Do You Trust Your LinkedIn Influencers?

Some people you admire maybe just another hypocrite

People have many such questions about LinkedIn. Is LinkedIn trusty? Is it helpful? It is a professional tool that connects employees and employers around the world with a different story than Facebook or Twitter narrates. We find its timeline filled up with a motivating speech to promote humanity. But have you observed their trend? Have you analyzed their post and resources? Do you think their leadership post addresses our day-to-day problems?

I call this process a dark marketing.

In this blog, I write about the post of some LinkedIn leaders and influencers I have seen in the last year. My writing is not to demotivate its use but to aware of such practices. Don’t blindly follow any ideal influencers.

The practice of Ctrl +C and Ctrl +V

Many people with fake and unprofessional ethics dominate LinkedIn these days. I find many viral posts in LinkedIn filled up with a motivating practice of human resources. Sadly, they are just copy-pasted work and nothing other than to get easy likes and followers.

Recently, I read this post posted by a user who has over fifty thousand followers.

We INTERVIEWED someone today, and delivered an OFFER to the candidate within 2 hours! You want talent, then act fast ! Good people do not last on the JOB market. I do not understand why some companies take weeks and even months to make a decision. We met after the interview and made a decision, got approvals and boom ! Best news: She accepted on the spot ! Everyone is happy, she is, we are.

Hiring good people is not a rocket science.

Common sense, respect, empathy, speed. Basics !

It moved me. I wished if all human resources staff were efficient and understanding as those influencers.

But to be honest, I had seen such five posts by different accounts in the last week. To check further, I copied a bit of her’s content and searched on LinkedIn. To my surprise, I could see many users posting the exact text with no modification and with no credit. I wish professionals of LinkedIn would know that copying contents are highly unprofessional and crime.

It is not a problem to copy content and motivate your followers. The problem here is people use those texts just to build followers, and in reality, most follow not a single pirated line.

The practice of self bragging as an Ideal Leader

I had added one of my seniors on LinkedIn. Even though he didn’t supervise me, I knew the nature of the person he is. He used to post how managers should be, why they should be leaders and not a boss. His motivating posts on LinkedIn wasn’t surprising because he was the one who always wanted to be in the highlight. He practiced no such principals while he was working on the company.

Once, he posted about the ideal work stating how he served the interest of his employee. I wish he had changed to be a leader of his team, but he hadn’t. It was a duplicate content posted by a hundred of users on LinkedIn.

The same boss posted a piece of fake news that had tons of likes and comments. Although I mentioned to him personally that it is a piece of fake news, I abstained from further arguments.

The practice of distribution with no credit

Six months back, a data scientist in LinkedIn shared his tips, and he promised his followers to send cheat-sheets through email. The pdf file he sent to my mailbox was a compile of others’ work that had origin author name replaced by his name. I commented on his timeline about such an act, but all in vain in the pool of a thousand other thankful posts.

My Conclusion

The influencer whom you admire on LinkedIn might be a product of dark sides of LinkedIn marketing. Some of them are our hypocrite bosses who only know how to make a profit by advocating humanity and leadership among the crowd.

It’s personal to follow or not follow any influencers. But I am sorry folks, people are not what they show on social networking sites, not even on LinkedIn. We live in an illusion, hoping our professional world would bloom one day. But they may not, at least not until we keep being influenced by such marketing techniques.

Do not praise a book by its cover. People you admire may be just another hypocrite.

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