Self-Help Poetry, Dubbed Broetry, Has Taken Over LinkedIn

BuzzFeed coins the term for the genre and identifies its best practitioners.

An iPad is seen with a LinkedIn login page in a browser window on October 25, 2017. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
An iPad is seen with a LinkedIn login page in a browser window on October 25, 2017. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Over the past couple months, posts which bizarrely combine self-help, stanza-less poetry, and business acumen have dominated LinkedIn feeds. A new BuzzFeed report on the ubiquity of these posts has given them a name: broems. These posts, typically written by the site’s most active users, capitalize on a dearth of content in LinkedIn feeds. Popular LinkedIn user and digital media entrepreneur Josh Fechter is credited with establishing the basic standards of the form: one sentence per paragraph, several personal anecdotes, no external links, and decent length. Sam Parr, founder of business newsletter The Hustle, told BuzzFeed that he expects LinkedIn to start de-prioritizing these posts as they become increasingly omnipresent.

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From literary events and music festivals, to the gallery scene and film screenings, Minh Tran sorts cultural signal from noise every Tuesday and Friday.