boring but useful – how linked in does its work

Linked in is the least sexy social media platform ever, but it has 750m + members which is more than one in ten people on the planet and in developed countries, especially those for whom English is the lingua franca, it is more likely that if you’re in work, you’re on linked in- than not.

And people aren’t just “on” linked in, a good number of us actually use it as a newsfeed and as a place to catch up with everything from gossip to thought leadership – in our chose sphere.

We chose the information we get by choosing to follow individuals and by joining linked in groups. Most linked in groups aren’t managed with much avidity or conviction but occasionally you get a group that is, and linked in has taken to giving actively managed groups that serve a social purpose a helping hand.

I run a number of groups on linked in including Pension Auto Enrolment and Bryanston Alumni as well as a number of sub-groups that I’m going to wind up. None of these groups gets any help from linked in and they drift along with a little help from me.

But one group – AgeWage and Pension PlayPen has got the thumbs up from Linked in and is not just growing fast, but it attracting a phenomenal number of eyeballs.

Of it’s 11,000+ members, over 6,000 are actively engaging with the group at least once a week and each day I get around 40 posts to moderate of which I publish over half.  These posts regularly get more than 90,000 views a week.

It seems to me that people who are interested in the kind of things I’m interested in (as 96% of this group’s 11037 members are my first degree contacts). So I can see what is interesting my peers on a day to day basis

And I can see the types of people who find the content interesting

I can see what kind of work they do

I can see the employers whose employees are interested in the group’s content

and I can see where they come from

So I know that my group is catering for mainly UK based , financial services people who work for a diverse group of companies and located in the major financial services hubs in the UK.

What is odd, is that all this activity happens without a paywall and this huge amount of time and energy expended by professional people is being hosted by linked in as part of their offering and managed by me as part of mine.

It is odd because I suspect that linked in is increasingly where not just my blogs but the content of hundreds of organisations that are loosely connected with me, AgeWage and Pension PlayPen, finds its readership.

And yet virtually nothing is getting written about this. That is odd.

Why are linked in groups so used but so low profile?

The answer is in the first line of this blog. Linked in is profoundly unsexy, it is not a place people boast about spending time on and it’s a content distribution platform that is well down the list of media favorites below Twitter, Telegraph, Tic-Toc and Facebook.

I suspect too that many consider Linked in as a place people hang out on to find a new job or find a new employee.

But it is so much more than a web-based labour exchange, it is infact an information exchange and the people and groups we follow on linked in are increasingly shaping our thinking.

Since it is a free to use platform, it is diluting the value of pay to view content and eating into their advertising revenues. So it is unsurprising that  traditional sources of content are interested in commenting.

Like many great innovations, Linked In works because it simply does what needs to be done better than anyone else and does it in a most undemonstrative way.

If you are not already linked in to me , please do – or at least follow me. If you are linked in to me, please join AgeWage and Pension Play Pen linked in group using the link or finding it on linked in