If you count from the date of launch, LinkedIn turned 20 last week. Or 21, if you’re looking at date of establishment. To celebrate — or entirely coincidentally — it will be firing more than 700 staff from its Chinese operations and shuttering InCareer, the pared-back Chinese version of the site.
It is an interesting move from this, the dependable older sibling of the social media family. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has outlived many a comparable platform (like MySpace, Bebo, Google+ and so on) by being somewhat incomparable, the only such platform that put work first, and proudly so.
Sure, there are other websites that will host your online CV, connect you with potential jobs and open you up to relentless prospecting from “executive search professionals”. Yet LinkedIn somehow took that and the networking part of social networking and carved itself a niche, a foothold, and two decades later it is still going strong.
In fact, the going is very strong. Though it is intentionally dropping staff numbers now, LinkedIn — a Microsoft company — employs about 20,000 people around the world. It has also shown solid growth, increasing revenue quarter on quarter throughout the last year from a mix of advertising and subscriptions.
In terms of users, LinkedIn is approaching 1-billion, citing 930-million members in “200 countries and regions”. Particular areas of user growth include India, where membership is booming. Even the increasingly elusive youth (who have bailed out of other platforms in vast numbers) seem to be showing up for LinkedIn, with the most recent stats showing a 73% increase in students signing up for the portal year on year.
Key to this, I believe, is remaining useful. When big tech is firing, workers will be updating their LinkedIns. Whatever the cause, Linkedin boasts stats like “117 job applications submitted [on the platform] every second” and “61-million people using LinkedIn to search for jobs each week”.
Despite this, it has always suffered from a critical lack of cool. Oh gosh, Microsoft is never going to invite me to another press event after this. But probably because of its focus on professionalism, LinkedIn is left out of the after work drinks invite and avoided in the grocery aisles at weekends. She just feels like a 9-5 friend.
Being spotted with LinkedIn open on your screen at work used to be an acknowledged faux pas, a sign of potential disloyalty. This is changing. First of all, LinkedIn appears to have made a solid effort at shifting from the perception of being a tool for finding work to, sometimes, one of doing work.
Despite my aversion to buzzwords, networking today is not “just” speed-dating for work but something that prompts collaboration, innovation, co-operation and, yes, opportunity. And that’s the bingo card full.
Secondly, it is enjoying a sort of resurgence in business-related content as users adopt the microblogging (updates) and pseudo-blogging (article publishing) functionality. More and more, people tell me they are sharing their work news and insights first on LinkedIn, rather than say Twitter.
Anecdotally, SA’s estimated 11-million members are slower on the uptake of this particular trend. It’s starting though.
So, why then are we seeing LinkedIn restructuring now? Most articles on this news seem to be chalking it up to big tech layoffs. Lord knows, there have been plenty. Some 191,538 employees sent packing in 2023, according to the website layoffs.fyi, the definitive source tracking this these days.
LinkedIn’s statement on the decision mentions “increasingly fierce competition and macroeconomic challenges”. In the regional market, it seems competitors are managing to make more of a dent, or outpacing them entirely.
The Financial Times reports that “Chinese online recruitment platform Boss Zhipin and social networking site Maimai have overtaken LinkedIn in China, where it launched in 2014 and once had tens of millions of regular users”.
Bloomberg’s reporting includes this revealing quote from an internal memo: “We’ll focus our China strategy on assisting companies operating in China to hire, market and train abroad.”
InCareer will be officially mothballed in August, but a small group of LinkedIn China staff will stay on. InCareer was relatively young, having replaced the full functionality LinkedIn in-country about two years ago. It kept the online CV and messaging functionality, and did away with the social feeds and sharing elements.
The landscape of social media is vastly different in China, where many “Western” platforms are officially blocked, and unofficially hard to access. There’s also increasing scrutiny of international operators as relations between China and the US (and its allies) continues to cool.
Chip or semiconductor technology has been the primary frigid battleground, but the ongoing icing out — or pushback — around TikTok can’t have helped. This is surely contributing to what LinkedIn called a “significantly more challenging operating environment” with “greater compliance requirements”.
Big tech, and where it chooses to operate, is becoming an important thread of soft power. LinkedIn is by no means the first to rethink its presence. As I recently wrote, Apple is focusing on competing hubs such as India as it probes the developing world market, and Amazon is switching off its Chinese e-book service shortly.
The debate around why will be multifaceted, and rightly so, but the outcome will be a continuing divide between China and the West, in what we read and what media we consume and now how and where we network professionally.
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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