#LinkedIn

I dare say that I was (!) an enthusiastic social media user, but through experience and what we now know about platforms such as Facebook and especially with regard to Twitter/X, this has decreased enormously. But what about LinkedIn?

LinkedIn aims to connect business professionals with each other, it’s content must be about professional themes. Furthermore, the platform focuses on profiling companies and people, so that professionals and employers/recruiters can find assignments, vacancies and job seekers/candidates more easily.

I have fully embraced LinkedIn and post at least this blog every month and often also all kinds of (hopefully for my audience) fun and interesting items about what weColLaborate can do for companies and professionals. But what does it really bring me?

I now have a network of more than 1,000 people, but only a small part of those (about 10%) I frequently have contact with or work for.
I rarely receive new projects or work via LinkedIn, but much more through personal contact by calling, visiting a company or through contacts at trade fairs and conferences.
On the other hand, I do receive a lot of messages from companies/people who strongly recommend me to improve my website and SEO and that it really is not possible to do without them.... I now even have a person, I call him Stalker Mike, who emails me every week, with a different surname, via the contact form on my website (smart... I can't register it as spam, because then I won't receive anything anymore) to digitally improve everything.
And it is often the same, small group of people (thank you) who like and/or share my posts in their own network.

Is there nothing positive to report? Yes, there is!
I receive the interests from all the people I am linked to and these are often themes and stories that I also find interesting. I also frequently see good trade fairs and conferences via LinkedIn (although sometimes it is a bit late!). And when I want to get in touch with people to see if they want to catch up, LinkedIn's messaging function is a nice addition.
And let's be honest, and hopefully it shows, I just really enjoy making all those pictures, videos and videocasts (To-the-Point!) and posting them on LinkedIn.

But that's the crux of it!
I am dependent on, of course, the network I am in and what LinkedIn considers trending or popular. And the latter is only one part of what I find interesting.
Of course I would like to stay informed about what BASF, Envalior or DOMO are doing, but innovation is increasingly concentrated in SMEs and startups, which also interests me immensely. Not to mention the developments in education (from Secondary vocational education to universities) and the "Science Parks" that are developing beautifully in the Netherlands, such as High Tech Campus Eindhoven - Brightlands Geleen - Polymer Science Park Zwolle - Getec Park Emmen!
I frequently “by accident” come across interesting information when searching for other and unrelated information.
But the large companies have many more followers, many more connections, much more visibility in trade magazines and other media... then it is logical that with the existing algorithms in LinkedIn these companies are always trending (and lately this is usually about vacancies!); in addition, the people who work at large companies are inevitably popular when they post something, because a considerable part of the (large number of) colleagues give a thumbs up. Why do small companies, professionals and even job seekers so often need an influencer (with more than 30,000 connections and ditto more followers) to stand out from the crowd?

Now, I'm not an IT expert, so what I would like to see may be very difficult to do. But I would delete trending and popular completely, unless it can be more specified and changed to as many thumbs as possible from people outside the employees of a large company, for example...
But I am also thinking of notifications of posts with many thumbs per subgroup, such as large companies, SMEs, Startups, Freelancers/Professionals, Secondary vocational education/Higher professional education/University and trade fairs/conferences.

What I am looking for is that the playing field becomes a bit more level on LinkedIn and that you do not remain stuck in the same circle because of the algorithms. Entrepreneurship is also about innovations, inspiration, meeting new people, looking at things from a different perspective... and a social media platform like LinkedIn should even more facilitate this.

Now, do I have to become trending first to get this story across at LinkedIn?! 😉