Shameless Work Influencers Are the Bane of LinkedIn

The first thing you need to understand about LinkedIn is that you will either find it immensely appealing or achingly unbearable, depending on your views regarding social media, attention, work, and life in general.

Many people love it; many people (myself included) hate it. Often for the same reasons.

Off the bat, LinkedIn looks like a job-seeker’s paradise. The job search algorithm is solid and, at least in my experience, turned up plenty of relevant jobs. Recruiters can easily find and reach out to people who match a job description on the site, and by keeping a profile up-to-date and “active” (I’ll get to that bit later), you’ll probably end up with at least an occasional message from a recruiter in your inbox.

But start scrolling through your newsfeed, and you may begin to get an inkling that something is rotten in the state of the modern job search.

The LinkedIn newsfeed quickly reveals itself as a vast wasteland, a scrolling experience almost entirely filled with marketing gurus, salespeople talking sales, and recruiters and “career coaches” offering the same job search tips over and over. Even if you’re only connected with your acquaintances, the algorithm ensures that many of the posts your connections like or comment on will show up in your newsfeed. Thus, even one or two connections who are enamored with influencers or motivational quotes can wreak havoc with your experience.

Basically, the LinkedIn newsfeed is the place for working professionals to gather and network, look for jobs, exchange advice, and reassure themselves their careers are not just a meaningless charade.

It’s also very weird.

An Army of Professionals on Social Media

As you spend more time on LinkedIn, it’s hard not to notice just how strange the combination of professionalism and social media actually is. There’s an oil and water vibe going on here — the two concepts don’t really mix — and the ensuing tension produces some oddball “content,” as they say.

Professionalism, in the old-school sense, entails holding some things back from your colleagues because, crucially, “co-worker” is not synonymous with “close friend” or “family member.” But social media demands access to that inner sanctum; the ephemeral nature of content creates a bias toward oversharing. Each post is a little mayfly in the morning light, doomed to perish by next sunrise. If you want to keep eyeballs on your content, your profile, your personal brand, then you have to keep creating content regularly, until you quit or die.

And banal, corporatized posts will only get you a tiny hit of attention on LinkedIn. For a slug of the good stuff, you need to get personal. Emotional. Authentic.

People on LinkedIn really like these words, mostly because they’re marketers, salespeople, or recruiters, and their entire job revolves around deploying them all to one degree or another.

This is, not incidentally, why these types of people tend to absolutely thrive on the site. There are a lot of influencers who have reached the heights of LinkedIn stardom with nothing more than a deck of cards, each bearing some astoundingly banal platitude masquerading as received wisdom from the workplace gods. Every day they flip over a new card and, without an ounce of shame, tell you about that time they worked really hard — until they got physically ill and figured out Family is the most important thing! The authenticity of it all is sublime.

However, to really make a name for yourself on the site, you’ll also need to get “vulnerable.”

And by “being vulnerable,” what people on LinkedIn really mean is sharing something startlingly personal which elicits an emotional reaction from other people on LinkedIn. This is not a novel social media tactic for earning likes, but when it happens on LinkedIn, it leads to some bizarre spectacles. I’ve witnessed a grown man announce his own divorce to thousands of ostensibly professional connections, thereby ensuring that tens of thousands of people would see the post (thanks to the algorithm) once the likes and comments started rolling in.

And everyone applauded him!

Anyone who commented that this was strange, self-pitying, or even childish behavior was treated to a torrent of anger and outrage. How dare anyone suggest we have an inner, private life that is degraded by sharing it via the same medium we use to update everyone on a product launch? How dare anyone be so cynical?

But consider, for a moment, how much attention this post got him. It’s become something of a truism to say that we live in an attention economy, but the consequences of it permeate nearly every aspect of our lives. The savvy, ambitious LinkedIn user simply finds what will garner the most attention — and then posts it.

Seeing this dynamic play out over and over, I began to wonder, who is really the cynical one here? Is it me, spotting ploys for attention in every LinkedIn post? Or is it the newly divorced marketer, making sure no part of the buffalo goes unused in his never-ending battle to maintain other users’ attention?

Why LinkedIn Is Overrun by Influencers

All of this begs the question: Why? Why do LinkedIn influencers (large and small, established and wannabe) put themselves through this never-ending posting regimen? What’s in it for them if they control the flow of attention on the site?

The answer, as some of you probably well know, is that they need your attention in order to sell you something. Again, this is a classic tactic on social media, but it’s reached its purest form on LinkedIn, where everyone is already interacting under their “work” identities. So you find salespeople teaching other salespeople how to sell, marketers teaching other marketers how to market, and life coaches, I presume, teaching other people how to live, ad infinitum.

This aspect of LinkedIn — that it’s basically a giant haven for scammers of the “professional” persuasion — is not generally mentioned in polite company. It would be unseemly to suggest that site is basically a writhing mass of opportunists, a vast circle jerk in the cloud.

And look, I’m not saying you can’t find someone to teach you a useful skill, or two, on LinkedIn. But I am saying that teaching people how to do something online is often much more lucrative than actually doing that thing yourself. All it takes is positioning yourself as a bonafide Successful and then constantly talking about what it is that made you such a Successful. Then offer your best tips or guaranteed process and put it behind a paywall.

Voila! Passive income.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/34qDyrl