Welcome to the fascinating history of the multi-dimensional social media phenomenon called, LinkedIn! A website marketed to professionals in various business fields worldwide! Its main goals are to connect Business professionals, provide business trainings, provide professional networking capabilities, and post job openings and marketing services to its users. Mainly, they’re purpose is to connect companies with potential employees. LinkedIn headquarters are located in Silicon Valley, yet they have offices all over the world!

A Brief History

Interestingly, LinkedIn was brought to life right from Reid Hoffman’s living room in 2002. Hoffman was the co-founder of LinkedIn. On May 5, 2003, LinkedIn made its public debut. During the birth of LinkedIn, the internet was well on its way to providing consumers with a few different types of social media platforms, namely, Friendster, Myspace, and Quora. Although there were other professional social media platforms at the time, LinkedIn was the trail blazer for professional social media platforms. Currently, it is truly a validated, one of a kind social media platform like no other.

What is LinkedIn Really?

Consumers who use LinkedIn sign up to be a free member on the site. LinkedIn also offers a Premium upgrade membership offering an advanced customer experience with a monetary fee. Experts use the site to post professional posts about their companies, employment offers, special company promotions, and most importantly, professionals build their networks by connecting with other specialists. “With more than 590 million+ members worldwide, including executives from every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networks on the Internet.” (LinkedIn, 2019)  Headhunters search the LinkedIn database of members and find potential employees for companies that best fits their needs. “More than 1 million LinkedIn users have published long-form content, with 160,000 long-form posts being published weekly. And over 19.7 million SlideShare presentations have been uploaded to the platform.” (Lister, 2018) With all of the capabilities provided, LinkedIn has a prosperous future ahead.

Even the Strongest of Foundations Get A Little Shaky!

Although innovative in its own right, LinkedIn is a great competitor among many other professional networking mediums. The competitor that may give LinkedIn a run for its money is Workplace by Facebook. Recently launched last year, Workplace provides yet another form of networking. The website itself states, “Our goal at Workplace is to build meaningful communities in the work environment.” (2019) With Workplace being on the market for over a year, LinkedIn still holds its value – we certainly don’t see any challengers shaking this networking giant!

In this day and age, you HAVE to be adaptable!

Predictions for the future of LinkedIn are newer styles of marketing ads, faster accessibility, more advanced technology, and improved analytic features for users. Additionally, Alexandria Sielaff says these 2019 Trends will be taking over LinkedIn; customer-centric marketing, native advertising, voice search marketing, virtual and augmented reality, and massive consumption of video content. (2018) Move over Facebook, LinkedIn is about to become more visually (and AI) oriented!

We live in a modern social media communication society. The World Wide Web started with limited consumer communication. Today, the social media highway is LIMITLESS! The future of LinkedIn is promising. Networking professionally provides consumers with the ability to find employment from anywhere in the world and it all starts with one ‘CONNECT’ at a time.