Nepal! How is your LinkedIn feed looking? Possibly a Shark Tank Nepal discussion portal? Well, even experts and high-level professionals couldn’t help but shrug off their professionalism and talk wholeheartedly with humor, personal touchpoints, as if in a local tea shop gossiping!
In such a case, how come a platform that would have strict professional talks and activities a few years ago, suddenly transforms into a social media where anyone can speak anything, slash competitors, present in-depth ideas in a fun, creative way, share videos, and even memes? Well, today’s article will speak exactly about this transformation.
LinkedIn is becoming the next Instagram, and the roots of this have already sprouted. Established in 2002, LinkedIn wasn’t quite the fan favorite immediately! Here’s what LinkedIn’s growth stats look like
- 15 years post establishment, LinkedIn hit its first 500million + userbase status in 2017
- 2023 became the golden door for LinkedIn, as it managed to reach a billion user company repuation.
- As the year 2024 came to an end, welcomed by January of 2025, LinkedIn recorded 1.15 billion + users.
Source: demandsage
LinkedIn has become much more than just a platform where companies post for jobs, candidates apply and get selected!
Likewise, LinkedIn has become much more than just a platform that allows connection building for status, validation, and follower growth!
LinkedIn Then Vs Now : The Transition
LinkedIn Then
Let’s roll back to 2011 when life was easy and nonchalant! LinkedIn was seen as just a job-searching platform. Whether usage came from marketers, other niche professionals, or people looking for a job, resume submission, resume screening, hiring, or sending connects was the common norm.
How did users behave? Well,
- Connections had one intention: either to recruit or get recruited by companies. HR’s and managers sent connects to potential brimming talents in the market, and aspirants connected and sent their CVs to job openings
- People from a company restricted connection activities with other companies or their people fearing questions regarding possible job move or getting seen by the top people in the company there were working for
- Connects were limited, and simple profile visits, having experience, skill explanations, or sometimes just the profile picture screening would do the job
LinkedIn was strictly professional, with limited videos or any form of content shared. While social media was quoted as “fun time”, LinkedIn was labeled as the “professional business portal”. Moreover, text was the only way of interaction
- Most contents were in read format and had professional tongue used
- Topics would cover the core and serious aspects of business
- A strong profile enriched with advanced linkedIn course completion certificates, badges or sharing of personal works were limited
- LinkedIn ads weren’t as diverse and evolved as now
LinkedIn Now
The revolution of LinkedIn’s transformation pretty much began after 2020. With platforms like Instagram and Facebook gaining a larger audience base, thanks to the interactive, less formal, fun, and meme-oriented operation, LinkedIn had to adapt.
It was quite clear that LinkedIn would never be an entertainment platform, but could still have some fun elements that excited professionals and business-minded individuals. Business development, learning, and community-building started exploding. Moreover, the following modernities were put into action:
- Personal branding rose with brands and start-ups actively vocalizing their presence, service, and meme materials through videos, carousels, and engaging static images. Value and entertainment were present!
- Not just monotonous business messages, but other topics that indirectly played a part in business development were gossiped about. Mental health, employee dissatisfaction, mentorship, digital courses, and brand campaigns started to boom.
- More back of the picture items like employee meetups, outings, vacations were displayed. This showed the fun part of working in a company
- Integrations evolved with across-platform integrations, link embedding.
- Marketing took a sharp rise with marketers and companies focusing on aspects like CTA, viral hooks, headline setup and much more.
- LinkedIn showed support for both profit as well as non-profit missions
People could speak anything and everything straight out of their minds without the fear of being judged in a professional platform like LinkedIn. Well, in that case is LinkedIn becoming the next Instagram? Keep reading to find out.
Brand Building Coming Up As A Major Reason For LinkedIn Personalization
Stating as per 2025, LinkedIn is not a job seeking place anymore but a complete holistic market with shaping growing businesses, startup supports, personal brand building, multi sector and cross border connection. It is basically a social media, but for businesses!
A primary reason for this could be need of building a personal brand. Now matter the affiliation with giant companies, individuals recognized the need of having a recognitions and a brand just to oneself.
This explains why Forbes lists the 3rd richest person in the world, with a real-time Net Worth of 248.7 billion USD, Mark Zuckerberg, who is also the CEO of Meta, is out with a surfing board video carrying the flag of the USA. Having a following for what a person actually is, detaching from their image in a company, is important in the 21st century.
The 4th richest man on the planet and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, quoted, “Your personal brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.“
Why And How LinkedIn Is Becoming The Next Instagram
Instagram thrives in content sharing, with millions of reels to watch, each belonging to a different niche and tailored according to one’s preferences, the algorithm just doesn’t disappoint!
A similar tone has now actively gotten adopted by LinkedIn and that is humor oriented posts, personal story telling or business story telling. LinkedIn users want engaging fun content in the form of business insights while Instagram users want in the form of memes and reels. Either way, the goal is content extraction!
Now, let’s uncover how LinkedIn is becoming the next Instagram
1. Visual Content Dependency
Browsing LinkedIn now is pretty social media like! Selfies of people with a caption about their professional story, team photos, after-shoot wrap photos, event clicks, concept explanations through infographics and so much. Where else does such strong media sharing work? It’s Instagram!
With each passing day, LinkedIn posts are taking the shape of how Instagram posts look, with principal aspects like casual photo sharing, video sharing booming. The filter barrier of being judged in a professional environment is slowly breaking. Over 1 billion interactions happen every month on LinkedIn! Content is the reason for this.
2. Short Form Videos
Instagram reels are presumably the most popular feature on the platform. It is a way of grabbing attention spans with viral hooks and addictive scripts. LinkedIn, in its early days of establishment, wasn’t even as popular as a video-sharing platform, let alone the short, addictive video style of content.
However, as of 2025, LinkedIn has its own section where one can scroll through short clips that speak and talk the niches you enjoy the most! And with AI evolving at the speed of light, professional business videos have a special reservation on LinkedIn for themselves.
Why the massive evolution of videos? Well, this is because video content gets 5x more engagement in comparison to regular text or image forms of content.
3. The Influencer
Influencers have one job: to keep people interested in whatever they have to offer in the form of video or photo content. Instagram influencers come in all shapes and sizes, niches, styles of influence, and virality. Mostly, the fields of fashion, comedic skits, travel, and lifestyle have the highest number of influencers.
How does LinkedIn tally to this? Well, like Instagram’s influencers, LinkedIn has a rising number of mentors, Industry thought leaders, career coaches, startup founders, educators, and entrepreneurs who influence rookies and fresh faces to amplify their professionalism.
Irrespective of the platform, both these platforms provide great value in the form of an influencer!
4. Content Frequency
Previously, LinkedIn was like a platform that mainly had posts of hiring, open to hire, and recruiting. Companies would post more than an average person. Forward to now, LinkedIn’s content frequency has amplified both number-wise as well as role-wise.
Not only has the number of hiring content by companies, HR’s and Managers increased, but the pattern on how anyone belonging to any field could easily vocalize and post whatever their hearts fonder about is skyrocketing.
LinkedIn somewhat also feels like a news portal where discussions, gossip, and debates on some of the most popular, trending, or controversial topics are covered.
Overall, 80 percent of LinkedIn’s posts are Text + Image, while the number of video and carousel posts has definitely 10x the amount it used to be. And amongst all this, one this is for sure, Companies posting weekly see 2x engagement.
5. Personal Life Sharing
As the article title suggests, LinkedIn is becoming more personal than professional. The professional arena of things does exist, but the personal life sharing journey has also increased significantly. People are seen sharing glimpses of their daily lives, such as awards, achievements, and honors.
Furthermore, the beginning of a new job, promotion to a new post, appraisal, or close moments with close co-workers are also shared filter-free. Just like how Instagram has notes, stories, and post uploading as a part of personal life sharing, LinkedIn used to have stories before, while the present interface allows browsing top content, adding and connecting with people, job detail sharing, games, and text-based content sharing and crafting.
6. Direct Message Culture
Instagram has always had a direct message culture since its establishment in 2010. LinkedIn previously lacked this DM feature, and 12 years after its establishment did it finally launched the direct message feature. Furthermore, messaging to businesses and company pages only began in June of 2023.
As of the latest update status, sending a connect with a personalized note has been embedded. A culture of formal human introductions, eliminating the need to having to sculpt one’s approach solely as professional, has been cut off.
Even B2B deals are closed through direct messages on LinkedIn. Up to 80% of leads from social media come through LinkedIn.
Winning Hacks On LinkedIn
LinkedIn is powerful and creating a huge impact on it dwells on some consistent activities we can term as winning hacks. Let’s uncover some of the winning hacks for this platform.
Firstly, engagement is your most powerful tool for growing on this platform. Simple acts of commenting on people’s posts, liking, and reposting gradually get you seen and heard. This hack pulls, connects, and follows!
Likewise, keywords are your content’s best friend. Having the right keywords, with volume and trend, helps get your posts to high SERP rankings. Another solid way to land connections, solid connections, and follows.
Another heavily underrated hack is optimizing and completing your profile. A strong, verified, certified profile enriched with accomplishments, work experience adds value and authority to your impressions. Any form of activity on LinkedIn with a complete profile becomes a whole lot converting!
Free courses on LinkedIn and their respective certificates are globally recognized and rewarded! Be sure to invest in such valuable assets.
So, LinkedIn is becoming the next Instagram? Well, it’s for enthusiasts like you and me to perceive as time flies. Signing off on this note!