For most of Big Valley’s B2B tech clients, LinkedIn is the sole focus of their social media strategies. It is not just a place to invest, it is THE investment. And that’s because LinkedIn has been all business, all the time. Their key features – company pages, resumes masquerading as personal profiles, and a job application platform – are catered to fostering key business relationships between employees, their employers, and their professional networks. Over the years, it has become the main stage for brands to build their reputations and increase trust with future employees, industry peers, customers, and investors.
While that hasn’t gone away, there has been a clear vibe shift on LinkedIn over the past year: people are getting more personal and vulnerable. While it hasn’t become what Facebook was at its peak (as I explored in a previous blog), people are clearly looking to build more human connection into their experience on the platform. We’re seeing more casual photos and videos, posts sharing personal news, and less formal language across both individual users and big brands in the feed. We’re also seeing a shift in which content performs best for our clients: assets featuring executive’s faces, behind-the-scenes content, and more human-centric storytelling over the big product announcements and industry perspective.
Why is this? Well, we see a couple of factors: the public’s declining trust in Facebook, isolation from remote work, and the realization that social media is inherently social. In the last few years, our community spaces have either been over-commercialized or completely removed, and this has led to people carving out social connection wherever they can, including LinkedIn.
Whether we love this or hate this direction for LinkedIn, it is still the most important social media platform for B2B. The same users and features are there and at the center of the platform, meaning LinkedIn continues to hold the same value for our brands. But the way in which we invest in this platform has to evolve with our audience’s expectations.
This does not mean you have to completely transform your brand identity and persona, but it does mean finding opportunities where we can center your people and the things that matter to us as humans in the content. In 2025, reply to comments, tell a story with your profile, and every once in a while, let some personality break through and it will pay off.
