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When British creative director Rob Mayhew was browsing LinkedIn in 2020, his feed was devoid of fun content. The professional social network was primarily used to find work and to brag about seemingly humble, but often embarrassing, personal achievements.
“It’s not the place where you go to laugh,” says Mayhew, who saw humor as an opportunity to differentiate himself in a place full of seriousness and corporate clichés. He has posted hundreds of sketches about shared work experiences, such as being stuck in a Zoom waiting room, which has grown his follower count to more than 128,000.
As personal and professional lives have blurred in the wake of the pandemic, the content that people and companies post on LinkedIn has changed. Personal posts about weaknesses and vulnerabilities have gone viral. But so has content poking fun at corporate life, comments about working from home and raps about being an IT salesperson.
“We’re tired of corporate jargon, business ideas and leadership ramblings,” says Charlotte Day, director of social media consultancy Contentworks Agency. In a sea of online ads, humor is increasingly used as a strategy to “break the monotony” and connect in a more casual way.
Comedy-focused “LinkedInfluencers” include natalia corporatewhose videos for 140,000 followers poke fun at everything from Gen Z vaping in conference rooms to the irresponsible new employee you shouldn’t take on a work trip to Las Vegas.
Between 2019 and 2022, LinkedIn saw a 160 percent increase in “members requesting more ways to express humor.” The use of phrases like “haha,” “lol,” and humor-related emojis in comments also nearly doubled, prompting the addition of a laughing emoji to the platform’s standard set of five reactions. American comedian Mindy Kaling announced the news and encouraged users to post “funny work interactions” on the site.
The shift toward a more cheerful attitude comes as LinkedIn’s popularity is growing rapidly.
However, the site’s humorous potential is complicated by its reputation for “accidental comedy”: quirky posts that boast about punishing routines or extracting business lessons from unspeakable tragedies with absurd sincerity. Entire Reddit threads are dedicated to exposing the worst examples of self-promotion or overwork. Parody accounts that skewer tone-deaf posts from hyperambitious leaders have tens of thousands of followers. Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between genuine and satirical content.
Gyanda Sachdeva, head of consumer experience at LinkedIn, says it’s now more common to find humor in posts, especially videos, which lends itself well to “more relatable” content. Last year, the platform launched a TikTok-style video channel on mobile devices.
However, Sachdeva stresses that “humor is by no means the end game” and should be used as a “means to an end” in a social network created for people to exchange professional knowledge. “If humor is a good way to do it, great.”
For some businesses, using sarcastic posts to pursue marketing goals is easy. Digital bank Monzo conducts “mundane surveys” on small office conversations, while marketing platform Semrush compares digital marketers to contestants in a dystopian thriller. Squid Game.
Even Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, plays it for laughs. He’s created Christmas videos since 2018, including a riff on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour filled with financial jokes. Christine Anderson, director of global corporate affairs at Blackstone, says the videos challenge an “assumption” that financial workers are serious. “We’re trying to show that our people are mission-driven, but they’re also great, authentic colleagues who enjoy working together.”
Mayhew, who describes his content as “holding up a mirror to the ridiculousness of most of our work,” would love to see more humor on the site, but adds that there is a fine line between funny and embarrassing.
Given the large number of “laughing” emojis in response to Blackstone’s posts, the company appears to be walking the right side of that divide.