LinkedIn’s Future Is a Joke
I recently saw one of the most absurd LinkedIn posts — and odds are good that you may have, too.
Alex Cohen, a product manager for Carbon Health, relayed the story of how he saved money for his startup while on a business trip. Instead of ordering room service, Cohen says, he bought some raw chicken breast and cooked it using the hotel room's coffee brewing pot. He posted this image, saying, “It's the little things that get you promoted.”
It was all a joke, as Cohen later admitted. But not before his tale went viral on LinkedIn, then Reddit and Twitter. The post ultimately garnered thousands of replies and millions of impressions.
“The beautiful part about LinkedIn is that because it's professional, everyone expects posts to be professional and they take it all at face value,” Cohen tells me. “You can really push satire, and while my coffee-pot chicken was a joke, I've seen wilder stories on the platform turn out to be true — like the ‘crying CEO.'”
In a digital world where attention is the scarcest resource, the coffee-pot-chicken story is the perfect example of how a skilled practitioner can use humor to pull eyeballs on LinkedIn (and beyond) — and illustrates why LinkedIn represents such a huge opportunity for entrepreneurial content providers.
To start with, LinkedIn has 850 million users. The Microsoft-owned site doesn't break out daily active users, but even a minority of that user base is comparable to traditional social networks like Snap (347 million) or Twitter (238 million).
Meanwhile, LinkedIn's ad business has surpassed $5 billion a year, which is on par with Twitter ($5.1 billion) and more than Snap ($4.1 billion) or Pinterest ($2.6 billion).
Despite the impressive numbers, LinkedIn is probably not top of mind
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