LinkedIn is decades old, and is a rare place where things are professional, not personal.
As a result of this, the job networking platform is often cringy, and full of self-promotion. For more than plenty of times, users there boast their status, job title, portfolio, past works, and other experiences they may have. In the digital space where things are "social," LinkedIn has past its prime age.
In the era where people can connect through more than multiple means, LinkedIn has lost most its charm.
But not entirely, because sometimes, there is a second chance for everything.
And this time, LinkedIn is like having a second puberty, in which it experienced a growth spurt that happens after the market shifted.
Following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, and after he renamed it to X, the platform becomes increasingly unstable and controversial.
Despite he is not the CEO, this X is still under Musk's stewardship, and like it or not, Musk is still leading it to where he thinks X should go.
The chaos forced a number of people to look for somewhere else to post.
And to many of those people, LinkedIn is their choice.
Whereas Twitter-turned X remains a place for arguing with strangers, and that Instagram keeps on being the popular place for showing off breathtaking selfies, Facebook continues being a place for 'older' people to share their college photos, and TikTok rules as the place for short-form videos.
And as for LinkedIn, it has been the place where people update their professional profile when they're looking for a job, or trying to impress others for work related things.
When smaller social media platforms, like Clubhouse, Mastodon and others haven't become a household name yet, the biggest social media platforms all have their niches.
But this is changing because the landscape is also changing.
LinkedIn users are increasingly sharing baby photos, wedding photos, and other kinds of posts people of LinkedIn wouldn't ever find years ago.
For sure, it's strange to see ones' vacation pictures and emotional stories shared on LinkedIn, and being captioned and commented on.
Besides the fact that Elon Musk created quite an uncertainty at X, which made people to look for alternatives, there are reasons for the shift.
For example, people becoming more comfortable posting about their personal lives during the pandemic, LinkedIn editor-in-chief Dan Roth said.
After remote working that shifted how people work, people are blurring the lines between their professional life and their personal life.
And also because of COVID-19, where many people were laid off, an increasing number of people turned to LinkedIn.
Then, there is the fact that algorithms keep on changing, and various social media platforms keep on tweaking this, as well as adding and removing features, just to compete with others.
"We’re totally agnostic about what media form people share," explained Roth, saying how LinkedIn is different than others.
Let's not forget the fact that LinkedIn is allowing users to self-policing themselves when engaging with others. Due to what it's known for, people on LinkedIn are less likely to be rude and inappropriate. This helped the platform many forms of toxicity that plague its rivals.
And because LinkedIn fits nicely by occupying the space where others cannot, it can be a place that attracts attention, but without creating so much pushback.
While Meta, X and others are distancing themselves from the news industry, downplaying article links, LinkedIn is instead increasing its efforts for content curation and partnerships with content creators and publishers.
According to the company, users like seeing "knowledge-based" content and, as a result, are more satisfied.
And lastly, LinkedIn’s business model relies on selling subscriptions to salespeople and recruiters looking to find partners or job candidates. This makes it less reliant on user engagement and ads. This in turn give it a tendency toward stability.
LinkedIn is known for being rather stagnant, with little changes happening throughout the years.
In the ever-changing world of tech, this is one big disadvantage, since being slow means being left behind.
But LinkedIn managed to tackle this. Not internally, but externally, because being slow means that it's mature enough to be what it is. And that means making users worry less about uncertainties.
Whereas the social media sphere is quite candid and messy, LinkedIn is rock solid.
For social media users looking to engage in some old-fashioned self-promotional posting, LinkedIn is the only notable place left.
LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired for $26.2 billion in 2016, doesn’t have to report its number of daily or monthly average users. But the company did say earlier this 2023, that its users shared 41% more content on the network than they did in the same period in 2021.
That kind of growth is indeed unusual for a platform that has been around for about 20 years, especially amid the turbulence its industry is experiencing.