The Case For Two Feeds

“Why should I bother creating awesome content, when it is arbitrarily limited by my connection network and not the quality of the content?”

I saw this comment in a thread this week and do you know what, it’s a really good point! …I think LinkedIn needs another feed, a feed where content is purely there because the algorithm thinks we will be interested - connecting, following and relevance do not count - just the quality and subject of the content.

(The following is a written summary of the latest episode of the LinkedInformed podcast, see the bottom of this article for a link)

More of that later but first…

Interesting Stuff I Saw This Week

Kate Lister got in touch to highlight the comments thread in a post she saw this week.

Clearly, this is an emotive subject and Greta is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea…neither is the Australian TV host but it is really quite amazing how some people seem to completely forget that they are commenting on a professional platform, a platform where their customers, potential customers or employer/potential employers can see these comments!

The same issue came up this week when Maddy Alexander-Grout posted this…

Maddy said she did this experiment to see what reaction she would get when showing a bit of cleavage. Many of the comments in the thread are very supportive and friendly and then there are these ones (apart from Michael Pallottas) which are a whole different type of ‘friendly’!

…”Let’s connect and grow together”, really Arvind?!!! ??

When will people learn? Fortunately for us all, these situations are relatively rare on LinkedIn in comparison the Facebook but they do seem to be happening more often.

Prioritize The Most Impactful Actions With Our Reimagined Sales Navigator Homepage Experience The quarterly product update for LinkedIn Sales Navigator announces some pretty good changes. I especially like the priority accounts feature.

Kevin D Turner informed me this week that LinkedIn help has admitted to him that not all of your newsletters subscribers will be notified when you post a new article…What?!!!

This is potentially worrying, I say potentially only because it is quite possible that Sagarika has got notifications and posts in the feed mixed up…it won’t be the first time LinkedIn Help have got it completely wrong!

If it is true, it’s a complete disgrace! If I sign up for a newsletter, I’m doing so because I want to see it…Doh! Stop allowing the algorithms to interfere with what we are expressly asking for.

New Profile Design.

This week some users are seeing a new design in the profiles of others. This update has just started rolling out for the viewer, not the profile owner. I quite like the changes but they are mostly cosmetic.

These changes are only for the desktop app at the moment.

The new Featured section looks great and the About section above it (for all now inc Creators) has a 4 line preview, an extension of 1 line. It’s hard to know if this will help or not, I’m worried it will result in less ‘see more’ clicks but the truth is, we will never know the answer to that! Recommendations are not an improvement and less user-friendly and you still can’t re-order them!!

Feedback from previous episodes

Having listened to episode 341 Sandra Long got in touch regarding the services review feature. She agreed that about asking for reviews primarily from customers/clients and had gone a step further and taken the time to specify which of her services she was asking the client to review. This seemed like a good strategy but unfortunately, LinkedIn hadn’t considered this when designing the review feature ??.

Reviews are not aligned to any specific service, just you.

Yet another example of the poor understanding that LinkedIn designers have of how we actually use this platform. Maybe they will add this feature in the future.

Mark Lee also got it touch regarding a message he has received from LinkedIn about a new feature that allows you to link your services to your company page. This is a great idea!

In episode 340 , I talked about the benefits of authenticity, especially regarding posting and content. This week I saw this brilliant post from Laura Taylor which sums up everything I covered in that episode. A brilliant example that should serve as a warning to anyone who is starting to accelerate their growth as a business…stop listening to ‘business experts’ who are not skilled and knowledgeable in social media, LinkedIn, and content generally. The traditional approach to business growth and marketing will likely take you away from the authentic approach that got you to where you are.

The Case For Two Feeds

This topic was inspired by a couple of comments I saw in a recent post.

This really got me thinking. I think Ben and Michelle both make great points and I think Linkedin could definitely learn something here from TikTok.

I’m not a big user of TikTok, I’ve never posted but I do enjoy browsing through my feed…mainly for entertainment purposes. For those of you who haven’t tried TikTok, it has multiple feeds - Following, ‘For You’ and Live and the default feed is ‘For You’

The 'For You' feed is purely based on the algorithm, the Follow feed is based on who you have chosen to follow (with algorithm influence), which is the same as the LinkedIn homepage feed.

When I first started using TikTok I was served up popular content in the ‘For You’ feed that, based on my profile, the algorithm guessed I might like so inevitably, much of it was irrelevant. Very quickly I noticed that the ‘machine’ started to learn what I was pausing on and engaging with and my feed began to improve…so much so that I now rarely bother changing the feed to Following.

The problem with having just the one feed on LinkedIn is that, once we start to follow a decent amount of people, the content we see is exclusively from those we follow or a post that they have engaged with. Hashtags posts we follow can sometimes appear which may provide you with the opportunity to see content from people you don’t follow but these seem to have a low priority in our feed so, if those you follow are active, we rarely see them.

So the only chance we have of discovering new content authors is via those we follow. This means that Authors can find it difficult to reach a wider audience.

If you want to see content from different creators you have to build a large network/follow a lot of people or use keyword searching (a technique I highly recommend).

If LinkedIn added a ‘For You’ feed as a default feed, or even better allow users to change the default to whichever they prefer, everyone would benefit. Creators would gain more visibility, viewers would get to see a wider range of content and LinkedIn would benefit from more engagement and longer session times.

I’m really struggling to see a downside to this…can you?

Post Of The Week

We had quite a few good nominations this week. Before I reveal the winner, I wanted to give a special mention to this one from Tracie Murray. It really is an excellent post, using a TikTok video to share a very important message with her LinkedIn community.

I was very tempted to make this one the winner due to the amazing engagement numbers but it’s not original content and whilst there is nothing wrong with cross-platform sharing of someone else content, I prefer to pick a winner that is more original.

I really hope that some keyboard warriors watch this video and reflect on the hurt their words create on others.

This weeks amazing winner is from Joeli Brearley. I wanted to highlight it for several reasons;

• A great subject that is topical and comment-worthy
• Highly relatable subject to a wide demographic but is especially relevant to her target audience. She will have likely gained a lot of highly relevant new followers as a result of this post.
• Excellent use of an external article without ruining the reach by using a link to the article itself. Many others would have automatically read the piece and then posted with a link, which would limit the visibility of the post*. Joeli has done the right thing here…The Times do not require our support (at the expense of engagement) so all she has done is taken a screenshot of the article and added her brilliant statement. She can then sit back and watch it fly!
• *The algorithm does not throttle the reach of posts with links, that theory is a myth but it does favour content that attracts engagement and external link posts attract less engagement (unless your audience is already highly engaged). The likely outcome of a linked post is to click on the link before engaging with the post - this discourages the algorithm to further distribute the post.

That’s all for this week. Did you find that useful, enjoyable or stimulating? If so drop me a DM on LinkedIn and let me know why.

If you didn’t then do the same and add your constructive (and most welcome) feedback on what I could do differently.

Until next time…

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts ?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts