Despite continuous reports of LinkedIn performing the best it ever has, a lot of its supposed ‘engagement’ is seemingly dominated by re-posts from other platforms, spam, oddly topical polls, and various other low-interest post types. What’s more, all of these were specifically designed to generate shallow engagement.
Feeding Time
Well, at least that’s the general feel of things. LinkedIn says that it’s working to improve this and today, LinkedIn has launched a new initiative to provide more transparency into how it plans to combat these elements and improve everybody’s LinkedIn experience.
As LinkedIn explains:
“Starting today and over the next several weeks, we’ll publish “Mythbusting the Feed”, a series of blog posts and on-platform content that will aim to provide greater insights into how our product works and addressing common misconceptions and assumptions. Our ultimate goal is to be transparent with you on how we think about the feed, and how things work.”
The first two videos in this new series are now active, with LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering Sabry Tozin explaining what kind of content LinkedIn seeks to amplify in-stream, as well as the alignment between profession and personal growth. The latter is probably a key focus note, with many seemingly off-topic posts potentially falling into the more ‘personal’ category.
If ever you’d be posting the same updates you share on Facebook to LinkedIn too, where your audience would likely be professionals and those within your peer network, well, you can just imagine the contrast. As Tozin explains, there is some crossover that’s acceptable and aligns with LinkedIn’s use case. This is an interesting insight to have – but really, what LinkedIn users apparently want to know more about is what gets more traction on the platform and what’s likely to be penalized by its algorithms.
LinkedIn hasn’t traditionally provided a heap of insight on this, but it has previously noted the following:
‘Dwell Time’ or how long users spend looking at an update to measure its relevance.
Posts explicitly asking users to engage via likes and reactions will see less reach.
Increased limitations on the number of polls that users see.
If you want to maximize content performance on LinkedIn, then it’d be best to avoid using these elements and focus instead on creating relevant, engaging posts with your target audience. Of course, it won’t stop some people from re-sharing viral posts from other apps as a means to lure cheap engagement.
The Wrap
LinkedIn’s hoping to be able to provide more oversight as to how it tackles such concerns with this new initiative, which could help you build a more effective and engaging presence on the platform. Though the first two videos mentioned above are fairly general, expect more to come, including:
Mythbusting the Feed: How the Algorithm Works and Personalizing the Feed
Mythbusting the Feed: Content Distribution and How We Work to Address Bias
Subscribe to our‘Bottoms Up!’ Newsletter. Get the latest social media blogs about news, updates, trends, and effective social media strategies to take your business to the highest level from Tristan Ahumada and Jeff Pfitzer.
Please note:
This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin.
Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
