LinkedIn has evolved from a place to network and find jobs into a platform with its own content, video bloggers, and other features that weren't even envisioned when it launched. Technology writer Simon Stoltzoff looks at the company's past and present.
Like most people, Goldie Chen logged onto LinkedIn because she was looking for a new job. It was late 2017, and after years in digital marketing, Chen decided to take a month off to figure out what to do next. While scrolling through her LinkedIn feed, which at the time was mostly filled with job postings and random news, she saw a video icon: The social network had begun experimenting with native video content, and Chen had been invited to join the project’s closed beta.
She thought that creating videos for the growing platform might be a good way to pass the time while she was looking for a new job. The next day, she headed to The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Los Angeles to shoot her first video. Little did she know that LinkedIn Video would change her life.
Chen doesn’t look like your typical LinkedIn addict: She wears cat-eyeliner, dyes her short hair electric green, and wears a bowler hat. She’d rather talk about Dungeons and Dragons than sales and cold emails. But for the past two years, Chen has been posting videos to LinkedIn every day. Her videos have amassed more than 6 million views.
Chen represents a significant shift in LinkedIn’s audience. Once known as a resume- sharing site , LinkedIn has become a learning platform, media company, and SaaS provider. Three years ago, Microsoft made the largest deal in its history, buying LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. Since then, the social network’s audience has grown more than 60%, and its revenue has nearly doubled, to more than $7 billion.
Reid Hoffman launched LinkedIn in 2002 based on two hypotheses. First, he believed that the cartoonish avatars of ’90s message boards were ready to give way to real photos. Hoffman’s first company, SocialNet, was a platform for connecting people with shared interests. And as an angel investor, he’d first invested in Friendster, a social network that required real names and photos. Hoffman wanted LinkedIn profiles to be linked to real identities, too. (Ironically, the site found 21.6 million fake accounts in the first half of 2019.)
Connecting pages to real personalities wasn’t just a conceptual moment, but a key mechanism for keeping users connected to LinkedIn. “Everything on your profile is part of your professional life. If you write something, you know that your coworkers, your employer, and your future employer’s recruiter will see it,” explains LinkedIn editor-in-chief Dan Roth.
Advertising
Second, Hoffman believed that virality would be the key to growth in the digital age. Like a virus that infects a person and causes them to infect others, virality is a way to grow a business by making customers willing sellers. After SocialNet, Hoffman joined his Stanford buddy Peter Thiel’s startup PayPal, which had already mastered virality: PayPal gave new users and their referrals $20. Within a month of launching its refer-a-friend program, PayPal had attracted more than 100,000 people.
Throughout its history, LinkedIn has used virality to grow. At first, LinkedIn was an invite-only social network. The first 13 employees sent out invites to their connections, who then invited their colleagues, and so on. Each new person on LinkedIn made the network more valuable to users, so they worked hard to help it grow organically. LinkedIn’s infamous “Someone is viewing your profile” notifications created a viral engagement loop. They encouraged users to visit the site and open other people’s profiles, which prompted more notifications to be sent.
LinkedIn user growth
But Hoffman knew that for LinkedIn to break out of the Silicon Valley bubble, it needed to find people willing to try new things. And few people are better suited to that role than job seekers.
The first evidence that LinkedIn could actually make money came in 2005 with the launch of LinkedIn Jobs. The company made a small effort to sell ads through its AdBrite service, but only after it began charging employers $75 per job posting. Later that year, LinkedIn introduced a premium version that allowed recruiters to contact candidates directly. And by 2006, the social network had improved its advertising tools to better target ads. A decade and a half later, a combination of subscriptions, B2B tools, and advertising still accounts for the lion’s share of LinkedIn’s revenue. But unlike some of its social networking peers, LinkedIn hasn’t put all its eggs in the advertising basket.
LinkedIn has avoided the toxicity of Facebook and Twitter because it doesn’t rely heavily on advertising. But despite its diversified business model, LinkedIn still made mistakes when it came to engagement and growth. Five years after experimenting with advertising, LinkedIn released a product called Social Ads, which allowed brands to use cues, including a user’s connections, to personalize ads. The problem? It was incredibly creepy. Imagine scrolling through your feed and seeing a post from your employer with your own photo next to the text. LinkedIn eventually quietly shut down Social Ads.
Perhaps LinkedIn's most popular growth tactic was the address book importer. This tool allowed you to download your LinkedIn contacts into a .CSV file, complete with names, email addresses, companies, and job titles. One can only imagine the number of spam emails that were sent as a result of using this feature. But no other LinkedIn growth tactic has gained such a nefarious reputation as "broetry."
At some point, similar posts with the following structure began to appear on LinkedIn.
- Short, provocative first line.
- Then a line break (required).
- The second provocative line.
If the user wanted to see the full text, they had to click on the “read more” button. Each post was dedicated to “a lesson learned the hard way” or “advice I wish I had known earlier.” This strange genre of pseudo-inspirational stories became known as “broetry.”
The thing is, around 2017, a group of “growth hackers” — a term coined by startups that needed massive growth on a small budget — found a loophole in LinkedIn’s feed: The algorithm treated clicking “read more” as a like or a share.
People like Josh Fechter, co-founder of the marketing agency Badass Marketers and Founders (BAMF), began writing long, one-sentence stories about marketing, management, and entrepreneurship. Fechter told Buzzfeed News that his “bro-ems” averaged about 600,000 views. LinkedIn has since changed its algorithm to curb the spread of these viral posts, but user engagement remains the social network’s top priority — its board wanted LinkedIn to be a platform that users visit every day.
If you had told Reid Hoffman in 2002 that LinkedIn would employ more than 50 journalists in 2019, he probably wouldn’t have believed it. Hoffman and his team were programmers: They thought in beats, not headlines.
When Dan Roth, a longtime editor at Fortune, first met Jeff Weiner, Hoffman’s successor as LinkedIn’s CEO, in 2011, he felt out of place, too. At the time, Roth was tasked with making Fortune more like a tech company. Part of that mission was to build an app for Fortune 500+ suppliers with customer data. Fortune had a solid set of company data, but LinkedIn had employee data. “I really had no idea what I was doing. I hadn’t even heard the name until my first call with the product manager,” Roth recalls. He showed up to try to get LinkedIn’s API access for Fortune. Weiner had a better pitch.
After the meeting, Weiner said to Roth, “We’re going to get into content—why don’t you join us?” Roth was confused. He was a journalist who had spent years at Fortune, Wired, and Forbes. What could he bring to the tech company? Weiner had been CEO for less than a year and had recently taken the company public. He had a vision Roth hadn’t seen before: If LinkedIn wanted to make people more successful, it needed to tell them about the world—that is, get into the news business.
In the eight years since Roth joined LinkedIn, it has broken out of its role as a social network and become a full-fledged media company. Roth leads a team of nearly 60 journalists who curate news and create original content. But many users are unaware of this aspect of LinkedIn: The social network’s Facebook-like feed is still filled with job listings, memes, and the like.
As the lines between work and other topics blur, LinkedIn’s feed is starting to look more like other social media feeds. Couples have started posting engagement photos, and influencers like Goldie Chen are posting Snapchat-style videos. Work is increasingly becoming part of your identity: Whether you’re sharing news of a promotion or confessing your love of junk food, LinkedIn is an opportunity to build your personal brand.
In 2015, designer Frank Chimero created a series of illustrations featuring a 12-word phrase he believed could serve as a universal headline for any New York City situation: “Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”
In the 17 years since its founding, LinkedIn has become the butt of many jokes. There’s #LinkedInFlex, a hashtag dedicated to its corporate communications, and @BestOfLinkedIn, a Twitter page designed to “spotlight the heroes and influencers brave enough to share their stories and inspire others.” But one thing has remained constant: The company knows who it is. LinkedIn’s mission statement—“to connect the world’s professionals so they can be more productive and successful”—is much the same as it was when LinkedIn was run by five people out of Reid Hoffman’s apartment.
LinkedIn has largely avoided misinformation (Facebook's problem) and hate speech (Twitter's problem) precisely because it stuck to its guns. The fact that it's boring has become its competitive advantage. Now, with Microsoft's backing, LinkedIn doesn't feel the pressure to squeeze out extra revenue at the end of each quarter or to clutter the feed with ads. But it does need to keep users engaged and coming back.
Historically, LinkedIn’s struggles have been around monetization and integration. From its IPO to its Microsoft deal, LinkedIn’s revenue and stock price were unpredictable. By comparison, Facebook, which went public a year after LinkedIn, has consistently grown in both categories. Analysts generally agree that LinkedIn botched the integration of online learning platform Lynda.com, which it acquired for $1.5 billion in 2015. And in 2016, LinkedIn was forced to shutter its $175 million Bizo marketing service.
It’s impossible to value LinkedIn’s business as accurately today as it was when the company was public. We know that LinkedIn made $5.3 billion for Microsoft in 2018, nearly double Twitter’s 2018 revenue. At the end of its 2019 fiscal year, LinkedIn announced that it had 645 million users, up 40% from the time of the acquisition. But you can’t determine LinkedIn’s value by its stock price anymore. It’s just another cog in Microsoft’s giant machine.
Perhaps the best way to evaluate LinkedIn is to look at its impact on business culture. LinkedIn has become a site that millions of people check every day, even when they’re not looking for a job. Co-founder Gericke summed it up best: “We’re here to build a business, not to build something cool.”