20 Years of LinkedIn: Success Due to a Good Balance Between Personal and Professional

When LinkedIn, a new business platform, was launched in 2003, few bet on its success. Moreover, it was predicted to face complete failure because, unlike other ‘more personal’ social networks that were emerging at the time, while the young, ambitious Zuckerberg was just stepping onto the scene, LinkedIn targeted the professional lives of its users, which sounded, to put it mildly, boring.

Instead of succumbing to the influence of skeptics, the new social platform decided to prove them wrong. Very quickly, the prevailing view became that opening a profile on LinkedIn was a given, and that anyone who did not have one and participated in the job market was almost eccentric. Although the platform could not escape recent turbulence in the tech market and also announced layoffs, its effectiveness and success, especially during and after the pandemic, are undisputed.

Every day, four and a half thousand job ads are posted on it, and every minute, eight employments are realized. Its revenues exceeded $14 billion last year, which is four times more than in 2016, when the platform was acquired by the giant Microsoft. LinkedIn is celebrating its full twenty years of operation this year, and today no one bets on its failure.

Early Days

As reported by the media platform Conversation, LinkedIn is the ‘invention’ of American entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, who previously worked on developing early social platforms for Apple and launched his own in 1997. Hoffman’s SocialNet was conceived as a platform for connecting business people and kindred spirits, but in the early days of networking, it failed to gather a critical mass of users. Hoffman briefly gave up on his dream and took a job at PayPal as a senior manager. At that time, eBay acquired PayPal, allowing Hoffman to earn a nice sum of money, sufficient to launch LinkedIn with former colleagues from SocialNet.

At that time, innovators from Silicon Valley began to realize the importance of connecting users, and shortly after Hoffman’s platform, MySpace and Facebook emerged. However, these platforms focused on the private lives of users, while LinkedIn was exclusively focused on their professional side.

Initially, it was possible to share resumes on the platform, and later innovations such as uploading contact lists, job listings, and even the option to open public profiles were added. In the late 2000s, LinkedIn became a global brand: in 2008, it opened its first office in the United Kingdom and then introduced versions in Spanish and French. As the platform outgrew the confines of the American business market and became a ‘real’ business, the management brought in Jeff Weiner, then a director at Yahoo, as CEO in 2009.

The new management team was responsible for the commercial expansion of the platform, as the option to sell advertising space and packages was soon introduced to attract potential talent. LinkedIn went public in 2011, and its estimated value of nine billion dollars helped finance acquisitions through which it gradually introduced new features such as publishing links (articles) in 2015 and videos in 2017.

Thoughtful Growth

In 2016, the tech giant Microsoft became interested in LinkedIn, acquiring it for $26 billion. Hoffman joined Microsoft’s management, while Weiner retained his position as CEO of the network. This stable, thoughtful growth is responsible for LinkedIn’s status as one of the largest social networks, specifically ranking seventh – behind Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok. Two years ago, it recorded 824 million users from as many as 200 countries, of which 49 million (six percent) premium subscribers who pay at least $29.99 per month for the service. It also managed to expand and rejuvenate its user base, with the majority (59 percent) of users now in the age group of 25 to 34 years, 20 percent between 18 and 24 years, and 18 percent from 35 to 54 years.

While many businesses struggled to make ends meet during the pandemic, the platform grew steadily: engagement increased by 43 percent, and the content sharing rate by 30 percent. As Conversation writes, it benefited from the change in how users network. Given that time and space constraints disappeared during the pandemic, and work was reduced to Zoom meetings, users more frequently connected with their occasional contacts, people they would ‘meet’ on platforms rather than in person.

A Major Transformation

Moreover, the pandemic changed the way a large number of users think about work, reshuffled their life priorities and encouraged them to explore other options, with LinkedIn being the ideal channel for exploring new jobs and exchanging experiences. In other words, the platform played a key role in the trend of ‘the great resignation.’ Its drivers were millennials who, after experiencing the 2008 recession and then the new crisis during the pandemic, questioned the quality of their work lives and life in general. They began to yearn for change. The content they posted dealt with topics that were previously not possible to see on strictly business networks, and they encouraged and inspired each other, thus gathering a large number of likes and comments.

Due to the fact that so many people were connected, the platform became a major catalyst for change, as well as a key solution for employers who had to take action to retain employees. Thanks to these users, LinkedIn transformed from a platform offering job ads into a fighter for workers’ rights and changes, and soon a new category of influencers emerged – work influencers. Brands realized that posts from employees and business people could represent them better, more qualitatively, and authentically, so they began to engage individuals as influencers.

Instead of articles about professional milestones and triumphs, these influencers spoke more openly and honestly about everyday work, from which, of course, the company they work for also benefits. Additionally, discussions about salaries, conditions, experiences, needs, and opportunities became more open, making the business side of life much more humane, and LinkedIn a platform that successfully balances between corporate and personal. This has become crucial for its growth and the image it holds in the eyes of users twenty years after it first saw the light of day.