Why We Love to Hate LinkedIn™

You've all heard someone complain about LinkedIn; maybe you even complain about it yourself. "The platform is full of self-promotion and bragging content -ugh!" But is that really the case? In this episode, I walk through the unique phenomenon of people bashing LinkedIn, why that is, and how you can approach the platform with a different perspective. 

Let's connect:

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/brittablanski

Website: https://brittajuneandco.com/

50 LinkedIn Content Prompts: https://my.brittajuneandco.com/50contentideas

Studies Mentioned Episode:

PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908369116

Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/negativity-biases-and-political-ideology-a-comparative-test-across-17-countries/F80A700B09BE107D15C51A3301C495E7

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8554093/

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to the LinkedIn Lounge Podcast, a space where we dive deep into questions surrounding culture, community, employee engagement, employee experience, and what it looks like to help be an active voice to improve our workplaces. LinkedIn is an amazing place of connection and opportunity, so when you're willing to dive into that space and be a little bit vulnerable and lean into your authentic, genuine side when it comes to relationship building, you'll be surprised at what you find. So grab those earbuds, find a quiet space, and enjoy this conversation. Um, although a lot of it, which you will see, has to do with your mindset and perspective. But mostly it's just this phenomenon that I have continued to see since I got into the LinkedIn space about six, seven years ago. And it hasn't really changed. And so it's just really interesting to me. And in the last couple months, actually, it has come up multiple times. Um, like the first thing that someone says to me when I say with LinkedIn is related to this phenomenon. And so just always having to deal with the same question, not that I don't mind answering the question at all, I really I think it's a really great conversation starter, but it really it I'm like, okay, this needs to be addressed because it keeps coming up. So what on earth am I talking about? I know that was a really long introduction and I still haven't even said what it is. This is what I have been mulling over for quite some time is the unique negative bias towards LinkedIn. So recently in a couple conversations, when people hear that I'm a LinkedIn coach, a LinkedIn consultant, I help people write their content for LinkedIn, for their LinkedIn profiles or company pages, one of the first things they've said is, well, how do you manage all the self-promotion and bragging content on the platform? And it's just really unique to me. I it's uh strikes me as fascinating that people consider the content on LinkedIn to be self-promotional, self-centered, and quote unquote bragging. And the reason I find this interesting is because all social media uh shares only a small sliver of what's happening in life and in business. Most people are not showing up on social media and posting the worst part of their day, the worst thing that happened, or sharing all their failures. When they share their failures, usually it's in retrospect. Like this is what I'm going through, this is what happened. And oftentimes when people do share a little bit more of the vulnerable side, they get called out for being fake, which is just ironic in itself, that when someone publishes a picture of their beautiful family, their beautiful family vacation, their new home that they just purchased, they just had a baby, they just got married, they just got whatever, like all these really wonderful, really amazing, nice life milestones that we we love to celebrate, right? Like we're there's nothing negative inherently about those really cool, exciting aspects of that happen in daily life. But we're not like, oh, they're faking it. You know, they're faking their new home, oh, they're faking their, you know, their latest um Halloween decor that they just got, or they're they're faking the fact that they stopped at Starbucks or whatever it might be, right? Like we see all these things happening all the same, like all the time on social media, on Instagram, on Facebook, or whatever the the platform is. And when it's positive, we don't say, oh, they're faking it. But when it's negative, we're like, oh, they're just sharing that for attention. Well, it's like, well, isn't that why isn't that why you shared also the you know the announcement of your vacation or your trip, your I don't know, your trip to the gym. It's like those are all things that inherently we want people to celebrate with us. And we don't say, oh, this is so self-promotional, like promotional. I can't believe you know, Sarah posted another picture of that book that she's reading. It's like, yeah, cool. You're like, oh, cool, Sarah's reading that book, maybe I'll go check it out. Like, I have read so many books because someone else has mentioned it on Instagram, and there's a lot of them that I have really thoroughly enjoyed, and we even have read in our book club. So there are really positive aspects of sharing, you know, parts of your daily life and the positive things in your life and letting us enter into your story and live quote unquote live life through you vicariously through the internet. So I just find it really interesting when people are like, oh, well, on LinkedIn, like you're talking about your job promotion on like a professional networking website. Gosh, that's so self-promotional. How could you possibly be talking about your career moves that you're making? It's like, well, where else would you talk about these things, right? Like LinkedIn is an ongoing live networking event slash portfolio slash resume. It's a living resume, right? That's where you talk about your work experience. And if you ironically, I would say that even if you shared that promotion on Instagram, you probably would not get the same reaction. People wouldn't be like, oh gosh, she's bragging about her job promotion on Instagram. Like if you posted that exact same post on Facebook, your community of people that you have added friends over the years would probably celebrate with you and like it and say, congratulations and not say that you were bragging, right? So why is it that when it comes to LinkedIn, we it has this negative bias? So I would just want to, I mean, that's just a little bit of some recent con conversations that I've people have asked me directly, but it's just it's really funny. Like I when I open up threads or I open up Reddit or even um there's quite a few memes circling around on X and on Instagram too about LinkedIn, just kind of like mocking it, making fun of it. And we don't really do that, we don't we don't mock the other social media platforms. And so some Reddit quotes, just to give you a sense, because maybe you're not familiar with this, but also I'm sure you've felt this because I'll even as someone who works on LinkedIn, there's times when I've also read content and I'm like, oh yeah, well, that's not so nice, right? Not in the sense that I don't like what they're sharing, but it's it, you know, like, oh, are they really self-promoting? So that feeling is common, okay. So if I'm sure you've experienced that feeling as well. But if you're not, if you're not familiar with it, um these are what these are just some quotes that I've extracted from Reddit. Uh someone said LinkedIn is the perfect example of toxic Whoa, that was hard to say. Let me start again. LinkedIn is the perfect example of toxic positivity. Uh I refuse to believe anyone can love their employer and their job that much and be so excited and happy about how amazing their career is every day. It just can't be real. Someone else said, Wild how it went from just uploading your resume to people writing novels about how their coffee order taught them leadership skills. Um, someone has said, I mean, this has been said before, it's the Tinder for work. Um, someone says, I call it the no-fun Facebook. Uh it's just a place where very pretentious people can sniff their own farts. And that one made me laugh. And um here someone else said, it's like the whole site forgot that professional credibility, what professional credibility even means. I'm not close to leaving, but it is unfortunately what HR and Talent Acquisition are using to confirm you are a real human. So those are just a couple quotes, and there's so many more. You can, you know, if you go on Reddit yourself, you can go and read through all the things that people say, just bashing LinkedIn. So, um, on this uh on this you know funny response to LinkedIn, I actually went and did a little bit of research. And I think a good place to start is just a basic understanding of how we compare ourselves to other people, and this isn't new, right? We've been comparing ourselves since probably the beginning of time, but Leon Festinger is a psychologist who in 1954 is the one who came up with the name of the social comparison theory. And I'm just reading this, okay, so these aren't my own words. But it states that humans have an innate drive to evaluate their own opinions and abilities. And when objective physical benchmarks are missing, people evaluate themselves by comparing their personal traits, their status, and their performance against others. And so this breaks down into three different categories, very largely, broadly speaking. So either upward comparison, so you compare yourself to someone who's better off or more skilled than you. This can inspire someone to become motivated and want to work on self-improvement, but it can also very often cause feelings of inferiority or envy. Then you have downward comparison, comparing yourself to someone who is worse off or less capable. And this often helps us uh protect our self-esteem and make us feel better about ourselves, but it can also lead us to complacency. And then you have lateral peer comparison, so comparing yourself to people who are similar to you, and this usually provides validation and also helps you feel like you belong. And with social media in general, we have a lot of lateral peer comparison, um, just because of the algorithm and also maybe based on your own social habits of who you end up meeting in person and then end up connecting with online, or also the fact that you know, you really we're always just trying to look for confirmation of what we already know and what we already believe to be true, and so we end up following people who have similar interests to us or who things, you know, I'm interested in this, and they're speaking on that topic, so I'm gonna follow them. Most likely they're probably with the same generation as yourself. Um, and so that just naturally is gonna tend to be your peers, and then the way that the algorithm works is giving you more of what it thinks that you want, right? It's constantly studying all your behavior across all your apps on your phone and your computer and everything that you're doing, and so it's just it's feeding you more of what it what you want, which is inherently going to be peer-based. But this ultimately creates a distorted reality, so it's very one-sided, and it almost always forces a continuous upward social comparison. Uh, and so what you're seeing is you're con like you have your real life that you're living every single day, right? And you're not filming every single thing. And like we said before, you're not you're really not sharing the negative bad things, right? Uh, you're not sharing the arguments or the temper tantrums or you know, the things that you forgot at the grocery store and all and all these things, right? Um people are sharing the highlights of their life, they're sharing very curated, specific whether they're aware of it or not, right? How conscious they are, what they're putting out. It's very curated, very specific. Um, and so you're comparing a very small part of someone's, you know, best part of their life with your very messy, unfiltered, everyday life that's not polished, um, it's not edited, it's not filtered. And so this really enhances the feeling of I'm inadequate, or maybe feelings of envy, and then just generally feeling kind of bad about yourself. Um, and and there's that's a whole discussion in itself, which I'm not gonna go down necessarily that route of the negative effects of spending so much time on social media and comparison. But I do want to highlight something that's also really unique is apart from one spending time scrolling through other people's best moments of their lives and comparing it to your everyday daily life, thinking that well, my life is boring, even though it's not, your life isn't boring. Um what performs well in terms of media is also quote unquote negative. There are multiple studies that have been conducted and that show as people we prefer to read negative headlines, negative content, and also share and click more on negative content. So, as that one Reddit reader or one Reddit commenter had said LinkedIn is just toxic positivity. I personally find that really interesting that in one of the few platforms where neg quote unquote negative content, negative headlines doesn't trend is the place then that we call it toxic positivity because it's like you're inherently looking for the negative and it's almost like the story that you're already telling yourself, and so when you're not seeing like the scary, the world is ending, every this is it, everything is horrible and terrible, and whatever doom narrative is out there that you're following. It's you're looking for that. And so when you see it, it's like your your brain is like, okay, this is what I know, this is safe and this is comfortable. And then when you head into another space like LinkedIn, where people are talking about the work that they're doing, the clients that they're getting, the progress that they're making, you know, the rewards that they're winning, it's like, oh, whoa, like no, this is so, like, this is so bragging. Like, I can't believe people are talking about this, right? So it's almost this paradox of you know what what we want, like what you inherently want as a person, right, to grow and be successful and you know, be continually moving forward in your life. I think it's safe to say that most people would aspire to that. It might be way more difficult, you know, other people have different experiences and chase after those um ideas of how they define success differently in different ways, okay? But we we don't want to be stuck in this place of the world is ending, everything is horrible and terrible, like there's no solution, there's no outcome. But yet that's what we're subconsciously internally seeking when it comes to opening up so the news and social media. So I want to read through these studies that were done. Again, I'm just reading through this, okay? Um, they're not my studies. I'm not re-paraphrasing it just for the sake of time and being able to share it correctly and well with you. I just think this is really fascinating on how we as humans perhaps this negative bias when it comes to the news and media. So this first study was published in 2019 in PNAS, the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And it was a cross-cultural study uh conducted in 17 different countries with just over a thousand participants. And uh the participants had to wear skin conductance and heart rate sensors while watching BBC World news clips. And the researchers found the average person is more physiologically activated by negative content than by positive content, with participants exhibiting higher heart rate variability and skin conductance during negative stories than positive ones. The study also reports broadly cross-cultural negativity bias and responsiveness to video news content while also showing a high degree of individual level variation. Another study, which was published in March of 2023 in the publication Nature, titled Negativity Drives Online News Consumption, goes and just highlights how we click on negative headlines much more. And I'm just going to read this from their abstract of the article. It says the newsroom phrase, if it bleeds, it leads, was coined to reflect the intuition among journalists that stories about crime, bloodshed, and tragedy sell more newspapers than stories about good news. However, a large portion of news readership now occurs online. The motivation to sell papers transformed into a motivation to keep readers clicking on news articles. In the United States, 89% of adults get at least some of their news online, and reliance of the internet as a news source is increasing. Even so, most users spend less than five minutes per month on all of the top 25 news sites put together. Hence, online media is forced to compete for extremely limited source of readers' attention. In this study, they analyzed the effect of negative words on news consumption using a massive online data set of viral news stories from Upworthy.com. The tendency for individuals to attend to negative news reflects something foundational about the human cognition, that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli across many domains. Attentional biases towards negative stimuli begin in infancy and persist into adulthood as a fast and automatic response. Furthermore, negative information may be more sticky, quote unquote, in our brains. People weigh negative information more heavily than positive information when learning about themselves, learning about others, and making decisions. This may be due to negative information automatically activating threat responses. Knowing about possible negative outcomes allow for planning and avoidance of potentially harmful and painful experiences. Previous work has explored the role of negativity in driving online behavior. In particular, negative language and online content has been linked to user engagement, that is, sharing activities. As such, negativity embedded in online content explains the spread, the speed and virality of online diffusion dynamics. For example, response time, branching of online cascades. Further, online stories from social media perceived as negative garner more reactions. Negativity in news increases physiological activations, and negative news is more likely to be remembered by users than one more study to talk about this negativity bias. And then I want to talk specifically about LinkedIn, because there's a study that was done in particular looking at websites that talk about careers and professional opportunities. So this third and last study I want to share with you is from 2014 done at McGill University in Canada by Trussler and Siroca. So participants were invited into the lab under the premise of a quote-unquote eye tracking study, and they were asked to select political news stories to read while a camera recorded their eye movement. They were told that the important thing was that they just read the whole article of whatever it was that they chose to read. It didn't matter what they chose, though, just as long as they completed reading it. Afterward, even though some people said they wanted more good news, the eye tracking data showed they were actually more interested in bad news, leading the authors to conclude that regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content. The more politically engaged a participant was, the more likely they were to select bad news. So we don't really need to discover more research and more studies that have been done, because even I would argue just by paying more attention to our own habits of what we consume online, we can tell that we do have a negative bias of attraction to what we consume, and which means we just really need to be careful, right, of how we spend our time and what we are, what we're reading and watching and listening to. But then on the flip side, right, the whole reason why I want to be talking about this is why then are we, why do we get this like ugh ick cringe feeling when we're reading positive content on LinkedIn, and particular when it's about success, when it's about professional career success, all of a sudden we get the ick and we don't like it anymore, apart from the general, you know, our our ne default. Mode of wanting to consume the negative, it's like we go hard the other direction when we read someone else being successful. So part of that, if we go back to our first psychologist that I mentioned, Leon Festinger, part of that's probably because we're now forced into an upward comparison where we're seeing someone who's better than us, and we now feel like that's a threat, or we feel like we're inadequate. We don't feel like we're good enough. Now we're experiencing envy. And so the thoughts just start to spiral, and so our defense neck neck mechanism would be just to kind of speak poorly on that, right? Try to make ourselves feel better by speaking down to someone else's success. Interestingly, though, in 2021, there was a Japanese study that came out that was looking particularly how people responded when reading about, hearing about, talking about their career and other people's career in person versus online, virtually online. So this study was done by Fukubayashi and Fuji, and it was published in The Frontiers in Psychology, titled Social Comparison on Social Media Increases Career Frustration, a focus on mitigating effective companionship. And really they were just measuring, um, back to our psychologist from the beginning, the upward comparison, downward comparison, and peer comparison. And over the seven-day study, they discovered that fascinatingly, in-person interactions, discussing career left people actually feeling more motivated, and virtual online interactions and reading about other people's careers left them actually feeling worse. And so the outcome of this was essentially you can mitigate those feelings of frustration in your career by talking to other people, getting out and having those conversations and networking live and spending less time on social media. So I thought this was in particular was unique because it was looking specifically how you feel about your career and how you compare, and how even when reading about other people's career, these participants admitted to feeling a sense of superiority when they were also read maybe having like reading about a downward comparison. So in terms of success, it seems like when it comes to career-related content, there is a much stronger protective mechanism that kicks into place that makes us react stronger compared to reading other content. Now, it's not that I necessarily have an answer to this information. I'm sharing it with you really to just be mindful. One that given this competitive nature that's going to come just because of the way that we are created and the way that our brains function and work, that not the you're going to feel like you're exposing yourself when you talk about your career visibly and publicly online because it can become all of a sudden a threat. And that might be why you tell yourself that no one else wants to hear this or it's not good enough because you inherently already like subconsciously know that people are comparing themselves to you. And maybe you're subconsciously thinking that because you're also at the same time comparing yourself to other people's success, and because you see all these quote unquote bragging self-promotional posts, you feel like, well, I'm not up to par. Uh, I'm not where they're at yet, or I'll never be there, and so I don't want to put myself out there because I'm just opening myself up for comparison and criticism. And so I would counter that by saying, Well, first of all, most people actually aren't thinking about you as much as you think they are, and also other people can still learn from you when you share your experience. And so there's certainly a time and a place to highlight awards and wins that you've had at work or in your business. There's also a way that you can talk about it that's not that doesn't sound so self-promotional and doesn't sound like it's bragging. You can certainly talk about how you got to where you are today and how you would not say not that you're giving like a mentorship post, but how you would mentor someone who's a couple steps behind you. Because you didn't, I'm sure you didn't just get there by yourself, right? Like you had people surrounding you, supporting you. You probably had to have some moments of failure and setbacks and having to readjust and realign and figure out, okay, this didn't work, so now it is gonna work. And the whole you know, everything is a life learning experience, and you can be open to sharing that with other people if you're willing to get a little bit vulnerable vulnerable. I think the other thing is too, is just knowing that work can feel I don't want to say dangerous isn't the right word, but maybe we feel a little bit more insecure about work because we know that it might not be forever. You know, there's an unstable job market, I might lose my job. There's a lot of fears that could could surround that come can surround your work, and also a deep rooted sense of identity is often placed with our job title as well. Not to get into whether or not that's right or wrong or what that means for you as a person, but because we connect it with our identity, we might also feel more exposed. One, right, we're being we know that people are comparing because I I compare, and so therefore other people are gonna compare themselves against me, and I don't that makes me feel vulnerable. And then two, maybe you feel exposed. I feel exposed because my job isn't necessarily guaranteed. It's not a forever. I don't know how long I'll have it, and I don't know what that would mean for me if I lose this role, right? What if I get laid off? What if I get fired? What if the business closes and shuts down or whatever, you know, whatever could happen in this very um unpredictable world right now? And so that exposure can also make us feel more timid and fearful to show up, and maybe even more uh in a protective stance when we read other people's success stories online because we just don't have a belief that that could also be for us and that could happen for us. So ultimately, I guess what I want to say is that anyone who says that LinkedIn is full of this toxic positivity, bragging, spammy content that's you know fake and self-promotional is probably more a reflection of how they're feeling inside about their own success story and journey so far up to this point, more than it is about the actual type of content that is being shared on LinkedIn. Because we also know there's so much content out there. I've had so many people tell me they've learned more reading on LinkedIn and following great content creators who are given really high value than they've learned in some courses, and that if you get plugged in and you get connected, it is an incredible space to be in, to learn from each other, to support one another, put people in contact, collaborate. And that has nothing to do with self-promotion. It just has to do being confident in who you are and how you can help and serve other people from a genuine place of I know that I have something to offer. That doesn't mean I'm bragging, but I have gifts, skills, and talents that I can use to benefit the people around me. And so I want to be at your service, I want to help those people, and the only way that they could possibly know about it is if I talk about it. So whether I get out there in person and have those conversations and talk about my career, or if I'm sharing it online, so you have two different places where people can validate this, right? Like I met you in person, now I want to go follow and stay up to date with what you have going on on LinkedIn, I want to see what else you put out, or maybe I meet you on LinkedIn and now I want to have a chance to be able to network with you in person. Whatever the circumstance might be, it's not a podium to just stand out there and yell at everyone how amazing you are and how you're the best, and how everyone should come follow you. It's really a place to say, I've got something of value here, let's connect, let's follow each other, let's see how we can support one another. And we're all in this really crazy, messy world that's constantly changing, and there's nothing better than being able to support one another. So I hope this encourages you to view LinkedIn differently. Uh, stop comparing it to the way that you compare other social media platforms, give it a little more grace, be a little more gracious with yourself, love yourself and your experience and journey and career success so far. Don't see other people as a threat to what you can do, but be motivated by their success and get out there, share online, and keep networking, keep keeping it real, and be willing to be a little vulnerable because we learn best when we learn from one another. And if you're feeling inspired to share something on LinkedIn and you don't know where to start, I have 50 content prompts for you down in the show notes here that you can download for free and it walks you through some of the mindset blocks that hold you back, that keep you back from sharing, a different way that you can maybe flip the script and view it differently, and then broke it into different categories. 50 prompts for you to grab from, share one, and share it online. And if you do that, I'd love for you to drop me a message on LinkedIn, just ping me, say, hey, I took your guide, and this is one of my first posts, or I posted again, or I needed some encouragement, I needed some inspiration, so here I am, and I'd love to be able to support you on your journey sharing on LinkedIn.