CONTENT MARKETING
LinkedIn Feed: How to Make Your Post Visible?
The algorithm explained and tips on LinkedIn marketing
1. My True Story
I’ve been consistently building my LinkedIn network for about 8–10 years.
One of the main reasons for that is my profession — Recruiter and career consultant. To be a recruiter almost automatically means LinkedIn is one of the main professional instruments for you: you visit the platform daily to post jobs, source сandidates, interact with connections, colleagues businesses. Sometimes you spend the whole day long in LinkedIn search and chats.
My network on LinkedIn now (July 2020) consists of more than 9500 connections. They are real people with successful careers (I’m sure).
Well, I’ve built my own network, but it appeared that the possibility to reach my connections and to communicate with them is very limited.
Problem Definition
A few weeks ago I’ve decided to become a bit more public and to post more through the LinkedIn feed. To my surprise, I’ve discovered that my content is not visible to the majority of my connections.
How did I realize that?
I created a few posts and articles, started to make reposts more often — no likes, no comments, and very low numbers in “post views”.
Maybe, I wouldn’t be so much confused if I had no experience with LinkedIn before. But I did have. And it was much more positive even a few years ago.
The comparison between the current situation and the past made me think about the algorithm that stands behind the LinkedIn feed. It was obvious to me that I have to understand it better if I want to improve my content strategy and my audience reach.
Intermediate Solution
Even though the algorithm is constantly changing and evolving, I decided to make my own research . In this article, you’ll find the latest update (July, 2020) on how to optimize your experience with the LinkedIn feed.
2. How LinkedIn Algorithm Works
Intro to Algorithm
The LinkedIn algorithm is what decides which posts people see when they open their feed. It is based on machine learning.
To imagine the amount of information that is generated through the LinkedIn platform and the role of the algorithm which filters it, please consider the below stats from 2020:
- LinkedIn now has over 660+ million members.
- LinkedIn has 675 million monthly users and 40% of them use LinkedIn daily.
- Of the 2 billion Millennials globally, 87 million of them are on LinkedIn.
- There are 9 billion content impressions in the LinkedIn feed every week.
- 91% of marketing executives list LinkedIn as the top place to find quality content.
More stats are here:
Logic Behind the Algorithm
The numbers clearly show that none of LinkedIn members would be able to “digest” the full amount of information that is being spread through their network daily. That’s why a platform (as any other social network) had to implement its logic of filtering information for members.
LinkedIn Founders understand their goal as the following:
“At LinkedIn, our mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. The LinkedIn Feed stands at the center of this global professional community: a place for our members to discover and join the conversations that are happening among their connections, taking place within their groups, and ignited by the Influencers and companies they’re following. Our members post ideas, career news, questions, jobs, and suggestions in an array of formats, including video, photo, short text, and long-form articles. Every one of these starts a conversation”.
According to Pete Davies, LinkedIn’s senior director of product management, the moto of the feed is
“People you know, talking about the things you care about.”
In other words, the Linkedin algorithm prioritizes personal connections based on interests. Differently, it may be reformulated into two primary goals: to promote engagement and to prioritize relevant content.
Criteria for Algorithm Optimization
Every time you visit LinkedIn, a machine learning algorithm starts by identifying the best content for you. It sorts tens of thousands of posts and ranks the most relevant at the top of the feed.
The good news is that you still have a piece of choice (it’s limited, but still). There 2 options of how to sort your content in the feed: “top” posts (set by default) and “recent” posts.
Thus, if you’d like your feed to be shown in a choronological order, you have to make the right choice in the top right corner.
How exactly do they define what is relevant for you?
In a short, by analyzing your past activity.
There are 3 Top Ranking Signals which LinkedIn algorithms take into account from your activity in the feed.
A. Personal Connections
It tracks who you’ve interacted with directly, through reactions, comments, and shares. It also considers your personal information mentioned in the profile, such as skills, interests, who you work with.
You may follow Elon Mask on Linkedin, but chances you know him are low, aren’t they? The new LinkedIn algorithm aims to consider personal connections more important.
Advice for a better optimized feed:
Don’t forget to put a ‘like’ and to comment the posts of people you would like to see in your feed (it’s a similar rule to Instagram).
Also, don’t hesitate to add the information about your interests and skills into the profile. Keep it really relevant and updated.
B. Interest relevance
Even though you are personally connected with someone, it doesn’t mean you would like to follow the same content. That’s why the LinkedIn algorithm measures a post’s association to someone’s interests based on the hashtags and people you follow, the pages you visit, and the groups you’re in.
LinkedIn’s Engineering blog mentions that the algorithm also pays attention to the companies, people, and topics mentioned in a post, and the language it’s written.
Advice for a better optimized feed:
Сhoose whom you follow wisely, as it influences what content will be delivered to your feed.
Consider following a few hashtags on topics that really matter to you.
C. Engagement Probability
Ok, we got it: LinkedIn collects information about the content we’ve liked and shared in the past, and with whom we’ve interacted with most frequently. Based on it, the algorithms tries to predict the likelihood that you will share, comment, or react to a new post. Relying on this kind of assumption, fresh content appears in your feed. LinkedIn calls this multi-objective optimization.
In other words, the click-through rate (CTR), or the number of times you clicked on offerings or posts, matters. Also, the time you spent reading is important.
Moreover, LinkedIn engineers say: “the model takes into account timely feedback to content creators.” It means that the quicker the post starts ranking in interactions after being published, the more likely LinkedIn is to show it in the feeds.
Advice for a better optimized feed:
Pay attention to the time when you get your content published.
What to Expect in the Nearest Future
LinkedIn seems to work on developing a personalized interest graph.
LinkedIn engineers say: It “represents relationships between members and taxonomy of topics. This graph allows us to measure member-to-topic affinity (e.g. how interested are you about scuba diving?), topic-to-topic relatedness (e.g. snorkling is related to scuba diving), as well as which of your connections share your interests”.
In the future, LinkedIn plans to invest in models that will support the spread of content from the members who create high-quality content over time.
To dive deeper into the technical details of how AI work and the future of its development, check the below articles please:
3. Conclusions, or Your Winning Content Strategy
- Be Relevant and Create Quality Content
Know your audience and appeal to it with the content that may be of an interest to both you and them.
When talking about relevance, we mean all the formats, because LinkedIn members prefer to engage with rich media.
Rich media — texts that include images and videos. By statistics, you’ll get 98% more comments with an image, and 75% greater shares with a video.
- Promote Your Posts
Tag relevant members and companies, use keywords strategically and include relevant hashtags. Mind that LinkedIn recommends three hashtags max.
Also, you may use so called branded hashtags — it will help to attract attention of narrow audience.
- Encourage Engagement
The LinkedIn algorithm rewards engagement — especially posts that inspire conversations. Ask open questions, create polls, reply to comments.
- Go Nishe Instead of Going Broad
For example, look at KLM company. Instead of constantly using popular hashtags #travel, they often go for more niche tags like #aviation. It’s a big difference because #travel links KLM to those who think of a wanderlust, while #aviation tag connects them to aviation geeks.
That doesn’t mean you should completely ignore generic hashtags. Find your own right balance.
- Post At The Right Time
The quicker your post get likes and comments, the higher LinkedIn’s algorithm will rank it. Therefore, try to post at times LinkedIn members are online — more likely, it will result in higher engagement.
According to Hootsuite, the best time to post on LinkedIn:
- 7:45 a.m., 10:45 a.m., 12:45 p.m., and 5:45 p.m. EST.
- The best day for B2B brands is Wednesday (followed by Tuesday).
- The best days for B2C brands are Monday and Wednesday.
- Optimize Posts by Using LinkedIn Analytics
