Move over Instagram.
Step aside YouTube.
Buzz off Twitter.
There’s a new destination for creators in India, and it’s the unlikeliest of them all. It’s LinkedIn. But wait, you may ask, are you telling me content creators have flocked to LinkedIn to write hashtag-filled posts like “Lessons that startup founders can learn from Alia and Ranbir’s announcement”? (The answer, sadly, is yes.)
Is this the future? Well, For starters, LinkedIn always wanted to make itself a destination for creators. After it got acquired by Microsoft, it did a bunch of things to increase adoption in India. Like create (heh!) a Lite version that could run on low-data networks. It’s also one of the first (if not the only) social networks to create editorial voice principles (EVPs) in 2020, which essentially laid out a superstructure for content moderation on the platform.
It also hired over 100 journalists around the world to run the LinkedIn News vertical. But then came the pandemic. And suddenly, everyone was on LinkedIn. Making memes. Talking about work from home. Networking. Searching for jobs. And very quickly, LinkedIn grew, and grew and grew in India. In February, 2022 LinkedIn launched its first Creator Accelerator Program in India (the second country after the US), which is part of its US$25 million investment in creators globally.
And since June, 200 aspiring and established creators, from high-performance coaches to transgender rights activists, sustainability consultants, and bestselling authors are attending virtual training sessions helmed by Ankur Warikoo and Nas Academy’s chief executive Nuseir Yassin. And what next?
