In recent times, scrolling through LinkedIn increasingly feels like being exposed to 24×7 media outlets. Speakers’ attempts to differentiate, out-compete, and breathlessly hold forth on the new, novel, and emerging game-changers mostly add to noise. What content is indeed insightful, creative, and engaging is limited, while the bulk of it is banal and repetitive.

As a platform for building a professional network of connections, it is remarkably successful. As a stage for self-projection, it has succeeded in drawing out even the more inhibited and reticent. It is a non-punitive space where anyone with a gig can have a go, flaunt, and hope to get attention, a comment, a call, an invite, an order, a cheque… It is a free parking space for one’s profile and nourishes the hope that the Universe will shed its kindly light on it from time to time for people to take note and reach out.

It is an excellent place to put a mask on and strut around post to post, drop a comment here, a word of appreciation there. It is easy to establish faux familiarity with strangers—congratulations on becoming Chair of MS, Satya (Nadella)!—or claim some intellectual heft by posting a Harari article or quote, play safe but solid with a Drucker line or an Adam Smith quote about the free market and the ‘invisible hand’ and very indulgently patronise a public figure or senior business leader with encouraging words. You are forgiven if your vanity soars and your eminence deign to comment on some hapless soul’s post—commenting for visibility.

If you seek a more colourful profile, you would, of course, post something related to the arts and theatre, and to burnish your progressive credentials, you maybe throw in a word of support of conservation, or all things LGBTQ. It is a space for connections increasingly without shared context, where the game of besting the next one on number of ‘connections’ is a thing,

If you want to be the oddball, the untouchable, the quaint, rude intruder/gate-crasher into this milling assembly of self-promoting, aspiring, business-focused, zealously improvement-driven and homo economicus-worshipping ‘professionals’, bring up politics, poverty, inequity, human rights, race, caste, religion, sexuality, and spoilers like these. You will discover the bubble that LinkedIn perpetuates. 

However, as a marketplace for ideas, its record is more middling—for ideas to have purchase beyond an uncritical fan club, there needs to be more robust exchange, refutation/challenge, and diversity of perspectives. In this respect, LinkedIn, intended or otherwise, is more like an upmarket lounge bar, where acquaintances, with the swag that comes with reputation, settle into familiar grooves and safe, sanitised, feel-good banter of mutual encouragement and staying clear of energetic confrontation, while a host of others are part of the undifferentiated background cacophony.

It has become a space where ‘what to, how to’ advice farmed from experience, current bestsellers or classic texts, is interspersed with sweet, syrupy Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul variety of stories with a heart. There is now a ‘LinkedIn length’ for your posts that you may want to pay heed to—keep it short and snappy. Who has the time for longer, nuanced, layered text? Always try and end with one of these two lines: What do you think? Or, for the sake of variation: ‘How do you feel?’ With this, you have done your bit to invite participation and engagement.

You are allowed to be definitive, even about the future, if you are doing a LinkedIn ‘live’. People will love your ‘insight’ and ‘conviction’ and soon direct questions to channel your wisdom. You will then respond sagely even if you know that some of the questions are infantile. Remember to always preface what you will say with ‘That is a great question’.

If you are a big honcho, your acquaintances and junior colleagues will enthusiastically vote with their ‘likes’. Much praise through comment will come from the followership. No worries. You must acknowledge these, and wherever possible, add a line or two to cement the mutual bonds of admiration. Everyone is happy.

If you are struggling or just a shooting star hoping for some play and gravity in the LinkedIn universe, you may have to learn a few tricks like tagging Barack, Bezos or some other ‘biggy’ having thousands of connections. There are other tools and tricks, but we don’t want to put the social media consultants out of business, do we? 

Sharing a poster with a quote from an army general in some century BC, the Dalai Lama, the Upanishads, and the epics do well. Confucius and Lao Tzu are safe bets and turn in good hits. Chanakya may be a surprise hit. It is okay to occasionally quote a song or a band. John Lennon is still cool. Iacocca and Jack Welch are out—you will write yourself into obsolescence that very instant you take their names. Also, it is not okay to put out trite stuff like ‘Fortune favours the brave’. So, if you play this correctly, you will have added great many profile views and a few connections too. Watch out for the bitcoin connections though. Right now, they feel like from another world.

LinkedIn is a paradise for the aspiring. Many do make profitable connections, find jobs, partners, and let themselves, their products and businesses be better known. Like all things in life, in LinkedIn too there is drama and irony, the rewarding and the ridiculous.

You may not have a passport, a driving license, a social security number, a PAN or Aadhaar, but it is now well understood that you need a LinkedIn profile.

Image by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash.