LinkedIn, You’ve Changed
How the Pandemic Affected User Behavior…and How Businesses Can Follow Suit
During the pandemic, I was taking a break from my social media marketing career to stay home with my two kids. As a result, I took a longer than typical hiatus from looking at LinkedIn with any regularity. This is why, as I eased my way back onto the platform after deciding to start working again, the changes that were taking place there came as such a surprise to me. What I noticed was an increasing number of personal posts - emotional, funny, thoughtful, detailed, and, I’ll say it, long - it seemed to me that the professional networking site was going in a new direction. “LinkedIn is becoming the new Facebook,” I would tell anyone asking for my official POV. But after delving a bit deeper, I realized that this was something entirely different. People were opening up, telling meaningful stories, and relating them back to their careers - a massive part of our everyday lives that isn’t discussed as much on other social media channels. Aside from how this affected my feelings about my own LinkedIn activity, or lack thereof (which is a blog post for another day), these changes affected how I would eventually manage the Story + Strategy business page.
The Covid pandemic spurred many changes in the workplace, and LinkedIn was no exception, according to a Worklife article entitled “How LinkedIn evolved from being the place we only show our ‘work’ selves to our ‘whole’ selves.” Worklife posits that, as professionals’ personal lives began to seep into their work lives out of necessity due to working from home, uncertain schedules, video conferencing and the like, their LinkedIn activity followed suit. Where once we may have kept our personal lives private in the workplace, we now felt that the line was so blurred, we had no choice but to merge the two into one “whole” person. Essentially, we felt more free to just be ourselves, no matter the environment.
In addition to this melding of the “work self” and the “real self,” the pandemic also had workers questioning if they were on their ideal career paths - whether by force via company-wide layoffs or furloughs, or because the pandemic had us reevaluating what we deemed important in our lives. In what is now known as The Great Resignation, many people were leaving the jobs they’d had for years “in search of more money, more flexibility, and more happiness,” according to this NPR article. LinkedIn was like a virtual networking event allowing job seekers to cast a wide net and let their connections know they were on the hunt for something else.
On that note, we’re brought to the topic of how companies should be responding to this shift in behavior on LinkedIn. As previously mentioned, the pandemic sparked a rising need for compassion and flexibility in the workplace. Employees seek these qualities from their potential or current employers. As a business page, you want your content to largely reflect the environment of the platform where you’re posting. You don’t want your posts to stick out like a sore thumb as overly promotional, unemotional or sterile on any channel… users will not engage with these posts and you’ll fall victim to the algorithm. Here are our top three tips for managing your company’s LinkedIn page in these post-Great Resignation times:
Read the room: Make sure you’re frequently monitoring your own LinkedIn feed. Follow relevant people and pages for inspiration and to get a good read on what everyone’s talking about. Join in on conversations that are already taking place (i.e. your company’s take on hybrid work). On the opposite side of the coin, if there is a major current event that everyone is discussing, consider holding off on posting or coming out with a related statement.
Pull back the curtain: LinkedIn is a recruiting tool at its core. Show your followers what it’s like to work at your company. Highlight fun bonding activities, your company values, your people… anything that shows what it’s like to work there and what makes you unique.
Experiment with your content: My motto with any social media channel is to experiment and see what works. LinkedIn has many content features available: photos, videos, polls, articles, etc. Don’t be afraid to try something new, switch it up frequently, be funny, be serious, share a post that’s very long or very short. We are showing our “whole selves” on LinkedIn now, so feel free to show your “whole company.”
Lastly, because I always like to end on a high note, please enjoy one of my favorite memes that pokes fun at the “new” LinkedIn.