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Grow and Catch Up
LinkedIn wants to make it easier to manage your professional interactions in the app by splitting its “Network” tab into new, dedicated “Grow” and “Catch-Up” feeds, with the latter designed to highlight daily outreach opportunities, as well as adding new AI-powered message prompts to help improve your outreach.
This, like many other AI features on LinkedIn, could be problematic, but we’ll get to it.
First, LinkedIn is now attempting to bring its many connection options together, making it easier to build and maintain your in-app community.
As you can see in this example, rather than putting triggers such as work anniversaries in your “Notifications” stream, LinkedIn is now attempting to give its relationship and outreach messages a more targeted focus. The familiar Network tab will be renamed “Grow”, and you will see all of your new and potential connection opportunities. Meanwhile, the new “Catch Up” page will highlight prompts to help you start new conversations.
As described by LinkedIn:
“The “Catch Up” tab is focused on uncovering reasons to…well…catch up with your network! We built the new “Catch Up” tab because sometimes the best way to start networking is a simple “hello!” But a cold-start is more successful when there is a reason behind it. So, we’re helping uncover those reasons and share with you as you at the ideal moments.”
A Place For Your Friends!
The Catch-Up list will include events such as your connections starting a new job, celebrating a work anniversary, or celebrating a birthday. Which LinkedIn now gives through your “Notifications” stream, but now they’ll get their own, dedicated feed, and LinkedIn will emphasize more possibilities to contact out within this listing.
So anticipate to receive more random well-wishes in your inbox, similar to those who send you ‘Happy Birthday’ notes every year.
At the same time, those messages are likely to become more diversified, as LinkedIn tests a new generative AI option for making messages in the app.
So, if you don’t sure what to say to start the conversation, you can now have the system come up with suggestions for you.
Generative AI prompts like this corrode the foundation of what “social” media is, because if we go to a future where bots generate messages and respond to them, the end result will be less and less true human “social” interaction within these apps.
This is especially problematic on LinkedIn, where it is all about putting your best professional foot forward, and as such, demonstrating your communication ability is an important part of communicating your abilities and personality. You aren’t doing that if you’re utilizing AI prompts to generate that message for you, and I believe this will lead to more deceptive and misleading techniques in the app.
How Much is Too Much?
LinkedIn says its technology will produce these messages “based on your relationship and goal of connecting,” which you may then personalize before sending.
“It’s important to review the message draft for accuracy, and fine tune the language so it’s in your voice and tailor for how you want the conversation to go next.”
So you add your own voice after it creates the message for you. I got you.
Who is ready to gamble that a lot of people will skip this step?
Perhaps it is an extremely negative viewpoint, and these tools will improve connection in the app, and having a dedicated tab to discussion suggestions may make it simpler to retain key connections in the future.
But I believe LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft, is going a little crazy with AI, which could eventually result in a backlash against automated engagement like this.
In any case, the new AI prompts are currently only available to LinkedIn Premium subscribers, so they may not be as noticeable, at least initially.
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