The LinkedIn Influencer Content Problem

One of the worst moments of 2022 was unquestionably when Meta’s revenue started to melt like a ice sculpture three hours into a royal banquet, and they decided to make every forth post on Instagram an advert and every seventh one a recommended post from an influencer you have zero interest in, promoting a product or service.

They’ve since rolled back the recommended posts in your feed, so it’s now just one-two-three-ADVERT, and it’s massively better than getting Johnny Ball, Gemma Collins, and random singers of indie bands other white forty year old men look up to promoting an online store selling discounted quality seconds kitkats or a meal replacement milkshake.

It tore back the curtain on how terrible influencer marketing’s reach has become for those of us who don’t follow many on the platform.

As a functional adult with friends who happens to work in social media, I know multiple people who have built notable followings online, and pay their bills with their help. Unprompted, this year they have almost all asked me if the paid-to-post market is absolutely terrible for everyone, or if it’s just them who’s seen the money they’re offered for work melt away like an ice sculpture at a wait a minute I’ve already used that metaphor.

Pickings are slimming down. A couple of years ago people were queuing up to pay them hundreds of pounds a time to post a picture of them holding a tube of toothpaste, opening a box from basically anyone and looking surprised about a gift that most readers didn’t sleuth out couldn’t have gotten there without the brand knowing their address, or holding up a luxury vibrator with some copy pasta of useless words written by a man about how it’s time we talked about female sexual pleasure.

The bottom line is, there’s now too many people with sizable followings on Instagram, TikTok, and similar, doing too many similar branded posts. Supply is driving down cost. So, what did those ahead of the game do this year?

They migrated to LinkedIn and started to post a combination of inspirational quotes, really terribly generic advice about the big four (sustainability, inclusion, leadership and mental health), and inspirational stories about how hard their lives are and how hustle and LinkedIn has given them opportunities not just to earn a living, but to hire family and friends who were also in some way excluded. Ringing some bells?

Their inboxes then fill with thirsty middle-managers from Slough, who pay them £1,500 to come and present thirty slides about their life and some lessons about leadership to a team of regional tile salespeople who have no idea what is going on, but are glad to have an hour off work with a buffet of Pret sandos on little plastic trays to scoff.

The two people we know who’ve done this literally laugh that they have zero experience in offices or corp life, and most of their feed is basically resharing recycle bin memes and quotes from websites, or other people’s takes on news items they read that morning from Twitter with “I think this is brilliant, what do you think?” stapled onto it.

In a twist that was unexpected, but probably shouldn’t have been though, these folks have started to do paid promotions for products and services on LinkedIn, where there’s nobody keeping an eye open for advertisement hashtags. Fair play to them, it can be harder to monetize that followership on LinkedIn than other platforms and they’ve worked hard to build those audiences. The knock on effect though is the feed takes another step towards becoming an endless scroll of the worst of advertising.

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, someone with no money and any kind of sizable audience getting loaned a rental Lambo for the day to create some content encouraging their audience to invest £3k in a new course run by a partner that will also make them rich and popular via LinkedIn 🎵

It’s been a rough year for social media platforms.

Meta and Twitter haven’t had a great time. You know that though.

TikTok is currently experimenting with a gaming hub and other features that will potentially move users away from the feed and into areas that generate less revenue, in order to maintain visit duration.

That awkward slapping sound is TikTok taking its first steps to becoming the same kind of Frankenstein’s monster Facebook and Instagram and Twitter have become. Blueish monoliths of other acquired platforms and ‘borrowed’ features stitched together, stumbling and grunting towards the light, hoping to discover what their purpose is in this strange world.

LinkedIn is on the brink of a familiar yet different crisis. This time about content and the feed itself rather than features.

LinkedIn suffered from a content shortfall pre-2020, where nobody really posted on it. Then as it emerged reach was great and everyone was locked in and thirsty for work when the pandemic hit, it became Facebook revisited. People posted videos doing home gym workouts and recycled memes from 2010, completely uncertain what else to do. It was weird and wild. It has since fallen into the same self-promotional, performative tropes as Instagram. Today when you mention LinkedIn to people, you can see their their faces twitch in the same way as if you hear someone at a party start to crack a joke about Jimmy Saville, Jeffrey Dahmer or Bill Cosby.

One of my predictions for 2023, is that people will become hyper pragmatic with their social media usage, and usage times will likely further decline.

Next year is going to be freaking massive for Hollywood and gaming, with a blockbuster seemingly coming out every third day. There’s only so many hours in a day and the ones you’re spending playing the Metal Gear Solid remake or watching Marvel in a cinema won’t be spent consuming TikToks or influencer posts on LinkedIn.

Remember three or four years back when people moaned they missed nights out or events, only to learn they’d been arranged between a Facebook post comment feed and Messenger, and they’d missed it all because they’d not been on Facebook for a week?

Last night my partner asked me if I got a link to a thing she DM’d me on Instagram almost a week earlier and I hadn’t for similar reasons to why people started to miss Facebook messages. Everyone I know has similar stories.

We’re at a point where IM is where personal relationships live (increasingly as voice and video notes) and social media is where you see adverts, consume some outrage porn about a celebrity or politician doing something shocking, and maybe get some real news or watch something entertaining.

The problem is, would you rather IM a friend group about the new film you saw the trailer for that you all love, or bark that onto social media like a dog shouting at a passing aeroplane, to be greeted with silence other than the sound of the wind in the trees?

It’s not your fault your content isn’t engaging enough to get reach in feeds, the reality is average people talking about average things just don’t get cut through these days. If you’d be interested though I could sign you up for a trial of my mate’s new course?