LinkedIn is benefiting from recent social media upheavals, as the only place where old-school self-promotion still works; sharing was up 41% YoY in spring 2023
The professional network is benefiting from upheavals elsewhere in the social media landscape. — The biggest social media platforms all have their niches.
BloombergSarah Frier
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn had already shifted its feed toward niche professional interests rather than broadly viral posts, giving professional sharing a clearer home inside the network. The reported activity increase shows that positioning gaining traction while other social platforms were in flux.
Subsequent coverage tied the same opening to influencers and executives building audiences on LinkedIn and to brands considering a reallocation of X advertising budgets. That makes the engagement rise relevant not just to usage, but to LinkedIn's creator and advertising appeal.
First-order effects
LinkedIn gains a larger volume of professional posts and sharing activity, while users seeking public visibility have a more receptive venue for career- and business-oriented self-promotion.
The network's professional audience becomes more valuable to creators, executives, and companies that want distribution in a comparatively focused setting.
Second-order effects
More visible professional creators can reinforce LinkedIn's content supply and audience engagement, increasing pressure on the platform to balance creator-friendly reach with its existing emphasis on niche professional relevance.
Advertisers looking for alternatives to disrupted social channels have a clearer reason to test LinkedIn; later coverage specifically identified potential reallocation of X ad spending as a growth driver.
Third-order effects
If this behavior persists, professional identity networks can compete more directly for the creator economy's business and thought-leadership segment, rather than functioning primarily as recruiting and networking utilities.
The durable differentiator may be contextual fit, not maximum reach: platforms with a defined audience purpose can capture activity displaced by instability elsewhere, though sustaining that advantage depends on keeping feeds useful and credible.
The trend: Social-media disruption is redistributing creators, audiences, and ad budgets toward platforms whose audience context offers a clearer use case.
Yes posting there is transparently strategic — but that's how a lot of people used to use Twitter. So there's a market for it! But I appreciate your full self Jane :) There's still time to craft the culture of Threads!
LinkedIn reached out to me (as a creator) a while back and pitched the platform as an alternative to Twitter But ultimately I didn't move forward with using LinkedIn fully, as I feel like I can't bring my full self to there or do real talk, as it's ultimately a professional platf…
LinkedIn will always be about job search and professional connections. I can understand them wanting to break out of that pidgeon hole to be more, but that's hard to do when you've already firmly established yourself as a product meant specifically for a niche need
The recent algorithm changes de-emphasizing business broetry + people using their actual names has made the general conversation far more tolerable on LinkedIn than here. https://www.bloomberg.com/...
“A generation that came of age posting about their lives on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, building their identities with dispatches from weekends and nights out, are starting to see some utility in wishing one another a happy work anniversary.” https://www.bloomberg.com/...
New by me in @BW: As other social networks stagnate or self-destruct, people are migrating to share their thoughts in the only place old-school self-promotional posting still works: LinkedIn! https://www.bloomberg.com/...
I felt a shift & I wasn't imagining it: in the spring of this year, users shared 41% more content on the network than they did in the same period in 2021. Kinda crazy growth in a 20-year-old network!
Oh honey, no. LinkedIn is, as I have said before, the “insurance company sponsored afternoon concert in the suburban park next to the Chili's” of social networks. That is its only vibe. https://www.bloomberg.com/...