Instagramisation of LinkedIn: Is personal branding overtaking real brand-building?

New Delhi: When LinkedIn launched, it was envisioned as a digital extension of the corporate world, a space where companies shaped reputations, professionals documented careers, and organisations showcased milestones that built long-term trust.

Open LinkedIn today and you may wonder even briefly if you’ve tapped Instagram by mistake. A platform designed for professional updates, organisational milestones and serious industry exchange now feels increasingly unmoored from its original purpose. What was intended to be a hub of expertise, credibility and career narratives is morphing into a stream of feelings, performance, personality and, at times, pure theatre. The platform that once helped brands build institutional identity is now dominated by personal branding. And with that shift, the very idea of “brand-building” has been rewritten.

LinkedIn is no longer just a professional ecosystem; it has become a performance arena. Abhik Santara, Director & CEO, Atom Network, captured this pivot unflinchingly. “The algorithm doesn’t reward expertise; it rewards emotion. Professionalism has turned into content. Vulnerability into strategy. Thought leadership into theatre.” 

That emotional pull has pushed personal storytelling to the centre of the platform, drowning out the quieter, more measured world of corporate communication. Where brands once depended on company pages and official updates to shape perception, individuals now dominate the feed with anecdotes, confessions and leadership lessons, crafted not simply to inform but to resonate.

Microsoft’s acquisition only accelerated that evolution. It wasn’t buying a networking site; it was buying attention, identity graphs and a highly monetisable advertising surface. Under Microsoft, LinkedIn has shifted from a utility to an ecosystem, from a résumé repository to a content engine.

As Kushal Sanghvi, director, Komerz, observed, “Ever since Microsoft bought LinkedIn, they’ve tried to get aggressive in the advertising game.”

You can see the impact on the feed: more video, more creator-style posts, and more personalised expression, all engineered to increase time spent on the platform. What began as a clean, career-first network has become a Microsoft-powered engagement machine where personal branding fuels attention, and attention fuels the business.

The personal branding boom and the rise of ‘slop’

What makes this shift particularly striking is that personal branding was supposed to be a tool to express one’s true professional identity. But authenticity has proved harder than it sounds. As Anirban Mozumdar, Chief Strategy Officer, TBWA India, observed, “Personal Branding is about being authentic. Unfortunately, this level of self-awareness comes to few.” In this authenticity deficit, a new content phenomenon has emerged: PBS, or personal branding slop. These are the hurriedly composed, AI-assisted posts on everything under the sun, crafted to stay visible rather than meaningful. Mozumdar pointed out that “what we are seeing is the rise of PBS (personal branding slop), hurriedly concocted AI-supported posts on topical matters, and the relevant and irrelevant.”

This “slop” contributes to a credibility crisis that affects both personal and corporate brand-building. Companies that once relied on LinkedIn as a serious business platform now find their institutional messages competing with templated vulnerability, generic motivation, and algorithm-friendly relatability. The platform begins to discount deeper expertise, pushing long-form analysis to newsletters or more niche platforms, a shift Mozumdar calls a “migration of meaning”, noting that “a lot of deep analysis is moving to other publishing platforms for more depth and expertise-led writing.”

The Instagramisation of LinkedIn

A major factor behind this evolution is how users themselves have migrated from other platforms. As Facebook aged and Instagram absorbed personal expression, professionals slowly shifted those habits onto LinkedIn. Sanghvi, who has seen the platform evolve over 15 years, explained that “LinkedIn has become the new Facebook, in short. People now share personal expressions, travel photos, awards, moving to a new organisation, and all types of personal pursuits.” His observation highlighted how the boundaries of professional life have blurred online. Where corporate updates once dominated timelines, today they sit uncomfortably beside holiday photos, emotional essays, and birthday posts.

Sanghvi added that this shift isn’t only cultural; it’s strategic. The platform itself is pushing expressive formats because the more time people spend creating content, the more the platform monetises.

“Microsoft made a big bet on LinkedIn, and it has paid off. Advertising revenues have grown massively in the last four–five years. LinkedIn itself is pushing the video narrative because it's becoming more aggressive with advertising solutions. The more time people spend creating content, the more the platform monetises,” he added.

With India now being LinkedIn’s second-largest user base, even a small behavioural change generates massive content volume. This is also why video-led personal storytelling, often more emotional than informational, thrives on the platform. And as users scroll more than they stop to think, deeper corporate narratives are often lost in the noise.

A battle between influence and expertise

The expanding ecosystem of personal voices has also caused a redistribution of influence. On LinkedIn today, visibility often trumps domain credibility. An independent content consultant captured this tension, noting that the platform’s evolution has allowed “experts at audience and aura farming (and buying)” to outshine those who are actual experts in their domains. This makes corporate brand-building more complex. Organisations may find that their own employees, or sometimes non-experts commenting on their industry, wield larger influence than the carefully curated content from official brand channels.

This dynamic leads to an unusual contradiction. Companies want their people to be visible because personal narratives humanise the brand. But they also risk losing control over the brand’s message, especially when loud personal content overshadows institutional updates. Meanwhile, the consultant’s remark that “LinkedIn has always been a self-promotion stage” reflects an older truth; it’s just that the rules and scale of self-promotion have changed.

Brand-building now lives in the shadow of personal narratives?

This tension between personal expression and professional communication becomes even more prominent as LinkedIn increasingly resembles a content-first platform. As Suneil Chawla, co-founder, Social Beat, explained, “Today, it's become a content consumption platform, e.g., similar to Instagram but more from a professional lens.” With audiences consuming content more passively, brand-building becomes less about structured announcements and more about storytelling, often delivered by the faces behind the company, not the company page itself.

Chawla also pointed out the difficulty of finding “a high level of authenticity in general” because visibility mechanics reward frequency and emotional resonance. This means CEOs, founders, and even junior employees often communicate through personal reflections or anecdotes about their journeys, with product plugs embedded into narrative arcs. Brands don’t just tell their stories anymore; people tell the brand’s story for them. The hierarchy of messaging has changed.

Meanwhile, the interpersonal drama of social media hasn’t spared LinkedIn either. As Santara quipped, “the generational duet: Millennials subtly implying Gen Z is lazy, while Gen Z lectures everyone on work-life balance from their bed at 11am on a Tuesday morning.” These interactions, though humorous, mark the transformation of LinkedIn from a knowledge-driven arena into a platform where cultural commentary, personality clashes, and identity narratives play out publicly.

What this means for the future of brand-building on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has not lost its value; it has simply changed its currency. Where it once traded in corporate authority, it now trades in personal visibility. Company updates, employer branding, innovation showcases, and industry thought leadership still matter, but they occupy less real estate and require more creativity to break through. As Mozumdar noted, LinkedIn is still “a must-have to begin your personal branding journey, a first-check Rolodex for getting a factual view of one’s professional journey.” But that Rolodex now sits beneath layers of personal narratives that colour how professionals perceive brands.