Welcome to a new episode. I hope you have had a great week.

Apparently, at LinkedIn they have a saying;

 “People You Know, Talking About Things You Care About.”

And so they have announced that they have been adjusting our feed algorithm to give us exactly that. I had noticed this change over the last few months and posted about it a couple of weeks ago;

Now LinkedIn have detailed these changes publicly so I thought I would take a deep dive into what this means to us.

More of that later…….

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

• Microsoft Deepens Its Dip Into LinkedIn’s Data
• Oleg posts his first ever video post….proving once and for all that he really does exist!

• Mike Winnet has launched his first book ‘How to get a #1 Amazon Best-seller’. Just read the reviews for a good laugh!

• LinkedIn have been asking members more about their connections in this survey. I’m curious to know how they intend to use the information – perhaps it will help them make our feed more personal (see main topic) or maybe it’s just to improve the ‘suggested connections’ you see in ‘My Network’

• Quuu is a product that lets you share external links to LinkedIn, it’s lazy ‘content marketing’ at it’s worst but this is even worse! They have now brought out Quuu pods. As opposed to engagement pods this product is for content pods where people post their content (urls) and everyone in the pod posts it to their followers – you can do it manually but I suspect that most Quuu users will do it automatically. This is non-sensical! It’s classic content spam.

• The Dark Side of LinkedIn Content – Quite possibly the worst, most cynical post I have ever seen on LinkedIn!

The interesting debate here is whether it’s a good idea to comment and ‘call out’ Kirsty for her actions. It’s clear that some readers think it’s genuine so perhaps they have a point. On the other hand, commenting gives the post more exposure. What do you think?

LinkedIn Updates

The much criticised new ‘Page invites’ feature that I talked about in episode 249  has been temporarily suspended. The rumour is that it will return once they have added a way of opting out of these annoying invitations.

Well done LinkedIn for listening to your members. I also hope they move these invites into notifications.

A Sincere Apology!

In last weeks show, I mistakenly talked about a TEDx talk by Sandra Clark when I should have said Sandra Long! – Huge apologies to both Sandra’s!

Feeds Get More Personal

LinkedIn typically don’t like to talk about their algorithm publicly, in fact they prefer to avoid telling us anything useful but this week they released a few articles about how they have recently redesigned our feeds.

If you want to read the somewhat heavy and boring technical pieces the links are below;

• Community-Focused Feed Optimization
• Communities AI: Building Communities Around Interests on LinkedIn

If you are like me and you find yourself drifting off after 2 mins reading all that techie stuff then you might find this piece from Pete Davies more digestible!

What’s in your LinkedIn feed: People You Know, Talking About Things You Care About

My thoughts;

• This is the first time I have seen LinkedIn admit that not all posts from those you follow appear in your feed
• I very rarely see any posts from Groups I’m in (thank goodness!) or hashtags that I follow although I have seen notifications about connections posts ‘trending’ in hashtags.
• Comments, Likes and Shares of others content means your content is more likely to appear in their feed.
• The things we have in common in profiles must be skills, current or previous companies and other ‘hard data’, not keywords. Make sure you consider this when updating your profile.
• LinkedIn want to reward conversations so posts with extensive comments and replies are prioritised. Whilst replies have visibility issues (they don’t make a post appear in our feed) they are clearly important in boosting the ranking and therefore visibility of a post. This is another reason why we should always reply to comments and ideally try to avoid ‘shutting the conversation down’.
• If conversations are rewarded we should perhaps save some of our content for comments. For instance, you could write a headline and mention some of your points in the main post but save 2 or 3 others for separate comments. This way you may be able to extend the conversation.
• Interests (following groups, companies & people) are signals to the algorithm – when a follower matches yours they are more likely to see your post, comment, like or share.
• Hashtags are especially important. If you use the most followed (relevant) hashtags in your post (3 max), there is a greater chance your post will be seen by your followers – less so people who follow the hashtag unless they are followers – this is described as giving an ‘extra boost’.
• The algorithm doesn’t favour any type of post (although it does when they first launch them!). This doesn’t mean that all types are equal though as it’s not all about the algorithm – how we (the LinkedIn users) react is equally as important. It would also seem that more types of posts are on the way…..I wonder what they could be…..audio, GIFs, Events or even Checking in?
• @mentions are important but there could be a penalty for tagging people that don’t respond. The 5 max recommendations seems sensible to me.

Overall a really interesting article and the improvements to our feeds are evident for us all to see.

Over 10,000 likes, circa 500 comments and over half a million views – Boom!

What makes this post so successful?

• She is clearly influential and has a loyal following. Only 264 connections yet 3986 followers
• She has a relationship with LinkedIn. Could they have boosted her post?
• First 3 secs shows an ordinary scene we can relate to and a normal person (not a model)
• First 3 lines include emotive words ‘desperate’ and ‘slackers’
• A very topical subject that people have strong feelings about
• Workplace and work/life balance topics often invoke a reaction on LinkedIn. So many active recruiters, HR professionals and job seekers plus in this case many people who are solopreneurs and can probably relate to this issue
• A high percentage of comments are from women, clearly this is an issue many women feel strongly about.
• Incredibly this was the second time she posted this video. The first was a week before with no subtitles and it received a similar amount of views and engagement. Interesting that the algorithm did not penalise duplicated content (although the text was changed slightly).

I have 1,000s of contacts which I am in frequent correspondence with and want to be able to manage these relationships and not let any message replies
slip through the net.

I was wondering if you knew a way which I can overcome this, preferably with free account.
Is there a way to set reminders or set forward activities so I can keep in touch with people (similar to a CRM)?

It’s a great question and one that has proven to be a dilemma I also face. I can understand why LinkedIn haven’t designed a solution as it will probably encourage spam from many users.

My system is pretty manual at the moment although I do also use Salesflare which works well with Gmail but not LinkedIn.

Does anyone else have any elegant solutions for this problem?

That’s it for this week. Get in touch if you have any questions, comments or suggestions for show content.

Have a great week.