I am a big fan of LinkedIn. Since I joined the platform 12.5 years ago, it has proved to be an incredible source of connections and information, as well as a great platform to publish my ideas. As a matter of fact, I like the platform so much, that I took a premium subscription a couple of years ago.
In order to celebrate this jubilee, I decided to publish my personal wishlist with features I wished LinkedIn would implement. I wish LinkedIn would enable me to:
- Distinguish between original and curated content
- Eliminate repetitive posts
- De-select feed based on keywords
Distinguish between original and curated content
Twitter offers a great feature that enables users to turn off retweets from people they are following on a follower-by-follower basis. I hope LinkedIn will also enable users in the future to choose if they only want to see original content, or also ‘curated content’, from their LinkedIn connections.
My problem is that curated content ‘clogs’ my feed. I see the same posts (e.g. from daily alerts from the Harvard Business Review) over and over again, each time with a different comment. Whether producing curated content is an effective ‘personal branding’ strategy or not, is another issue, however, it would be great if LinkedIn users would have the possibility to decide on a connection-by-connection basis if they want to see curated content.
Eliminate repetitive posts
Several times a week I see the same black & white picture of Steve Jobs, telling me that ‘It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do, we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.’ Apart from the fact that I find this expression out of character with Steve Jobs, there does not seem to be an effective way to switch these kind of repetitive posts off (I hit the ‘Hide this post – I don’t want to see this post in my post’ option tens of times – to no avail).
De-select feed based on keywords
Given the large number of connections I have on LinkedIn, I receive a huge feed every day. For this reason, I would welcome the possibility to eliminate posts about topics I am not interested in. This would increase my chances of reading those posts that I am interested in. It would be great if LinkedIn would enable users to optimize their feed by hiding posts with certain text strings. For instance, by entering text strings like ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘AI’, ‘machine learning’, etc., users who are not interested in artificial intelligence, could immediately improve the quality of their feed.
Anything else?
One of the reasons I like LinkedIn, is because it is a ‘professional network’. Although it is difficult to define exactly what ‘professional’ means, there are a number of posts which, in my opinion, belong more on Facebook type of platforms than on LinkedIn. Although I am a dog owner myself, videos of puppies are a case in point. The same is for political comments, for which I find Twitter a more appropriate outlet.
Looking at the comments of many fellow LinkedIn users, it looks like I am not the only one. Perhaps LinkedIn could provide a feature that would enable members to classify posts with labels like ‘social’ or ‘political’, and give users to opportunity to deselect posts marked with these labels from their feed.
All in all, LinkedIn was my first social network, and still is my favorite one to day. Perhaps I just need to remember on jubilee’s like this that ‘A beautiful thing is never perfect…’.
Dirk Verburg 