Incoming: your second weekly dive into the LinkedIn zeitgeist. Is AI helping or hurting our networking? What about AI content on LinkedIn? Eek.
For what it’s worth, we admire LinkedIn for so many reasons. And yet, the gap between LinkedIn and real networking is officially a chasm.
People are still at the center of business. Networking is knowing more of those people – building business friendships that lead to a productive career and life. Can you do that on LinkedIn? Uh…geez…it’s getting rare.
AI-generated comments certainly don’t help. Here’s what Reddit thinks:
Disclaimer: we get it, Reddit can attract critics and naysayers. Yet, criticisms aren’t always bad. It’s feedback.
And this week, coming in at 86 upvotes and 36 comments as of this writing, you have this gem:
Yikes. Just yikes. A couple thoughts:
First, most LinkedIn pros agree that if you’re attempting to build your audience on said platform, you need:
Incredibly time-consuming stuff. You want LinkedIn to reward your personal brand for heating up their algorithm and spending time engaging. It’s valuable to do this, but it’s not really networking in the interpersonal sense.
Second, few of us have time to do that unless we hire an assistant or, you guessed it, “leverage AI” to do the boring, time-consuming work of…wait what? Being a human on LinkedIn?
Hang on, did LinkedIn just become the place where your empty, meaningless bot can network with other people’s empty, meaningless bots?!?
That’s what it’s come to?!?
Well, first we’d like to point out the poster’s comment itself. What exactly is this AI approach getting us?
Well, it does provide the sort of LinkedIn vanity metrics (not a pejorative) one needs to justify however they’re monetizing their following and content. That’s not nothing, it’s just one strategy of many:
We won’t take sides on the approach, it works for some and not for others. *shrugs*
I’ve never heard of the original poster but we're sure he’s a good guy. The irony the Reddit crowd seems to identify here is that his social media courses (and the tactics therein) promote an engagement strategy that is now biting him in the bum:
In other words, now that LinkedIn integrates AI for their Premium accounts, we have a small problem:
Genuinely, we have no idea. We get it, the algo favors this behavior and engagement. But for what? Are you building an audience (fine, go for it, it’s a great platform for that) or are you, like so many of us, trying to grow our circle of business allies?
We repeat: AI talking to AI is not networking. Sooner or later, the jig is gonna be up at LinkedIn. The vast majority of us aren’t monetizing our audiences or building a personal brand…which means soon the platform won’t have any value (aside from a digital resume or job search platform).
And they’re doing it to themselves:
We can’t say this enough: we like LinkedIn. But is it networking? You made any new friends there recently?
Which leads us to the funniest perspective:
The Reddit crowd’s ironic mimicry (of the mimicry) had us giggling on this one:
This user pointed out the nuance we all need to embrace in two sentences, and we had to show our R-E-S-P-E-C-T:
(We didn’t use AI for this profound, pithy reply)
In the spirit of whatever “digital networking” is, we are honored, humbled, overjoyed, thrilled, etc. to help you make more business allies. Instead of losing hours per day in the AI-driven digital world, we’d like to invite you to the only platform that brings people together one-on-one and in person for real networking.
If you want to grow your network and get to know someone in the business world, soon you’ll just be able to ask them. On Tripally, everyone expects to meet in person to build their network the real way.
Join the waitlist. It’s free!
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