6 Issues That LinkedIn Really Needs to Fix
Reading Time: 4 minutesThe random invitation one is especially annoying.
If you are serious about building your career or a reliable professional network, then you have likely used LinkedIn. It’s the largest online professional network, allowing you to connect with colleagues, industry experts, and employers. Using LinkedIn is crucial if you are always on the hunt for new opportunities.
While the platform serves its purpose well, there are a few issues that can be a bit annoying, and others that can be downright detrimental to your overall experience. Here are some issues on LinkedIn that are not talked about enough and need to be fixed.
1. Disappearing Unsent Text
LinkedIn is all about connecting and communicating with new people. Since it’s a professional platform, you’ll often be writing messages in a longer format. You might be explaining your services or pitching to a client, or sending a lot of questions before you start working with them. Unfortunately, there are some issues with the messaging feature of LinkedIn.
When engaging with a new connection, you might decide to check their profile or their company while crafting a message. The issue here is that LinkedIn does not save messages in the form of drafts. Whenever you click on someone’s profile while writing a message, that text tends to disappear.
This is more of a user-experience issue, which can become frustrating if you often use LinkedIn to talk and connect with new people. So, you need to type that message completely before you click away from the messenger, or open that new page in a separate tab.
2. People Who Viewed Your Profile
One of the more interesting features of LinkedIn is called ‘People who viewed you.’ Every time someone visits your profile page, you’ll get a notification telling you who viewed your profile. You also get weekly insights that show you the number of views, where your profile viewers work, and how they found your profile.
While this is a decent feature, it somewhat discourages skimming through other people’s profiles. You might not want the other person to know that you viewed their profile. Recruiters may see that you viewed their profile, and start sending you unwanted messages, even if you’re not currently looking for work.
Fortunately, the private mode is a way to anonymously view profiles on LinkedIn. With that said, if you have a basic account, you won’t be able to see who viewed your profile either while in this mode.
3. Fake Engagements
LinkedIn is a platform that heavily relies on user activity, engagements, and profile SEO. Think about it, if you’re more active on the platform, you’re showing people that you have an interest in the field and conduct yourself professionally. While there’s nothing truly wrong with this, it does make for some questionable engagements.
You’ll often see comments from other users that look like they were automatically generated, rather than written by a human. This is because many people don’t care who they’re engaging with; they just want to appear as if they are active on the platform.
While you could argue that this is one of the ways to build a professional network, these fake engagements sort of ruin your experience when you are trying to research or find something useful on the site. At the very least, it gets a bit annoying when you regularly use LinkedIn.
4. A Boring Feed
Most users on LinkedIn take advantage of the platform as a job-hunting tool more than anything else. However, LinkedIn does feature a feed, just like any other social media platform out there. While it’s a decent way of keeping track of the people in your industry, the overall experience is not that interesting.
This directly correlates with the fake engagement issue we highlighted above. Most of the posts consist of people getting new jobs, starting a new business, or selling yet another online course. You will rarely find a decent read on the site or even a post that includes any sort of important resources. Compared to other platforms such as Reddit, Medium, or even StackOverflow, your LinkedIn feed will likely be more boring or unproductive.
Of course, you could always customize your LinkedIn feed, but even that won’t save you from the type of posts we just mentioned above.
5. Old-Styled Messaging
You’ll spend a good bit of time in the messenger area when you are using LinkedIn. While the messaging features on the platform are fine, they do not hold a candle to other messengers such as WhatsApp or Facebook’s Messenger. This is why you’ll see that people often just ask you to send an email, rather than talk on LinkedIn.
For example, you can’t quite select a specific message and reply to it properly. This is a common feature in almost every other online messenger. Other than that, you can only edit or delete a message within 60 minutes of sending it. This is not an issue with other platforms.
LinkedIn has improved the messenger feature by adding new items such as reactions, but they still have a long way to go if they want users to interact on the platform more often.
6. Random Invitations
You’ll be connecting with a lot of people that you’d like to work with on LinkedIn. This also includes people that you don’t know. There’s a high chance that you’ll get a random invite from a complete stranger every once in a while. This person could be someone that’s not even in your mutual circle, which likely means it’s more of a random invite than anything.
Now, some people will accept these random invites, on the off chance that there’s the possibility of building a useful connection. However, most of the time nothing truly comes out of it. If you do end up connecting with random people, you’ll often spend some time sifting through their profiles to see if they are of any relevance to you.
On top of that, the platform itself also sends you random invites. You’ll often get invites to attend a webinar, view a new course, or find or join new groups. Some of these are useful, but you’ll likely end up ignoring a majority of them.
There Is Room for Improvement
These are a few of the more common issues that you will experience while using LinkedIn. We are sure there are more, but these are the ones that have been around for a while. The fake engagements issue, in particular, is highly annoying, and it has been around for so long that it pushes some people away from the platform.
LinkedIn really needs to address these issues, especially considering the majority of the platform itself is quite useful. However, grilling LinkedIn doesn’t mean we shouldn’t appreciate its impact. It still is the best online professional network, and the best way to find freelance jobs or even regular contracts.