MEET THE “WORK-FLUENCER”
LinkedIn’s role as a lightning rod for work issues is also likely to determine how it develops, as a new category of social media influencer emerges – the “work-fluencer”. Companies are increasingly finding that employees’ LinkedIn profiles and postings can express the brand better than corporate accounts, allowing them to develop the corporate business network much more quickly and naturally.
When this is done well, employee posts are usually much more authentic than corporate PR. Rather than just curating articles on professional milestones and triumphs, people have become more open and honest about day-to-day work life.
More than 13 million LinkedIn members have their profile set to “creator mode” to obtain higher exposure for their postings. Many use the hashtag #careertiktok to publish things like their wages and day-in-the-life vlogs about their professions, achieving more than 1.5 billion views.
This new “online watercooler” represents a change in the amount of information people reveal about their work on the Internet. Workers are raising formerly taboo concerns like pay transparency, discrimination and professional undermining. Some professionals like lawyers, entrepreneurs and HR experts, have leveraged their posts into new content marketing businesses and other profitable side hustles.
Twenty years after LinkedIn was founded, this could enable the platform to enjoy the kind of trust and community growth that other social media networks would envy. Certainly it has challenges – fake accounts are an issue, for example. And LinkedIn inevitably attracts a lot of spam, which is probably one reason it doesn’t achieve the same amount of daily interactions as other social media.
On the other hand, it benefits from not having a single direct competitor of scale. The nearest big ones would be Facebook Groups or Reddit, but LinkedIn’s purely corporate focus is always likely to be a plus against such players. At a time when traditional platforms like Facebook and Twitter are experiencing difficulties, LinkedIn has a real opportunity to continue succeeding as the one dedicated platform of its size.
Theo Tzanidis is Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, University of the West of Scotland. This commentary first appeared in The Conversation.
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