LinkedIn is the worst of social media. Should I delete my account?

As far as social media housekeeping goes, maintaining your LinkedIn is the equivalent of cleaning the cutlery drawers – but is that reason enough not to?

What is LinkedIn good for, beyond spamming strangers? Do people actually get jobs on there?

LinkedIn is that unlikely contradiction: the social network that’s all business. No one’s up late at night checking out their connections’ connections, or who endorsed who and for what. You log in about once a month, you accept the “invitations to connect” from a handful of strangers, and you log out. And you’re sent, on average, 1.75 emails a day for the privilege.

To use Seinfeld terminology, LinkedIn feels a little like the Bizarro Facebook, where instead of births and engagements people publicise their “microactions” and “thought leadership”. One consultant with a large following described herself as “the Michael Bay of business”. Fleetingly, I wondered: would anyone buy that I was the Michael Bay of journalism?

LinkedIn is that kind of place – “a wasteland of endless management consultants congratulating each other”, to quote one correspondent.

“It’s not a healthy environment,” someone else messaged me. “There’s an excess focus on simulating optimism and excitement, rather than clear-headed discussion on issues. It’s like a giant, living, breathing resume, complete with bad formatting, plasticised optimism and synthetic relationships.

“It’s the worst of social media, combined with the worst of corporate culture, combined with the worst of website design. I hate it, but I have to also pretend to love it for my own work and to communicate with my industry.”

He concluded by asking me not to name him: “I’m actually on the lookout for jobs, and my clients are pretty keen on LinkedIn!”

“I don’t know any companies that don’t use LinkedIn to spam their products or services,” said someone else, who works in the start-up sector.

 

The platform has been attempting to establish itself as a publisher by cultivating “influencers”, a term that, on Instagram, refers to beautiful young women or pets with genetic oddities and, on Twitter, to journalists or comedians who mistake it for work. Ranked among the invite-only network of “LinkedInfluencers” (see what they did there!) are Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Oprah Winfrey and the prime ministers of India, Japan and – as of last month – Australia.

“I have tried to contact the recruiter as I have a bunch of questions … but they haven’t written back,” said the lucky lady, who described the approach as “a tad unnerving”.

Another woman told me she’d been recruited – for romance. “Frequently guys I have never met send me messages like, ‘Hey, I really like your profile picture’. Like, dude, it’s not Tinder – is that the first thing you want to mention on a career networking site?”

 

As with anything, the more you put into LinkedIn, the more you’ll get out of it – but a personalised headline and summary elevates your profile above others. Pay mind, too, to what keywords or skills a recruiter may be searching or and try to prioritise them high up.

At that point, unless you’re actively job-hunting, you can relax. You’ve now posted your resume to a bulletin board; you never know who might see it. Though, if my own “Who’s viewed your profile?” page is anything to go by, it’s disproportionately men you’ve matched with on Tinder.