A couple years ago, LinkedIn didn’t have too much traffic. If you signed onto your profile, you noticed that a few major organizations you followed were posting, but by in large it was not a very saturated News Feed. Hitting the refresh button wasn’t all that exciting.

Today, there has been a major shift in the skills economy, the type of jobs available, new non-profits, new digital work, new prospective graduates, and even new grassroots organizations that are taking to LinkedIn and promoting their business, or themself. Likewise, this has been the first year where I have personally seen on LinkedIn feed students and academics posting about their completions of Master’s program, a definite new self-promotion avenue that was frankly uncommon only a few years back.

In this way, LinkedIn has become saturated with content, which to some extent, takes away from its overall legitimacy. From the feeling’s economy, to corporate leadership, to academics posting about their achievements, the site is now generating so much traffic it might even produce some fatigue for users who wish there was a better, more consistent focus on the site.  

Developers, front-end and back-end, have improved LinkedIn and have done a great job. Major add-ons such as the new articles on the right-hand column, and adjustments to profiles, and Premium accounts all play a role in the way this online platform has become saturated with content.

A new and refreshing platform for researchers and PhDs

But with so much advancement on LinkedIn thanks to web developers who work behind the scenes, it might be time for a new career avenue for those experienced in the interface of professional social networking platforms.

The networking industry is growing thanks to Covid-19 and the reliance on the web now more than ever. Impactio is, “…America’s leading platform in academic impact analytics and scientific networking.” The interface is similar to LinkedIn in that the platform offers a professional profile that shares important information about the candidates' industry, where they are based, the number of publications they have, and also a Summary section that helps better define the candidate and set them apart from the rest.

But Impactio also goes further than LinkedIn in terms of organizing data, providing advanced metrics with a Citation Map function, as well as other Analytic data including the number of conferences attended and the number of journals published in. The citation and publication analytics data are what research or a Ph.D. needs for their professional profile and resume. 

In addition to the impact analytics data, Impactio presents a new opportunity to build on experience and influence a major online professional networking sector that, at the end of the day, helps people with specialized careers, thrive in a globally competitive market. In fact, just like PhDs and scientists might find passion in working with an interface that promotes research job opportunities and interactions.

Objective academic impact analytics data on Impactio

It is also becoming way too common for people to self-promote on professional networks—sometimes unethically. When viewing someone’s profile on LinkedIn for example, it has become common for Ph.D. candidates and those in academia to talk up their resumes and post lofty descriptions and responsibilities in jobs they’ve held. This is problematic. It means that online behavior like this might simply be mimicked by other candidates who are applying for similar positions and are trumping up their “Experience” section unnecessarily.

This phenomenon might result in some employers getting faulty or incomplete information about the candidate, and might even make recruiters jobs more difficult when screening for candidates.

Impactio goes about this academic problem in a different manner. With precise academic impact analytics on citation and professional journals published in, businesses can get a much better idea of someone’s exposure and research impact to a particular issue area, as well as their expertise and history. Impactio provides objective and comprehensive analytics data and professional platforms that promote ethics and transparency.