LinkedIn is omnipresent in today's age. Every business, employee, website, and newly-born infant seemingly has a LinkedIn account. However, while I have had an account
since senior year of college, I never truly appreciated the value that LinkedIn provides. As mind-numbing as the platform can be at times, there
is actually a way I can convince you - quantifiably mind you! - that LinkedIn provides you with a tremendous amount of value even if it seems unintuitive or
useless to you.
To start, let me posit you a question:
Who is more likely to help you out in your career: a close friend or a distant acquaintance?
Your immediate response would probably be to say "a close friend... obviously" followed up by "why would someone I don't really know
try to help me?"
While the response is perfectly justified (and in particular instances incredibly true), allow me to ask another question:
In your history, who has had more impact on your professional career: a close friend or a distant acquaintance?
For a select few, the answer might not change, but I'm willing to bet that many of you reading can recall a particular person that had an overwhleming contribution
to your professional development, and yet you would be hesitant to refer to them as a friend, less so a close friend. This concept actually has a term in the
realm of Graph Theory and Networks: weak ties.
Weak ties are actually something that arise in the
Strong Triadic Closure Property, but for now lets just use an over-simplified network for this exercise. We will say a strong tie is a friend and a weak tie
is an acquaintance.
For the sake of this explanation, let's assume that the network for LinkedIn is fully connected; this just means that if I start at any user,
I can get to any other user by taking connections paths. This is the same concept that is more colloquially known as "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"
showcasing that all actors are connected because each can reach Kevin Bacon.
While I understand that the core takeaway is the same old "networking is valuable because it puts you in touch with new thoughts, new people, and new ideas,"
I hope I have given you a new visual perspective on weak ties and why they are so valuable. Your LinkedIn network probably contains a few of these weak ties
and maybe appreciating and utilizing them in the future can lead to your next big step.
Weak Ties: A Formal Explanation of LinkedIn's Value
