later, and COVID is still stinking up life in a way we can’t even begin to quantify. But as only times of crisis can, it also puts into sharp focus how much of our corporate existence was a mirage.

Pictures of children in our Zoom rooms with our hair increasingly more disheveled were posted, a chorus of “You’re on mute!” rang out, and the last of the pretentious corporate newsfeed-Mohicans seemed to fall. The dawn of the messy professional with a real life and real job took root, and a whole bunch of us have returned to the question of, “Is LinkedIn now just a slightly more polished Facebook?” Are we all just here to digitally kvetch?

Call me naive, call me a LinkedIn enthusiast, my answer remains unequivocally, “No.”?

Through its community standards and brand position, LinkedIn will always be the space for professional networking and deep learning to happen. While selfies may flourish on the feed, let us not forget the newsletter feature afforded to creator members so they can educate their audience thoroughly. May we also not overlook LinkedIn learning, providing over 5,000 video courses to advance careers and sharpen skills, or their editorial team, a team of over 75 dedicated to pumping out fact-checked, nonpartisan content. Sure, users can creep into the comment crud and get divisive with each other, but it never divulges into the sheer volume of petulance hurled on Facebook.?

So, with all that, let’s end with this, LinkedIn is undoubtedly undergoing an identity shift because we, as users, are collectively undergoing a new identity shift. Personally, I’m excited to see how it continues to evolve alongside corporate evolution. And, for those of you who have come to rely on the prescriptive playbook format of my articles, stay tuned for the next article outlining how you can step into this brave new world while fundamentally leading with value.?