Destination Digital

What’s the impact of the latest LinkedIn algorithm updates in 2022?

It’s all change on LinkedIn with some new algorithm updates to “improve” the end user experience on the platform. There is an emphasis on pushing employee posts to help boost exposure, so now is the time to get your employees on board to help your brand.

There have been some recent updates to the algorithm so read on to find out more.

 

First principles on the quality of content on LinkedIn 

On this platform, each piece of content is firstly filtered into one of three categories, and they are:

  1. spam
  2. low quality
  3. high-quality

Straight and to the point we feel, but sometimes there’s no point in beating around the bush.

Obviously, if you post out what clearly could be considered to be spam your content is going to get nowhere fast. However, your non-spam posts aren’t given any immediate love either and are then thrown to the wolves to see how they fare.

LinkedIn will show your content to a small group of followers first to see how they react to your carefully crafted missive. If your post gets engagement in the first hour, LinkedIn will rank it a little higher and a wider audience will then be reached by your post as the platform continues to test it out with the audience.

Engagement is King on LinkedIn posts, and this includes any engagements you put out on your own post in the comments too.  Any replies, emoticons and other interactions you contribute to the conversation counts towards your engagement score, so now is the time to actually be a sociable creature on social media!

If you have a personal profile that ranks as an “All-Star profile” then engagements by these ranked accounts will be prioritised as well, so you get extra Brownie points for keeping your LinkedIn profile up-to-date and tidy.

So what’s new on LinkedIn?

Top of the pile of priorities for ranking well on LinkedIn is engagement, where quality content that generates interactions will bring you back into the home feed more frequently.

Proper grammar and spelling counts, so leave slang and text-speak at the door when on the LinkedIn platform. LinkedIn also likes you to share an image or a video along with the text of your posts, and especially loves the carousel format – so put together something that’s eye-catching if you are playing the game with the platform.

Posts without outbound links get more reach than posts that contain links. So LinkedIn is playing the Instagram game here by trying to keep everybody “on platform”. Moreover, the algorithm penalises posts with outbound links, and so posting your link in the comment is the way to get around this.  It’s quite annoying from a user-friendly point of view if you spot something on your home feed that piques your interest and you just want to read about it, but what can we do until LinkedIn decides to tweak this back again?

Keeping your posting routine to within office hours. Monday to Friday, 11am to 5pm are the best times to post, so keep it to business hours when posting. Just like other social platforms the first 60 minutes after content has been posted are crucial for determining whether your post will be a success or not. The same goes for Reels over on Instagram, and so figuring out what time works best for you is crucial for you being able to post at an optimal point in time.

A way you can manipulate this ‘first golden hour’ is to enlist the help of your employees by asking them to share and comment on your posts as soon as they go live. This will help your post get the legs it needs to reach a wider audience.  Enlist the help of your employees to help your brand get its message out there a little further.

On the flipside, don’t ask people explicitly to like a post as this is a red flag in the LinkedIn algorithm. So the simple act of asking for likes, comments and follows could end up having your post demoted in the feed.

A cool feature for Company page Admins

Anyone who runs a Company page, or a series of Company pages like we do, will have found it very frustrating to toggle between personas in order to work the platform effectively. Sometimes even knowing which persona you are in can be confusing at times – answering questions as yourself when you should be answering as a brand for instance.

There is a new toggle feature (see the picture above) that allows you to switch personas in order to react, comment and share as a Company page or your personal profile, or to toggle between the two to do both, and this is a fantastic new feature. You can spot this in the drop down menu to the left of the like, comment, share and send palette of tools on the bottom of posts.

At time of writing we can see that older Company page posts have just disappeared from our Company pages even though the notifications still take you to the original posts.  So no doubt there is something else cooking right now as we type.  August is usually a time of change on social media platforms, and so it might be that we are experiencing a temporary aberration related to a soft roll out. Watch this space for more!

 

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