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If you’ve noticed a lot of “My dog died today”, or “I had a mental breakdown last week” posts on LinkedIn recently, you may be forgiven for thinking you logged onto Facebook by mistake.

After all, LinkedIn is for business, right?

With 950 million members as of July, LinkedIn is poised to soon have a billion users, joining a rarefied three-comma club with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Started in 2003 as little more than an online repository for résumés, the Microsoft-owned behemoth has recently transformed. Not only are there more users to post, but they’re posting much more often.

The number of LinkedIn posts grew 41% from 2021 to 2023. But it’s the content of the posts that’s shifted the most, turning LinkedIn into one of the world’s strangest social networks.

As reported by Insider, the change seemed to have started in 2021, after the pandemic, when people began posting more and more personal information. Much of this change is because, over the past few years, remote work across the world has blurred the lines between work and life.

“We all build our professional castles here on LinkedIn, but real life shit happens, too.”

Take one post from Peter Rota, an SEO specialist from Massachusetts. “I have a secret,” he wrote to his thousands of followers in August 2022. “Most people are not even aware this is a real thing. Since 2015, I have struggled with peeing in public restrooms.”

Rota went on to explain that his social anxiety condition, also known as shy bladder syndrome, had caused years of discomfort and even provoked him to miss friends’ weddings. So why post it? “I had basically seen other people, I guess, share more vulnerable things, so to speak — and I feel like it’s kind of just something that I wanted to share.”

Personal sharing on LinkedIn is booming because of tidal shifts in both social norms and the social media marketplace.

For one, broad cultural attitudes toward the workplace, as well as what’s appropriate to share, are evolving. After the ‘rona pandemic, people were suddenly given free rein to be vulnerable and express their fears in front of their colleagues, while remote work simultaneously lowered inhibitions and eroded much of in-office etiquette.

There’s also a generational shift, with some younger people having fewer hang-ups sharing with their colleagues.

LinkedIn was also, for a long time, a virgin territory for posters. As the platform built out its sharing functionality, it had hundreds of millions of users, but without the same culture of posting as Twitter or Instagram. Some users found that the same post would receive far more engagement on LinkedIn as compared with rival social platforms — making it an attractive place to concentrate their energies.

And now it’s becoming the biggest game in town. Facebook has been a wasteland for years. X is subject to Elon Musk’s tantrums and whims. TikTok’s short-form video is a different form of content and unless you can flip water bottles or prank your parents, there’s not much you can contribute.

“LinkedIn is becoming a site where regular people actually want to hang out and post their thoughts. It might even be cool.”

But the wrong content can be off-putting. On LinkedIn people will still be looking at it going: This is how I want to present myself as a professional to the outside world.

Exactly what is and isn’t acceptable on LinkedIn depends on the norms of your industry; tech sales representatives may have very different ideas of professionalism compared with arbitration lawyers.

Played right, it can help you stand out and get ahead — as long as you don’t push it too far. And opting out of the rat race entirely by not having a LinkedIn account may also be viewed as a red flag.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The message from Daniel Roth, the site’s editor-in-chief, who has been with the company since 2011, is simple: LinkedIn does not want to be a place where posts go viral.

Over the past year or so, the site’s algorithm has been tweaked to prioritize what Roth calls “knowledge” content — posts that will actually help people get ahead in their jobs — rather than self-promotional diatribes.

Since the COVID-propelled boom in personal sharing, Roth says, the pendulum has swung back — but not all the way back to how things were before the pandemic. “The new normal is that you do talk in the office, you are more willing to show who you are as a person as well as how you operate as a professional,” he said.

“That kind of vulnerability I think is a permanent part of how people are posting on LinkedIn. So it’s knowledge first, but it’s knowledge plus humanity.”

Hardly any social media platforms remain true to the idea that spawned them. They evolve along with the users. Just remember that if you proclaim that “God gave me a job today”, it might annoy HR who had to sit through twenty interviews.

[source:insider]