Linkedin Lockdown
The world has fully moved online to interact and all of us will have noticed a peak in activity on our digital channels. Those that can work from home have adopted new ways of working while a lot of us will have either lost jobs (support food-banks if you can — #notallheroeswearpants) or stopped working temporarily.
Bizarre times in which we’ve seen an unprecedented use of ‘unprecedented’ and during which companies already accustomed to remote or distributed working winning an unofficial race to work productively from home. All the while senior managers at companies that were averse to working from home have either come to change their stance or continue to focus on when and how they can return to their historic ways of working, with some even acting too soon.
Wherever you stand on WFH or other digital matters, it is paramount to success to focus on digital strategies and leadership moving into the 2020s. With all the data dust up in the air and only ever increasing*, gaining actionable insights on how others are behaving is crucial.
Why LinkedIn?
LinkedIn topline company profile:
- owned by Microsoft ($26.2bn acquisition in 2016)
- currently has 675 million active monthly users
- 70% are non-US users.
With the ambitious growth goal to get the entire working population to use its network (3 billion users) and 2 new users per second joining, the fact LinkedIn will grow (users) and evolve (UX) is clear. Yet those actively using the network and who know its value have grown curious as to what the current situation has meant.
Connect, support & collaborate
The world of work has been seeing accelerated change during normal times and it is clear things will look different on the other end of the COVID-19 tunnel. To adjust we will need to use our human powers of connecting. The (commercial and societal) light is in forming our future world of work TOGETHER and we (Erendiz Ates and Leonard Burger) believe LinkedIn is a great platform to start and continue this journey, connecting with both like- and unlike-minded people in a PLEASANT way.
“The only way to make sense of it all is to use our only human superpower — our ability to connect, support each other and collaborate”
So are we applying our superpowers? To find out Erendiz posted the following 3 short questions to his network:
- Do you spend less or more time on LinkedIn during lockdown?
- How many hours / week do you spend on LinkedIn?
- What is your main activity?
After reading these on my timeline we agreed to team up and turn it into a structured quantitative survey. Although the sample is relatively small (n=101 — majority of respondents from UK, BE & NL ) it is interesting to see that indeed nearly half of respondents stated to be more active:
When we quantify this in hours we see that most spent between 1 and 3 hours per week with 15% actually spending 1 or more working days per week:
Finally, nearly half of people claim to only log in to passively consume content while 1 in 10 use it to engage further with their existing networks (i.e. having online conversations).
Besides this, 8.9% state to solely go online to post content and roughly 1 in 10 either do all of the 4 activities provided as options or stated ‘other’ (e.g. a combination of 1 of the 4 activities, active job hunts, live stream watching and accessing LinkedIn for educational purposes).
In conclusion, we can say that post lockdown enforcement LinkedIn has seen an increase in uptake and it will be interesting to track how and where this leads in the months and years ahead. 1.2bn (=41% of 3bn) people passively consuming content might be a dream for professional content creators yet for this to happen LinkedIn will need to increase its current growth rate of 2 new users per second. Because it would take 36 years to get to 3bn users, Erendiz and I will be retired by then….
What are your thoughts? Do you like/dislike LinkedIn? Unsure what to make of it and what it means for you as a business/freelancer/employee? Please comment 👇
PS: If anyone from LinkedIn is reading this, it might help changing the premium pricing structure to increase revenue and thereafter invest more into developing UX:
*= It is estimated that 1.7MB worth of data is generated per second for each of us.
