LinkedIn: The place to be professional

With over 300 million active users per month, LinkedIn is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. It's a place where people from different countries and professions are able to talk about their professional interests, look for potential employers or employees, and expand their businesses. As you can tell from the way people use LinkedIn, it's not like any other social media platform.

That being said, there are people who often fail to understand the importance of LinkedIn, and why it's important to maintain a proper and professional outlook on the platform. Hence, to help them out, here are a few (usual) social media practices to avoid on LinkedIn.

Posting unnecessary pictures: Your selfies, or pictures of your cat are best suited on your Instagram feed, not on LinkedIn. None of your connections expect you to post pictures of yourself with filters and emojis. If you do feel like posting a picture every once in a while, you can opt for something that has a professional touch to it. It could be a picture of you giving a presentation, or attending a seminar or conference. Anything that's a bit too casual should be kept as far away from LinkedIn as possible.

Getting too political: LinkedIn is not the place where you should be stirring up, or participating in debates on different political, religious, or social topics. There's Twitter for that. Unless you're somehow able to connect these conversations to your work, or talk about how certain elements in those fields are having an impact on your professional life, you'd be better off avoiding these conversations completely.

Sharing memes: Although everyone appreciates a good meme, it's highly unlikely that your connections expect to see memes on their LinkedIn news feed. LinkedIn is the last place you'd visit in search for some good memes. It's not that the platform doesn't allow people to share them, but the act itself comes off as unprofessional to many users. Imagine being connected to your potential employer, and instead of talking about things relevant to your field or area of interest, you decide to unleash the meme-lord within you and start posting memes. What does your future employer think of you now? They'll probably have a good laugh. But when it comes to shortlisting people for a job interview or any other work related purpose, you can rest assured that you won't be making the cut, simply because your actions seemed unprofessional to them.

Many of you might think that pulling off such a "professional" outlook on LinkedIn is nothing but being pretentious, and you'd probably be right. You see, one can rarely stay or act professional 24/7. It's only when we need to, that we act that way. And act that way we should, on LinkedIn.