The 5 purposes of LinkedIn

Being a user of LinkedIn is not your job. It is a conduit to achieve a purpose that you have consciously or unconsciously made.

What’s your purpose for using LinkedIn? If you’ve not asked yourself this question and spent time trying to understand your driver, please take a few minutes to consider the question. The reason you need to understand your purpose is that it will affect how you use it, how active/passive you are in making connections, the links to your business, the links to your personal life and the time your spend on it.

Find out who you are. And do it on purpose. (Dolly Parton)

I’ve spent many hours challenging myself on my purpose for using LinkedIn and tried to understand if I am getting out of my investment what I need. When I first started to post on LinkedIn, I was filled with fear, not knowing how to react if my posts or comments were met with anything other than kindness/positive challenge. At that time, I didn’t know my purpose and thought that I just needed to post some comments and like other posts so I could be seen to be doing something. It took many years before I started to understand what I could get from LinkedIn and how I could contribute to the community.

Along that journey, I’ve spoken to many people using the platform and got a deep understanding of what drives some people to use LinkedIn as their primary social media tool.

Here’s my 5 purposes of LinkedIn. After you’ve read these purposes, I’ll explain how to identify your own purpose:

1. Business driven – This is your basic need to find and develop leads which will ultimately lead to a sale. This can be a long-term endeavour which is generally a soft sell approach, or it can be the darker side where it’s constant spam. The users who have made LinkedIn the backbone of their business are highly visible as they seek to scrape every lead possible for their sales funnel.
2. Community spirit – This purpose is for people who wish to simply share their knowledge with as many as possible, but not for business gain. We also see this on the platform from those folks who offer pro-bono work and genuinely support others.
3. Learning sponge – We all use Google and YouTube to find information, but one of the other major sites for consuming content is LinkedIn. There are around 9 billion impressions per week (Kinsta.com, 2020) which helps understand why people use LinkedIn to search for ‘how to’ guides and research topics.
4. Job seeking – The purpose of job seeking is both way: by employer and candidate. Employers wish to use LinkedIn to look for quality candidates, expand their reach across boundaries or tap into a small niche of candidates. Meanwhile, candidates may be actively or passively seeking employment and use the ability to sell their experience, qualifications and skills through an informative profile.
5. Vanity project – There are many people who don’t wish to engage in discussions, share content or contribute to the greater good. They want to be seen and select carefully their activities to simply receive the most coverage. Their only interest is their number of followers. And if they do post, it’s all about the numbers. Quality discussion with people about their post is irrelevant. If your purpose is business driven, learn to identify these people and stay away.

So, which one are you? I find it difficult that anyone could put themselves into one category so I encourage you to take 10 points and allocate them against each purpose:

-       Business Driven       (_______)

-       Community Spirit      (_______)

-       Learning sponge       (_______)

-       Job seeking             (_______)

-       Vanity project            (_______)

Do you have a standout purpose? Have you ever realised that this is your split of interests across LinkedIn? 

Here’s a few tips for each purpose.

Business driven – Be open about your contact information and make sure it’s up to date. People want to know who you are, what you do, what your company does and how to get in contact. Reach out to your current clients and connect. Re-share their posts and engage with their comments. Even if a prospect fails to convert, reach out to them on LinkedIn and invite them to connect. Look out for groups that support your current industry or product and review the content regularly. To build your leads, engage with people as humans not simply a reference number from a CRM. If you don’t another supplier will.

Community spirit – Firstly, thanks for this approach. You make a difference. Help yourself and others to benefit from your knowledge by using the full range of media available including videos. This makes your content accessible. If you have completed some pro-bono work, ask for a reference from the client so everyone can see your activity which may help secure your next client (commercial or pro-bono). If you haven’t done so already, set up a group to harness the power of other community spirits to accelerate the impact you have.

Learning sponge – Make sure you are following the hashtags you are interested in and that you are a member of the right groups. Connect with people who you can learn from. Don’t be put off by a location or title. If you want to ask a question, send a message! Or connect with them an explain that you wish to seek their help. Very few people will flatly ignore a request for help and those do have nothing to offer you anyway. At some point, see if you can give back to others and develop a new purpose of the Community Spirit.

Job seeking – Is your profile up to date as a candidate? Have you looked at your LinkedIn through a critical eye and asked others for their feedback on the detail, spelling, grammar and content? Look at the profiles of others who you think are successful or in the job you are trying to secure. Is there anything you can learn from them? Make sure your account is visible to recruiters and that your headline explains that you are looking for a job in a particular location. You need to have your contacts up to date aswell! For employers, the same advice applies. Candidates are looking to be informed about your company and the vacancy. Ensure the company profile is clear, the address is available, contact details are posted and most importantly of all, respond to all candidates who have taken the time to contact you. It’s a two-way thing!

Vanity project – There’s little advice to offer here to someone who wishes to use LinkedIn as a vehicle to achieve numbers of likes and connections. The only hope is that at some point, they may somehow develop a community spirit to help their thousands of followers.

My own assessment is that I am mainly business driven (60%), with an equal split of the remainder between community spirit (20%) and learning sponge (20%). Everyone’s will be different. If you scored anything for vanity project, I celebrate your self-reflection and ask that you comment on why you believe that you identified with this purpose.

Here’s the important message. Your purpose can change including the % you attach to each one. If I am made redundant tomorrow, my % split may be 80% weighted towards job seeking. If my job changes, I may have more time to focus on the community spirit. It’s up to you how you use LinkedIn and with 575 million users, there are a huge range of purpose splits available. 

Please forward this article to people who you think are unsure of their purpose on LinkedIn. Then provide a little bit of community spirit by discussing their future purpose with them to help them get the most out of the time they spend on the platform.

#linkedin #purpose #5purposes

Andy