Since the start of the pandemic, as office workers missed in-person interactions with colleagues, many people turned to LinkedIn to help make up for what they had lost. They started talking about more than just work. The boundaries between office and home lives became blurrier than ever. As personal circumstances bled into workdays, people felt emboldened to share with their professional peers – and found interested audiences both in and beyond their networks.

Users, including some who had left Facebook or felt guilty about using it during work, found they could scroll through LinkedIn and still feel that they were working. And for those hoping to make a splash and build an audience, LinkedIn proved an easier place to get noticed than more saturated sites. Karen Shafrir Vladeck, a recruiter in Austin, Texas, who posts frequently on LinkedIn, said the site was “low-hanging fruit” compared with crowded platforms such as TikTok and Instagram.

Now, users find on a typical day that between job listings and “I’m happy to announce” posts are viral selfies of people crying, announcements about weddings and long reflections about overcoming illnesses. Not all are happy about the changes. Some said they find they cannot use the site in the same way. A newsfeed crowded with personal posts, they said, can distract from the information they seek on LinkedIn.

“Early in the pandemic, we started seeing content we really hadn’t seen before,” said Daniel Roth, a vice president and the editor-in-chief of LinkedIn. He said he noticed people posting about mental health, burnout and stress. “These were unusual posts for people where they were being much more vulnerable on LinkedIn,” he said.

It wasn’t as if no one had broached those topics on the site before but, Roth said, it was “nothing like the volume” that LinkedIn started seeing in the spring of 2020, and continued seeing over the next two years.

LinkedIn is not encouraging, or discouraging, the intimate posts. “In terms of the personal content, I wouldn’t say that we got too involved there,” Roth said. But it is encouraging influencers to join the site in the hope that they will post about topics such as leadership. The company walks a fine line, as it tries to encourage engagement on the site while protecting the professional context that it says its users expect. Roth said posts about skills and work accomplishments – more classic office fare — have seen increased engagement in the past year.

In a survey of about 2,000 employed adults this year, LinkedIn found that 60 per cent said their definition of “professional” had changed since the start of the pandemic.

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