Facebook is testing out LinkedIn-style profile tags
Facebook seems to be taking a cue from LinkedIn and is early in the process of testing a new feature — profile tags. — Verge reader Luke M. alerted us to Facebook's new profile tags feature, and the company confirmed it was testing …
Context & Ripple Effects
In mid-2015 Facebook quietly confirmed it was testing LinkedIn-style profile tags on user profiles, a small feature that put the company's toe into professional self-presentation — territory LinkedIn had owned. The Verge's report came from a reader tip, signaling how early and unannounced the experiment was.
The test reads differently in hindsight: over the following years Facebook kept probing adjacent identity and career surfaces, from letting page administrators post job listings and collect applications to launching a dating product built on a separate profile, later extended with "things in common" labels connecting non-friends. Profile tags were an early data point in that pattern of absorbing features from specialized networks.
First-order effects
- Users in the test cohort gain a new way to tag skills or roles on their profiles, giving Facebook richer interest and occupation data tied directly to its ad-targeting graph.
Second-order effects
- LinkedIn faces pressure at the low end of professional networking, since Facebook can reach far more users who never maintain a resume-style profile — reinforced when Facebook Pages later gained native job-posting and application tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Facebook consolidates the functions of vertical networks — professional identity, dating, community discovery — into a single app, eroding the standalone value proposition of category specialists like LinkedIn.
The trend: Facebook has spent the decade systematically cloning the core features of vertical social networks to keep every kind of identity — personal, professional, romantic — inside its own platform.