How To Flex on LinkedIn (Part 4) - The Superusers

The Financial Times subtly skewers LinkedIn superusers and its comments section steals the show

Comrades: I am humbled to announce that I have been promoted to LinkedIn Superuser!

The Financial Times recently profiled the hustlers known as LinkedIn superusers. They are the most cringeworthy Professional Managerial Class Non Player Characters. LinkedIn is a cesspool of toxic positivity where they get high on their own supply. The superusers lack the self-awareness to realize that the world laughs at their sanctimonious circle-jerking. Here are highlights from the article and brilliant comments section.

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Soon after lawyer Paul Verrico posted a plea on LinkedIn for hand sanitiser for his cancer charity in March 2020, the chief operating officer of a large Hong Kong energy company offered to help. During their discussions, the COO said it was a shame Verrico’s team at law firm Evershed Sutherlands did not operate in Hong Kong. “Links were made and we ended up working on the largest safety consultancy project the team had ever done,” Verrico recalls. “Yin and Yang, almost.”

Give a like to Paul for doing well and doing good! He will teach you how to change your behaviour by staying safe with hand sanitiser. Pronouns means he masked up and took 10 boosters.

The outcome was made possible by Verrico’s large and engaged network on LinkedIn. He has more than 9,000 followers. Verrico is one of the platform’s superusers — professionals that have amassed networks sometimes reaching tens or even hundreds of thousands of people, which they use to build their brand. For these users, LinkedIn is no longer just a recruitment site but a space to publish content relating to their work, to self-promote, share expertise and seek out business opportunities. Many are putting in the hours and effort equivalent to a part-time job to maintain their pages. Some have even recruited advisers to shape their LinkedIn strategies.

Self-promotion is a full time job. There is an inverse correlation between how much someone virtue signals on LinkedIn and the results they achieve. Live look at a LinkedIn strategy advisor holding an ego fluffing workshop:

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The shift reflects LinkedIn’s aim to reach deeper into people’s professional lives and take advantage of the hustle and self-promotion that is now a common feature of many jobs. The platform says 85 per cent of FTSE 100 chief executives now have a presence on LinkedIn, up from 12 per cent in 2023. “LinkedIn is no longer a job search platform, it’s a business networking platform,” says Jasmin Alić. He has more than 300,000 followers, and coaches people on “how to build a brand”, through one-to-one sessions and — of course — his LinkedIn page, Link Up. “Five or ten years ago it used to be, hey we received your CV. Today it’s: we saw your content, can we book a call. It went from seeking out opportunities to opportunities coming to you.”

Jasmin is the Royal Highness of Hustle. He will pump your personal brand for cash. It is an honor to join his inner circle of the biggest creators on planet Earth!

Alić is one of a thriving industry of influencers, consultants and advisers who help LinkedIn users, sometimes for a fee, to grow large and successful followings. It is not for the faint of heart. In a characteristically peppy post, Alić warns users that building a presence takes “mad time and effort”. His advice includes making 50 comments per day on other users’ posts — he suggests targeting peers and bigger influencers — and posting several times a week, while also publishing “ONLY if you have something to say”.

Tongue in cheek savagery by FT. Jay sounds like an AI bot hallucinating on ketamine. You can win with him as long as you put in “mad time and effort” (plus a fee, of course)!

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Dan Roth, editor-in-chief and vice-president at LinkedIn, is a little sceptical of such how-to guides. He advises users to “build trust and a reputation by being authentic and honest”, echoing the language of many experts in how to build followings. Yet in the 14 years he has been at the company he has helped introduce many features for brand building. These have included a “creator mode” that helps with content, algorithmic tweaks that prioritise relevance and expertise in users’ feeds, and more tools for publishing video.

“We are seeing people, over the last couple of years, increasingly use LinkedIn as a way to . . . build their voice,” Roth says. “You’ve got to think about . . . what’s going to get you hired, what’s going to get people to decide they want to work with you. This idea of building your voice is so critical to navigating the working world today, and that is what’s driving all of this.”

LinkedIn is as authentic and honest as a stripper. The more someone posts on LinkedIn, the less I’d want to work with them. Who needs to work when you can build your voice on LinkedIn all day? It’s BS about BS jobs.

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LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2bn, says comments have increased 37 per cent year-on-year, while video creation has doubled. More than five years ago, the company gave users the option to follow — or be followed by — other users. This is different to “connections”, which are capped at 30,000 — an attempt by LinkedIn to encourage users to keep close networks with people they “know personally and professionally”.

“With lots of followers you will have that content visibility . . . it’s one direction,” says Margo Laz, a consultant. “With connections, it’s two-fold communication”. Her agency, Kudos Narratives, mainly collaborates with accounts that make Verrico’s look tiny: she classes 11,000-50,000 as “micro” or “niche” influencer status, 50,000-100,000 “mid tier”.

Followers are peasants unworthy of a direct connection. Sad to see Europe adopt the worst of American hustle culture. You know Margo is an “expert” because she has a LinkedIn certification for growing your business on LinkedIn and giving a women’s TED talk.

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Some users suggest the quest for followers has led to a decline in the quality of posting. Alison Taylor, a business school professor and author, says that after her LinkedIn following passed 15,000, her experience got worse. Where before she had a focused following of colleagues, she began to interact more with people who viewed her as a public figure. This resulted in a “context collapse” that meant she was criticised by people who knew little about her field, while she ended up wading through posts from them.

“There were a lot of people asking why haven’t you commented on this or that — people jumping into comments to boost their own stuff, lots more trolls and ad hominem attacks,” Taylor says. “My feed is now a mess.” She believes the “sweet spot” for followers is 5,000-15,000. A broader audience can result in posts that are less thoughtful and specialist. “I see the urge to dumb down and converge to the medium [so] everyone ends up with bland posting.”

“Context collapse” is when the peasants dare to criticize the elites. Imagine paying $200,000 to go to NYU Business School and seeing your professor post like a teenage girl. She cannot fathom that she is the one missing context and dumbing down our feeds. In her propagandized mind, there are no farm murders in South Africa, banning political parties is good for democracy, and anyone who opposes the cultural enrichment of Germany is a Nazi.

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As always with MSM, the comments are better than the article:

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Harvard is the LinkedIn of universities - we wish them well on today’s commencement:

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For my previous LinkedIn flexes: