Product Enhancement Series: LinkedIn
By: Prashant Jain
Tags: Networking, Ideas, LinkedIn, Product

Interaction with each human being is precious as it is a way for the Universe to know itself!

How often do you come across a profile on LinkedIn and have this urge to meet the person in real-life, not only to garner a stronger network but also to know more about the person and learn from their life? Any social networking platform we have today focuses on building virtual relationships with people we may never meet, spending the time that can be better invested in some other activity, and reading the stories we seldom care about!

Having said that, we do have all the right platforms which with a little tweaking hold the potential to become the powerhouse of constructive networking, thereby strengthening the much required human-human connections facilitated by rapidly advancing human-computer interactions. In this article, I discuss how we can introduce one such feature into the LinkedIn ecosystem that would transcend networking beyond the realm of ‘Business Connections’ and would improve user satisfaction to keep them salubriously vested in the business networking platform.

There are a lot of different reasons why people use LinkedIn or are there!?

N for Networking!

LinkedIn has a large professional network with nearly 660+ million users in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Even if we remove the 10% of users who are either dormant or have multiple profiles on the platform, we are still left with roughly 600 million users who could be Professionals looking for jobs or career development opportunities, Recruiters who could be looking for new candidates, Lifelong Learners who are there for LinkedIn Learning, Salespeople who could be looking for new contacts, Influencers who are committed to sharing the best practices, or even Stealth-mode Scrollers who want to stay updated with what is happening in their network. All categories have one thing in common that they seek from this platform — meaningful networking!

Conventional Networking

In an age, before the internet could barely catch up with the ubiquitous and blazingly high-speed vehicles, people used to leave their apartments and interact with humanity. Considering how long the human race has been meeting with each other in an offline setting, there must be some merit to it! Turns out, this conventional networking style increases self-esteem and promotes a feeling of acceptance. As explained by Dr. Seppala of Stanford University, social connectedness generates a positive feedback loop of social, emotional and physical well-being.

There are multiple enhancements that LinkedIn can do to take its offerings to the next level to foster a stronger connected network. In this article, I am focusing on the most effective one — conventional Face to Face style networking and how LinkedIn can effortlessly introduce it into their platform for seamlessly connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful.

But why do we need this now? We are progressively being defined by our digital persona that is void of our feelings, our background stories, our struggles, and most importantly our journey. We need to think about why increasingly more people are gradually regressing to conventional mediums like interactive video sharing and using apps or app features such as TikTok, Instagram Stories, Whatsapp Stories, Facebook Stories, etc.! Sure they can reach a bigger audience but is that the goal?

The goal is to express oneself in a setting that is as close to the natural setting as possible, only then one feels heard and appreciated!

LinkedIn Face2Face

The information that users provide in the Headline or the About section of their LinkedIn profile page is instrumental in capturing their interests and creating a user persona by extracting the right keywords that aptly describe the user. Empowering users to edit these keywords will add to an enhanced user experience as users will feel in control of at least one social media platform they are a part of, unlike other platforms where data autonomy and privacy is still a huge concern.

Additionally, facilitating the users to periodically provide certain time-slots in their schedule when they would be available to engage with their LinkedIn connections over a face to face chat session or some other mutually agreed activity will not only fulfill the user’s desire to build stronger connections with their virtual network but will also provide them a real platform to share their stories.

Allowing users to mention whether they want to be matched randomly with someone in their network (or user-defined circle) or want to get matched algorithmically based on LinkedIn’s proprietary peer to peer network matching algorithm would put users at the center, leading to an incredible human-centered interaction platform.

This will also incentivize the users to keep their LinkedIn profiles updated which will eventually lead to increased user engagement and user satisfaction. Who does not want to meet someone from their professional network in real-life with whom they would have never been able to meet without a proper introduction!?

How this feature can be implemented on LinkedIn is another Medium article! For now, the question remains, which future do YOU want to be a part of: Connected or Isolated?