Linkedin & the Network Effect
When we think social media, our minds (or fingers) immediately run to Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. But, now more and more people are starting to migrate to also using Linkedin– what I always deemed to be the professional social media. This article discusses how due two the recent scandals with FB, Insta, and snap, many are turning to Linkedin as their source of social media. With platforms like FB being over run with memes (I know that is my whole feed), or other such items, according to this article, Linkedin is becoming a more attractive social media outlet for many people. Along with this, Linkedin is becoming a great place for brands to expose themselves, since the general consumer population is a professional one. According to the article, over half the users are college grads, and 44% make more than 75k a year. This shows that the general population using this social media platform has disposable income, and are consumers in the market. Along with it becoming a great platform for advertising brands, it has also become a popular way to attract attention to companies- whether it is potential employees, investors, or just positive exposure for the company.
This article connects to what we are studying in class when we look at the network effect that has taken place to make Linkedin increasingly more popular. Linkedin is a site that has becoming more and more popular, and the recent events that have made Linkedin more popular in the recent months have helped lower Linkedin’s threshold, and this has created more and more Linkedin users. Companies are seeing that being active on their Linkedin with posts about what their company is doing, their company life, products, employee benefits etc they are gaining traffic to their page. This traffic is coming from people liking and sharing the posts and telling friends about them. This spread of information about the companies on Linkedin are exemplary of how full cascades can occur- the publishing of articles about company happenings or “feel good stories” related to the company have helped decrease the threshold and facilitated the spread of companies and other pages on Linkedin. The increase in the number of Linkedin members, according to this article, can also be attributed to the fact that recent societal events have made people favor Linkedin over other social media outlets. We can call this happening an outside occurrence that helps decrease our threshold- almost like targeted marketing campaign or sales on a product would help change an individual’s opinion and facilitate the occurrence of a cascade.