2023: A Year of LinkedIn

So, it's been a year. It was just over a year ago that I wrote an article for LinkedIn about how my friend and ex-colleague Rich Dansky was leaving Red Storm. It had been a while since I'd written anything long-form like that. In writing it, I rediscovered how much I loved a short essay. And a terrible pun.

Over the course of the year, I wrote a bunch of other articles. Thinking out loud about the game industry and telling stories about my own experiences is a fun way to turn lessons learned into digestible content. If you look at my recent engagement numbers (because this is social media, after all), you'll see a lot of people:

Maybe those numbers are small; I don't know. It seems like a lot to me, but this is all pretty new. Those are the numbers for the last 90 days. Before that, things look a little different:

In other words, only 70K views happened before the last 90 days. Or, 85% of the impressions I've created this year happened in the last 3 months. What happened 3 months ago? What caused that initial spike?

I called Tim Sweeney a liar. On September 28th, Epic laid off 840 people. I ran some numbers on why that was a drop in the bucket for them, and apparently, it resonated with people. You can see pretty clearly that prior to that, nothing I wrote hit more than 2K impressions in a day. That post hits about 25K that day, and then things start to get a lot more impressions.

Keep in mind that at this point, I'd been writing posts and articles fairly regularly - advertising roles, commenting on the trends and news of the day, writing think pieces on the industry - nothing does very much traffic until the Epic post hits. The article I write immediately after that gets the best numbers for any article I've published so far - I don't think the quality of the writing improved.

That mid-sized spike around the end of November was a throwaway post about women in the industry, but I guess that's still controversial enough that it got over 20K impressions - more than 10X what my posts were getting before Epic. The next big spike is a post on WFH - a hot topic, to be sure, but almost identical to a post I made a few months earlier that didn't get anything like the exposure.

My takeaway from this is that LinkedIn has certain thresholds in its algorithm - once you produce something that crosses a threshold, it increases the exposure of your content. No doubt, follower count has something to do with it as well - the more exposure, the more followers; the more followers, the more exposure.

That big spike at the end is basically one post, another polemic, about layoffs this time. It seems that one way to get a lot of exposure is to say things that other people also want to say. So, I did a test poll - something engineered to get engagement from people who felt like they had something to say.

It ranks about #32 in impressions, in spite of getting 144 votes, which is about 10X the number of reactions that the closest other posts in my list got this year. My most read article ranks #11 in views at 9K. That's about 1/10th of the Epic post, and, honestly, I wish it were the other way around.

I've tried everything over the last year - jokes, insights, pithy maxims, game development tips, stories. Politics is what generates engagement. Engagement drives visibility. I hope that visibility does something other than just replicate itself; hopefully, there is some good in it beyond simple existence. At the end of the day, I could care less about social media.

The people whose opinions I care about are the ones that I've worked with. What they think means the world to me. How many clicks something gets, not so much.

The other thing that's important to me is helping people - in whatever small way, by adding to their knowledge, their understanding, or just giving them the sense that someone else out there knows the experience they're going through.

So I hope that this weird little lens into how LinkedIn works is valuable for you.