Welcome back to another show. This week I’m chatting with Andy Foote about the talk given by a LinkedIn executive called ‘creator-side optimization and incentives in social networks’.

This was a very interesting a quite revealing insight into how LinkedIn adjusted their algorithm earlier this year to counter what they described as a ‘perverse incentive’ where superstar content producers were being given too much visibility on our homepage feeds.

More of that to come but first……

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Not much to report this week other than LinkedIn release of their transparency report for the first half of 2018.  It was interesting to see that there were 15 content removal requests in that period, nine of which were from China and only one of the fifteen was refused – is this censorship in action?

LinkedIn Updates

I reported last week that you can now access saved articles on desktop. Articles and external links can now be saved from desktop as well.

Vimeo Users Can Now Post Videos Directly to LinkedIn

A somewhat misleading headline! firstly you have always been able to post videos to LinkedIn, the difference is that you can now post ‘Native’ videos on LinkedIn from Vimeo. This would be quite significant BUT for the fact that this only relates to company posts! If you connect your Vimeo account to your company page you can now post native videos directly from Vimeo.

I can’t connect my company page so I can’t test it but John Espirian has and these are his comments on this new feature;

Embedded posts from LinkedIn have been playing up recently so if you don’t see the post above, just click on this link;

NEW – People also searched for

When performing a basic search in the “all results’ page you can now see a ‘People also searched’ field which are links to perform that search instead (Premium only)

Feed Ranking Model with Andy Foote

What do we see in our feed and is it what we want to see? LinkedIn realised earlier this year that there was a problem and they have fixed it….or have they?

I chat with Andy Foote about the below talk given by Bonnie Barrilleaux

You can also read the full blog post at https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2018/10/linkedin-feed-with-creator-side-optimization

The Feed Ranking Model was adjusted earlier this year to give ‘smaller’ creators a better chance of having their content seen by those that are ‘Close’ or ‘Care about them’

We get into a wide range of topics around this subject including;

• How should we be measuring the success of our content? Likes, Comments, Views or the relevance of those we engage with
  Does the algorithm determine how many people initially see our post or who…or is it both?
  Content quality is still important but what can we do to impact WHO sees it?
  How do they assess who ‘cares’ about us?
  Does this favour large company employees (more colleagues)? Surely having their content shared to colleagues isn’t actually that useful to them!
  What other actions help the algorithm decide?
  Poor quality content (ie promotional) will result in negative feedback such as hiding content.
  How do we ever reach prospects if they never engage?
  Will the silent observers will stop seeing our content
  What can we do to prevent this?

What are your thoughts? Get in touch by sending me a voice message (see orange link on the right edge of this page) or send me a message on LinkedIn

That’s it for this week. I’m at Websummit next week where I will try to get an episode out but if I don’t manage it, I will be back the week after.