LinkedInfluencers: Kiwis acing the 'ick' social media platform

David Letele didn’t give much thought to LinkedIn until he started the Buttabean food bank during Covid. It was an extension of the free community fitness classes he was running in south and west Auckland.

He was already flat-out running social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to get donated funds and food, with little to show for it. Adding another platform sounded like hard work, but then a young man said something to him that stuck:

"‘Bro, LinkedIn is like Facebook but for people with money,’ he said," says Letele, a former professional boxer.

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Through a mutual connection on LinkedIn, he was soon talking food donations with Chris Quin, the boss of Foodstuffs North Island, Buttabean’s first major partner.

“Then from there, I just started really utilising LinkedIn as a place where I could highlight what’s going on in our communities.”

“Because a lot of times, people at the top don’t understand what’s happening down the bottom so it’s about highlighting the issues that are happening, what we are seeing first hand.”

Despite some ups and downs, the foodbank is still serving families and Letele’s manoeuvring on LinkedIn is a big part of that.

Yet, the most common description I hear of the LinkedIn ecosystem is “cringe”. It appears to be a closed loop of bragging, congratulating, bragging and congratulating, with the hopes of being headhunted or crowned a LinkedIn thought leader.

Like almost all of LinkedIn’s one billion users, it’s a place where I keep an outdated CV. So, I’m surprised to hear Letele and others I interviewed swear by LinkedIn’s effectiveness for fundraising, career development, personal growth and joyful scrolling.

Julie Clothier viewed LinkedIn as “mysterious” when she was a journalist and producer. Now, it is a cornerstone of her communications strategy for clients of Good Scoop, her non-profit-focused communications agency.

“A lot of people I know find it quite ick because there is a quiet brag factor to everything that goes on LinkedIn and it is about branding, so I understand that.

“But once you get past that and you can harness these eyeballs, it is exciting and it is enticing and a bit addictive.”

Lisa Young, an HR Coach with 50,000 plus LinkedIn followers, still encounters plenty of cringe posts on LinkedIn but she is there for what she says are authentic voices.

“If I’m sitting on the couch scrolling Instagram, I’m seeing girls in bikinis and all these clothes that I should be buying...”

“Whereas on LinkedIn, if I scroll for five minutes, I can learn, I can upskill myself, I can be exposed to things that are probably going to make me feel better rather than feeling like I’m lacking.”

Even though she is in HR, an industry that utilises LinkedIn as a recruiting tool, she only used it to cross-check an applicant's CV. It wasn’t until she was on maternity leave during Covid and developed online HR courses for a side hustle that she looked at LinkedIn with fresh eyes.

At first, she posted as her business, but a business coach advised her to embrace her personal brand (personal brand is very LinkedIn). Her first post as herself talking about the lack of trust people have towards HR professionals went viral, drawing awareness to her courses.

“You're more likely to be seen. You're more likely to be visible, so that was the thing that prompted me like, ‘OK, maybe it's worth giving it a try,'” says Young, calling the site less cluttered than other platforms.

All this talk about LinkedIn inspired me to scroll through my LinkedIn feed for the first time. I read a lovely post about a friend and business leader reflecting on his son’s autism diagnosis. I was warmed to see former journalism colleagues doing well and posting about their various scoops. I read about the history of the New Zealand supermarket business from a retail expert (random but interesting about food prices).

My feed was well populated with sponsored posts from LinkedIn thought leaders, whose profiles were dotted with the rocket emoji (on LinkedIn they mean growth, advancement or the launch of something new). One thought leader post I read told me I needed to make eye contact 70 percent of the time when listening to someone vs 50 percent of the time when I’m doing the talking. How one keeps track of that, I do not know.

It felt nutritious compared to the polarising nature of Facebook, where a post on my community’s Facebook group will generate enough angst to stop me from sleeping. But scrolling LinkedIn did feel like work.

The tech titans that own X (Elon Musk) and Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg) have positioned themselves and their platforms as agitators in the current political climate. LinkedIn, according to the active users I spoke to, has so far avoided much of that polarisation. The platform is owned by Microsoft, which seems to strategically be keeping its head down and doesn’t have a lightning rod as CEO.

“No, it's not [polarising] because it's a business platform and because you are out there as yourself. Unless you are a polarising contentious person in your business, you don't want that to come across on LinkedIn,” said Lynnaire Johnston, an internationally recognised LinkedIn expert based in Dunedin.

“You might be quite contentious on X, but you certainly wouldn't want to be there on LinkedIn, where people who are going to do business with you might see that.”

Research shows that the more anonymous a platform is, such as Reddit, the more vicious users will be whereas authenticity has emerged as LinkedIn’s main currency, according to Dr Phoebe Fletcher, a senior lecturer in digital marketing at Massey University.

“I think that the people that actually master LinkedIn are the people that are either offering really useful and insightful information or they're offering really authentic perspectives.”

Even though some users are using AI to generate their posts, the LinkedIn algorithm and other social media platforms are prioritising human-generated content, says Fletcher.

There are 2.3 million Kiwis who have a LinkedIn profile, which is close to 70 percent of the New Zealanders working age population, but again, many of those won’t be active users. LinkedIn’s largest user demographic is aged between 25 to 34.

Fletcher encourages her marketing students, many of them Gen Z, to engage with LinkedIn so they can give employers a peek at who they are.

“I think the people that are most successful at LinkedIn... are people that understand that companies quite often hire for culture because skills are something that you can teach whereas culture is much harder to hire for.”