Elon Musk’s arrival on Twitter has turned the social network upside down. Facing the public, Musk boasts of having increased the number of active users – a difficult statement to verify now that his accounts are not public – but many of his most loyal users seem to be looking for alternatives. Some have gone to Mastodon, others to Bluesky, a new social network founded by Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, others have landed on Post.News… the list of applications is long and grows every week.
None of these services, however, are currently a serious rival to Twitter. They have neither the influence nor the dynamism necessary. But there is a social network with more than 20 years behind it that, unexpectedly, is also benefiting from this exodus and that could end up being the destination of, at least, part of the conversation that until now took place on Twitter.
We are talking about LinkedIn, a page that most users view, or visit, only when it is time to look for a new job or boast about a promotion.
Since Elon Musk’s arrival on Twitter, interest in publishing on this social network has been increasing. In the latest report from the Reuters Institute on media trends and journalism, in fact, it has been crowned as the best alternative to Twitter.
“LinkedIn posts are slowly changing. And my feed is starting to include content that can be considered interesting,” Morgan Meaker, a journalist for technology publication Wired, acknowledged late last year.
LinkedIn was launched on May 5, 2003, seizing the opportunity offered by the economic climate of the time for a professional network. The world was still trying to get over the hangover of the dotcom crises, and a small group of Silicon Valley engineers and entrepreneurs thought that the dynamics of social media of the day, such as Myspace, could be accommodated in a more formal setting.
It worked. Although it never reached the profile and importance of other social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter itself, the web has become the essential destination for anyone trying to progress in their career. In 2016, Microsoft bought the network for $26 billion.
Today some 850 million users are registered, although most use the service only sporadically. Less than 20% access it daily but even so, we are talking about almost 200 million people, figures quite similar to those of social networks such as Snapchat or Twitter itself. It also moves the same amount of ad revenue that Twitter had before Elon’s landing scared off many advertisers.
Traditionally, and for obvious reasons, most of the people who logged in on a daily basis were part of human resources teams or marketing departments. This has conditioned the type of publications that were made on the social network, which used to be quite dry and formal; “the 20 best strategies to grow your personal brand” or “what you should say in a job interview”.
The change to which Meaker alluded, however, has been noticeable for months. Suddenly there are more jokes and jokes, more articles and commentary on current affairs. The network is beginning to be used to connect beyond a professional environment, even to flirt, although many users consider that it is an inappropriate network for personal contacts. Jokes about LinkedIn becoming the new Match or Tinder have been common for years, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that there is some truth to the cliché. “LinkedIn has replaced Tinder as a dating app among students,” the Bucknell University newspaper recently acknowledged in the US.
Part of the change in attitude, it is true, began to take shape during the pandemic. According to internal LinkedIn figures, interest in posts and the number of interactions doubled in 2020 compared to the previous year. The tone of the messages also began to change then, with more messages openly discussing personal issues or mental health.
The land, in a certain way, was fertilized. The fall in relevance of Twitter among certain professional sectors and communities has done the rest.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
