“Why am I posting on LinkedIn?”
That question recently just came to my mind.
My inital idea was to change from LinkIn posting to posting on another, work/IT related Mastodon-account – just for the sake of getting off a commercial platform. But then I started asking myself the “whys” …
Question: Why do I post on LinkedIn at all?
- Do I own a business that I need to advertise? No
- Do I want to be “famous” / have lots of followers? No
- Do I identify myself by the amount of followers/likes/reach? No
- Do I aim for discussion? No
- Do I get / trigger discussion? Rarely (no)
- Do I personally “get” a lot from posting on LinkedIn? No
- Do I get ANYTHING from posting on LinkedIn? Yes, sometimes some nice feedback! That’s nice!
- Do I find the LinkedIn Stream valuable for me? Rarely
- What is the time/gain ratio of the LinkedIn stream? NOT good
- Does “posting on LinkedIn” suck me into scrolling? Yes definitely. And I don’t like it!
Question: Why do I post AT ALL?
Well, sometimes I find some thoughts, ideas or solutions worth sharing. That’s a valid reason to me. And the traffic to some of my blog posts seems to justify the time I need to write about it.
Question: Why do I post on LinkedIn vs Posting on Mastodon vs my blog?
| Platform | Pro | Con |
| – Most views in short time | – Short Lived – Not my own platform – Sucks me into LinkedIn – Deleting old content is hard – Limited Styling | |
| Mastodon | – Independent platform – Deleting old posts is easy | – Short Lived – Not my own platform – Start with 0 people network – Yet another account – I don’t aim for discussion – Limited Styling |
| Own Blog | – My platform – Long Lived (Search Engines) – Can propagate to Fediverse – Full styling possibility – No length delimiter – Full control | – Low reach (RSS & Search Engine) – Loose current audience |
Well, as I don’t really care for the reach (Some how-tos I only post to have them documented for myself – it’s a nice side-effect if it’s useful for someone else as well). I can hardly find any reason I should not move to posting on my own blog.
Except that I won’t get the feedback as I get it now on LinkedIn (okay, I can live with that) and that I will likely lose all audience from LinkedIn because they (highly likely) will not follow my blog. But on the other side: I can live with that, too. And those who REALLY want to follow can still follow via RSS or Fediverse!
Especially regarding the lifetime of my posts: on any social media, the posts get a quick peak (well – if at all) and are then literally gone. On my blog they are reachable / findable via search engines “forever”.
Regarding all the above … I tend to say “Good Bye LinkedIn-posting!”
PS: I probably won’t stop posting on LinkedIn completely – but I’ll link only to my or other content. I want to keep my content on my platform.