Do Indie Hackers hate LinkedIn?
Not assuming anything, I just heard from several IHers now that they hate LinkedIn. How do you feel about it and why?
I personally like it, even if I do think it's getting pretty saturated with BS. IH is far more authentic of a platform. But LI is "the place to be" for B2B IMO.
You get what you put into it. I've got good use out of it over the years. I do prefer Twitter though.
I'm never really used twitter like that. What are the advantage of using twitter compared to linkedin?
Twitter feels more open and inclusive. Advantages, dunno. It really depends where you want to hang out. Twitter works for some. LinkedIn for others. I don't think there should be an either/or.
I agree! I have enjoyed LinkedIn and get great business from it but I could understand why some people don't like it.
I see, thanks for the input.
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Same! Still have not been able to get it/build a community with Twitter
As someone in the indifferent camp, I can definitely see why some people hate it, but I'm very curious about the 22% of users who love LinkedIn.
Could anyone who loves LinkedIn shed some light into why you love it?
I personally like it. It's a great place to build a personal brand and it's pretty much the only network where I can find/connect with higher-level positions. I get why it's unlovable sometimes but it's one of the best platforms I'm on for my business. So many of my leads come from LI
I've received some useful job offers and connections from LinkedIn. Also doubles up as a backup address book - between that, WhatsApp and email I felt very comfortable deleting Facebook years ago
I used to Love LinkedIn and found it super useful for social selling, building community, learning new skills, marketing my business and personal brand etc. I do however feel that the last couple of months it's lost a bit of its momentum. It's probably due to my network there, but I find that what I used to like about it (that it was purely professional and value driven) is dying out - might be affected by the state of the world right now and vacation time.
I haven't voted as I don't fall into any of these 3 categories.
I think it completely depends on what/who your target audience is. LinkedIn is very corporate/commercial, especially larger enterprises.
For some people, commercial, enterprise relationships are important for their product as they may be targeting enterprise sales.
For most on IHers, they are not targeting enterprises (particularly large ones) and therefore its simply not their target audience.
IDK, I find that a lot of SMBs and startup founders are on there too. Not just enterprises!
oh definitely, but who is their target customer?
I probably haven't explained it well, but those who dislike LinkedIn, I suspect dislike enterprise customers and have no interest in them.
It's a natural space for purveyors of personal truth. I don't like using it, but I think getting to grips with it is necessary since everyone in the B2B sector hangs out there for at least a couple of minutes a day.
Feel like the content on LinkedIn has really gone downhill over the past year.
A lot of dodgy engagement pods juicing up spammy click bait posts to take advantage of the algorithms and become "influencers". But hey, it's providing a source of income so power to them.
It just makes the platform pretty difficult to digest and find value.
Professional perspective: it has been valuable for contacts, painting a portrait of my professional journey, and helping me to land my current position.
User perspective: the UX is TERRIBLE! Using it from business side is frustrating as they keep changing algorithms, making it harder to master.
Personal perspective: there are some valuable posts in there, but now it is devolving into another FB with people posting personal updates and photos of their children.
Final verdict: can be useful, but in general I sort of hate it.
TRUE about the UX. Some things just don't make sense.
LinkedIn has tons of groups, pages similar to those on Facebook, and — this is where it gets interesting — there's the option to create a "showcase" page, which are associated with an existing business page, but are specific to a product or service.
Also, tagging does help get things noticed.
Like anything else, you get out of LinkedIn what you put in.
Groups are pretty horrible, I've had one for years and it's a nightmare to maintain. No real conversations, just people coming in and dropping spam/marketing links.
Company pages can be interesting.
Ministry of Testing has a really active one. It has a group too, but the company page is way better.
Pages are a lot more useful, that's for certain. You also get a good glimpse into the employees, too.
You can also find people who have said they've worked for you when they actually haven't! 😬
Oh man this has happened to me too
Yes, I've heard of that.
Fake it until you make it dialed up to 11.
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Do you use the LinkedIn groups? I find I get more from just engaging with people on their own posts.
Groups for sales and marketing tend to useful, but there's also a fair bit of noise and ego.
I'm a Vue developer, and their page is an excellent resource.
Most groups I've found are pretty dead in terms of activity. Worse than FB ones.
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Hate, is a huge word.
Maybe dislike is more appropriate.....
I dislike it.
What is it that you dislike about it?
The whole concept.
LinkedIn
•LinkedIn is location based, depending upon where you live, where you studied, where you work, the experience could be vastly different(Like invisible subreddit).
• It's hard to develop followers over a particular niche over LinkedIn especially if its an obscure niche, say you only post about reverse engineering; Your post will always have to compete with a cat video or other such content re-uploaded from other platforms which will have thousands of interactions.
• LinkedIn is Facebook for work.
Twitter
•Twitter is not location centric, 'where' doesn't matter. Someone from a village in India can have large number of followers from Bay Area if they tweet what they like.
• Niche is welcomed. Your followers follow you specifically for what you do and if its niche; high chances are that your followers are into that niche and so your tweet wouldn't have to compete head on with totally irrelevant content(for you).
• But Twitter can lock us into a bubble easily, because of less interactions outside of our preferences. This can lead to biases, which you have a large impact upon what we do.
P.S. I've personally had more business benefit from LinkedIn, than Twitter as several times my posts(not cats!) were featured by LinkedIn Editors. But that's accidental and can't be replicated easily.
I don't think it's totally location based. I connect with tons of people who are not in my location in LinkedIn. So cool that your posts got featured! How'd that happen?
I said location centric, not location specific.
Explaining further,
One generally opens a LinkedIn account when in College, almost all of the connections then are from our college, then when we move on to our first job our connections are from that company; So for an average LinkedIn user the total number of connections from within the City/State/Country are always higher than outside.
Where as for Twitter, If I am opening an account today, depending upon the tweet text and hashtag, my followers can be from anywhere.
LinkedIn India started their daily news section 'Daily Rundown' a year or so back, I used to comment in their post and they used mention me and link to my comment in next day's content as featured! Later, If I had put a post relevant to their News, They would feature my post directly under their News snippet. My connections grew by 1000 within few weeks.
I got bored after several months and stopped posting my views on News content on LinkedIn altogether (I purged old comments, which I do in all social networks regularly for privacy reasons).
But unfortunately this may not work for you. I explored Daily Rundown of other countries, even tried the same tactic to see if it works and found that they were featuring posts of only celebrities/influencers ; A case in point for my statement - 'LinkedIn experience is location centric'.
I don’t like the way recruiters use it which I touch on in this IH post:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/is-dev-recruiting-broken-1092544c42
I love it for professional networking though.
True some people on LI are sooooo cringey
I have been hating LinkedIn since well before being a indie hacker. The platform is ugly, pushy, and spammy.
Fair enough!
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I hate to admit it but that is true.