​LinkedIn is 20 years old: why it is still an icon

LinkedIn is celebrating its twentieth anniversary and it does so with more than 930 members in more than 200 countries. Impressive numbers, but twenty years is not nothing. LinkedIn is still rock solid and that has several causes.

LinkedIn has little competition

You would think that a company like Microsoft would have long since made a competitor to LinkedIn, but that is not the case. Why not? Because LinkedIn belongs to Microsoft. Not everyone knows that, but Microsoft is really just a social media company, albeit a business social media company. For that reason, LinkedIn naturally has a lot of extra power and can use the infrastructure that Microsoft already has. No doubt there are social media companies that have tried it, but the thing with LinkedIn is: it’s already good as it is. Moreover, people are not very fanatical about it every day (usually), which makes it more interesting for a new player to create a non-business social medium. More than 190 connections are made per second: yes, just try to fight against that.

It’s so useful to keep track of your life

Where you record your life in another social medium through food photos, selfies and the like, LinkedIn is a handy tool to keep track of your life in general. Think about your curriculum vitae. Sometimes you don’t even remember exactly which courses you have taken or which courses you have followed, or how many years you worked at that marketing agency: by taking a look at your LinkedIn you will immediately remember. And to be fair, in many cases it is also something to be proud of, that beautiful career you have already completed.

It has stayed with it

Shoemaker, stick to your reading, that’s what LinkedIn got it right. Founder Reid Hoffman started it in 2003 with the aim of enabling professionals from all over the world to network with each other and thus become more productive. LinkedIn still does that to this day. Even if there are new things, it has sometimes tried to introduce Stories, it checks whether it works. If not, it will say goodbye to it just as quickly as it came. Furthermore, LinkedIn is not that experimental: for example, the network has had roughly the same design for twenty years, with some tweaks here and there. But actually that is very nice, a kind of rock in the surf. With LinkedIn you know exactly what you are getting and the occasional small new item is fine, but nothing too rigorous. The latter is not really possible, because people often use LinkedIn less intensively than other social media, so the adjustment time is longer.

It got a boost and took action during corona

It is very double that corona has also resulted in positive things, because it also resulted in a lot of misery, but LinkedIn has in a sense reaped the benefits. Not so much from the pandemic itself, but from the measures that resulted from it. LinkedIn was visited more than 30 billion times in 2020 and engagement increased 27 percent. The listed company also responded to the pandemic by offering to conduct digital job interviews. After all, many people had to look for other work and if there is a platform that can help with that, it is LinkedIn.

Marcel Molenaar, Country Manager Benelux: “Since 2010, 1.5 million members have been at the basis of these developments in the Netherlands and there are now more than 10 million. I am therefore very curious about what the next twenty years have in store for our platform.” We also. LinkedIn has proven that it cannot easily copy from other social media, so it will have to be original. Does it need new things to last another 20 years, or can it build on that solid foundation that’s already there? We’ll come back to it in 2043.

Laura Jenny

When she’s not tapping, she’s traveling around the wonderful world of entertainment or some cool place in the real world. Mario is the man of her life,…