Is LinkedIn worth it for freelancers?

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that’s aimed at connecting job seekers with prospective employers. As freelancers, a big part of our job is finding, connecting with, and landing new clients, so LinkedIn sounds like a perfect fit for us. But is it? My, likely unpopular, opinion is that LinkedIn is not worth it as a tool to help you find and land clients, but that doesn’t mean you should disregard it entirely, because there are a few potential benefits to being on it.  

LinkedIn doesn’t cater to freelancers.

LinkedIn started in the early 2000’s (around the same time Facebook did actually) and was aimed strictly at the professional crowd. People like recruiters, employers with job openings, and those of us seeking jobs. Initially it was very much for finding full or part time work, and I don’t recall seeing any ‘freelance’ style work of any kind on it. But, without any direct competitors, it took off quickly and established itself as the social network for professionals and job seekers. 

Over the past few years though, LinkedIn has opened the doors to anyone, and now it’s much more like a professional Facebook than the relatively exclusive career focused social networking platform it once was. There are lots of ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ and your feed will be, or is, likely populated with content LinkedIn deems interesting, rather than the most recent stuff (although you can change that setting). There are tons of people on there trying to gain a following to sell their courses, books, consultation services, and more. This isn’t a bad idea, but it seems to be the overwhelming theme these days and all the junk you have to sort through makes it a pain to use.

Additionally, LinkedIn has really LeanedIn (see what I did there) to the millennial market with lots of options for fun and flashy posts by offering stickers, gifs, memes, and emojis as options in their posts. I am all for mixing fun and business, but truthfully it feels more like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook at times, rather than a place to effectively network and connect with potential business partners. 

How I use LinkedIn.

I have had a personal LinkedIn account for years, and in the recent past have created a business page for Droi Media. These accounts let me connect with a lot of my professional colleagues, and more importantly as a freelancer, connect with my clients. When I post a status from my business page or update my personal page with something video related it will pop up and remind people that Droi Media is in the video production business. It likely will not lead to any immediate phone calls, but no social media platform is about short term gains in that way, these platforms are all about long term networking and maintaining relationships. Having a LinkedIn page, personal or for your business, is a part of that longer term goal of maintaining client relationships and building brand awareness. 

Here’s where LinkedIn has potential. 

LinkedIn offers a Premium (i.e. paid) version for those of us who want to take things to the next level. I can see where this would be insanely useful if you were a recruiter or someone who hired a lot of people at your job. With Premium you get access to some additional features like advanced messaging, insights / analytics, and some educational or learning tools (LinkedIn bought Lynda.com not too long ago and migrated libraries of educational content over for their Premium members). While not a game changer for a freelancer, I can see the benefit of having Premium in certain circumstances. If you’re interested, LinkedIn lets you try out Premium for free for a month every once in awhile, all you have to do is enter payment issue and remember to cancel your subscription before the free month ends. I do this every other year or so to see if any new features would make it worth it. It never has but I still try it out.

Your SSI, or Social Selling Index, is one of the potentially worthy aspects of LinkedIn currently. This is some, seemingly arbitrary analytic feature that LinkedIn uses to determine how ‘popular’ you are in a sense - the higher your score the more your content is in front of others, the more influential you are, the more likely you are to give a TED talk, and the more likely you are to use the word ‘synergy’ non-ironically. Jokes aside it’s an OK indicator of how well you’re doing at LinkedIn-ing. You can use that score and see where you might have some shortcomings, and if you care enough you can work on boosting those numbers. A mediocre analytic feature is still better than nothing. 

Groups on LinkedIn used to be an amazing way to interact with people in your industry, and in some instances they might still be. However, almost every group I belong to is rife with people sharing their blog posts, asking you to sign up for their newsletter, or resharing something else not as worthwhile as I want it to be. Like the rest of LinkedIn it’s turned into a bit of a shameless self promotion platform rather than a useful part of the site to connect with like-minded individuals. I do think the Groups part of LinkedIn has the most potential to be good and useful for a freelancer, but it needs a lot of work, and until then I’ll just be over on Reddit.

Creating a business page is certainly something you can consider doing as a freelancer, especially if you share a fair amount of content. You can invite clients to like your business page, leave public reviews, or tag you when they share the great content you created for them. Things like that are great opportunities to get your brand in front of other potential clients - essentially a digital word of mouth, which is the best advertising for freelancers.

The bottom line. 

LinkedIn has some potential, but it’s likely not worth it for freelancers at this time (and might never be). LinkedIn has really set its sights on trying to appeal to a much younger market and their digital media interests, rather than holding steady and raising the bar on what that generation can and should be doing as young professionals. It’s like a career center saying it’s OK to use emojis on your resume because that’s what young people do. They certainly do use emojis, but a resume is not the time or place for them. But 🤷

So is LinkedIn for you? Probably not, but go ahead and try it out.