LinkedIn now has more than 30 million users in France. And increasingly, people are no longer content simply to be present on the platform: they are telling their own stories. As LinkedIn has evolved into a space for both personal and professional expression, it has given rise to a phenomenon that is now firmly established: the pressure to turn ourselves into a narrative.
Sharing our successes, but also our failures. Telling the story of our career, showing what goes on behind the scenes, revealing our doubts, taking a stand on social issues. In just a few years, LinkedIn has evolved from a professional directory into a fully-fledged social network, complete with its own codes, rituals and, inevitably, excesses.
How is personal branding created?
The term “personal branding” has become firmly established in the vocabulary of communications professionals and career coaches. The principle is simple: to build a coherent, distinctive and memorable image of yourself, much as you would build a brand. LinkedIn has naturally become one of the main places where this happens.
There is nothing fundamentally new about this. Managing the way we present ourselves is as old as social interaction itself. What has changed, however, is the scale, permanence and level of staging involved. A single post can reach thousands of people, be commented on and shared, resurface months later, and become part of a public timeline that gradually forms a permanent professional narrative.
LinkedIn has therefore become a stage on which everyone plays their own role, while the audience participates in the performance by liking, commenting and sharing.
Has authenticity on LinkedIn become an obligation?
This is perhaps LinkedIn’s greatest paradox today. The more the platform celebrates authenticity, the more authenticity itself becomes codified. Personal stories, accounts of chaotic career paths, failures reframed as learning experiences and admissions of vulnerability have all become commonplace in our feeds. Yet this authenticity is rarely entirely spontaneous.
We choose what we share, the tone we use, when we publish and sometimes even the emotion we hope to provoke. That does not mean what we say is false. It simply means that, once authenticity is shared with thousands of people, it too becomes a form of communication.
As one HR director interviewed for this analysis put it: “Authenticity on LinkedIn is like naturalness on screen: it takes a lot of work.”
What does LinkedIn reveal about companies?
For communications professionals, the rise of personal branding represents both an opportunity and a risk. An opportunity, because visible executives and employees can give a company a human face, embody its values and strengthen its reputation. A risk, because what they say can also affect the organisation’s image, whether directly or indirectly.
- Executives who are active on LinkedIn therefore become de facto spokespeople, sometimes without fully realising it.
- The consistency between the values they publicly advocate and the reality within their organisation can be scrutinised by employees, candidates, customers and journalists alike.
- A single individual post can now spark a much broader conversation about a company’s culture, management or employer brand.
- Conversely, the complete absence of some executives from these platforms can also raise questions at a time when putting a human face to corporate communications has become increasingly important.
What is the strategic challenge for PR agencies?
The question is therefore no longer simply whether executives should be on LinkedIn, but rather what they genuinely have to say there and how they can be supported in a way that remains consistent with their personality, expertise and their company’s broader reputation strategy. Because perhaps the real risk today is no longer an excess of content, but its increasing uniformity. When every executive talks about “resilience”, “empathetic leadership”, “transformation” or “collective intelligence” using the same language and the same formats, personal branding paradoxically ends up erasing the very thing it was supposed to reveal: personality. This is probably where the next challenge in executive communications lies: publishing less simply for the sake of being visible, and speaking up when there is genuinely something worth contributing. Expertise, a point of view, an experience, or even a disagreement.
LinkedIn will continue to evolve, and so will its formats. But a presence that says nothing distinctive eventually becomes invisible. And a genuinely distinctive voice deserves to be shaped without being standardised.
