LinkedIn And Millennials

Welcome to episode 127, I hope you all had a fantastic week.

In this episode I attempt to get my head around the millennial problem - i.e. Why don’t Millennials use LinkedIn?

Firstly though a few things I found interesting this week;

• New content search on the LinkedIn app
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• LinkedIn Profinder expands to the whole of the US New iOS 10 launch this month will include deeper SIRI integration into LinkedIn
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• The Millennial Question
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• I read a very interesting article this week from Allen M. Quinn titled 5 Reasons Why Millenials Aren’t Using LinkedIn.
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• I thought this was a very interesting subject and worth further consideration. As a father of two millennials (who are both nowhere near LinkedIn!) I have a particular perspective to bring to the issue and it struck me that you might also.
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• I contacted the author Allen and despite viewing my profile, he didn’t come back to me - Bloody Millennials!!! To be fair, I only reached out yesterday so he may come back yet but I was unable to arrange to interview him for this episode - perhaps that might work for another episode.
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• I would urge to read not only the piece itself but also the comments, which include contributions from millennials and those of an older generation - it’s very interesting.
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• What is a Millennial? Whilst there is no definitive birth date range, Most experts state that a Millennial (formerly known as Gen Y) is someone who was born between the early 1980s to the early 2000’s so effectively they range between age 15 and 35 although I think most people think of millennials as being in their 20s.
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• Earlier this year LinkedIn published some analysis showing that 87 million millennials were on LinkedIn. At the time LinkedIn had 433 million users so that is 20% millennials and not the 38% quoted in Allens article.
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• My first point is that I am not sure that's 20% is necessarily such a bad figure. The US census of 2015 showed that millennials accounted for about 28% of the population so it could be better but it's not disastrous!
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• Allen details five reasons so I thought it would make sense to address each one individually.
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• Too many "rules"/ Too structured:
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• This really covered two subjects, Firstly it seems to be about etiquette with millennials being unsure about what to say and what is okay. I think this is an issue created out of being a minority rather than a millennial, if you are only 20% of any community you are bound to find it intimidating! My advice would be to encourage millennials to take more risks and not be intimidated by negative feedback. Allen states that he has witnessed someone's update getting slammed by LinkedIn users and publicly shaming that person for it but surely this happens across all social media, In fact LinkedIn is significantly “tamer" than most - have you seen Reddit?!! Millennials should aim to show humility in their posts and be open about their desire to learn more about online networking, this approach will inevitably lead to greater success. Finally I think the 80% of users who are not millennials need to show a much higher level of empathy towards this demographic.
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• 2. It's not a "Fun" Social Media:
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• Isn't that what Facebook, snapchat, Instagram and twitter are for? I don't think there is anything wrong with having a bit of fun on LinkedIn but it is essentially a business network and therefore one would expect it to be less ‘light hearted’ than social networks that are focussed on your personal life. Social media doesn't have to have a singular purpose (Fun),