LinkedIn and Triadic Closure
LinkedIn is a complex social platform that connects professionals together. With over 850 million profiles (source 1), users actually create their own “network” by connecting with other professionals and expanding their contacts. While on the surface it may seem like a user connects with their immediate friends, associates, or family members, users actually expand their network because of the ties they have with other users. LinkedIn implemented a new feature called ‘People you may know’, (recently studied in an article published by the New York Times) which recommends certain other users that someone may want to connect with because of a mutual connection. For example, if user John is connected with his good friend Annie, John is likely to connect with Annie’s connection Carla, who is in his ‘People you may know’ suggestions. Here, we can see an example of triadic closure:
When two nodes are connected in a network of three nodes, there is an increased likelihood that the third person will become friends with the person they don’t know yet. It’s because they have a mutual connection, so it is likely that they will form a connection with each other. This connection is called a tie, which will likely begin weak.
A good way to represent this formation is through a triangle drawing:
The network would begin with Annie having strong ties to both John and Carla. However, because John sees that Carla is also strongly connected to Annie, he can now connect with her, and close the triangle with a tie to Carla now too.
In the LinkedIn world, researchers found that the addition of the “People you may know” feature provided a significant increase in users’ access to jobs. This is because they were able to form new connections and bridge the gap between two nodes by closing the triangle through the property of triadic closure. Even further, the study indicated that people are actually even more likely to obtain a new job through these weak ties rather than strong ties. Furthermore, these weak connections that users made actually proved double as effective in gaining employment.
Maybe the focus should no longer be to secure the coveted ‘500+ connections’ but on obtaining mutual connections. After all, LinkedIn revolves around the professional setting, so finding a job could be achieved through arms-length connections.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/business/linkedin-social-experiments.html