Connections

LinkedIn connections: Do you need them? How many is enough? Are they overrated? Is it better to have followers?

Welcome to this weeks LinkedInformed.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

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More about connections later but first I wanted to discuss the article that has caused much chat that Linda Leung published recently.

Changes to the Feed

I've seen a lot of dramatic headlines this weeks such as;

LinkedIn is clamping down on engagement-bait posts that explicitly ask people to like and comment

and

LinkedIn is going to punish the explicit call to action to like or comment on a post

This all sounds a bit concerning so I thought I would delve into Lindas' article and decipher the LinkedIn code (ie what they really mean).

You can read the full article here;

Keeping your feed relevant and productive

Here's my interpretation into normal, day to day 'non-silicon valley' English!

A very verbose way of stating that they have added 'remove connection' to the 3 dot menu!

Only available in the US but interesting all the same.

On a similar note, I recently heard about a member who works in Europe but went home to India and noticed that the news about the Ukrainian war was quite different there. He felt that perhaps it might be useful for his connections to see that a different picture of the war was being portrayed in what he saw as a more balanced way in India. His post got taken down within an hour!

I haven't seen the post, so he may have been breaking the rules in some other way but it is alarming how LinkedIn seem to be coming down hard on content portraying anything other than the general narrative being put out in western countries. I suspect they have had to program their bots to counter the notorious Russian propaganda bot farms but this incident does make you think about where that censorship line should be.

I hope this intro paragraph is not suggesting more career and job seeker related content will be favoured...I doubt it, LinkedIn want to believe we are all job seekers so they tend to use phrases like 'Career growth & development' without really meaning just that.

Updates that matter: this is so vague, it's almost comical! We have never seen all the activity from every single one of our connections! I really can't see anything new in this statement.

News and insights: This is probably referring to Creator mode. The suggestion is that we will see content from creators we are not connected to who post about subjects that we care about, which means that we see content from creators who have certain hashtags associated with their profile that are related to topics we have previously shown interest in, either through engagement or information in our profile (probably both). I suspect this will only occasionally happen and when it does, we are given the option to follow that person. As seen in the example on the left

This is the one that has caused all those sensational headlines!

There is NO MENTION of comments here at all! Linda makes it clear this refers to 'Likes & reactions' only.

I think this must be related to those 'reaction vote' image posts that ask you to vote with a ?? for option A and ?? for option B ?? for option C etc.

What is less clear is how they will be able to spot such posts and limit their reach. That said, I do believe that some sort of image scanning occurs in the post-approval process (hence why you never see nudity etc) so I guess they have just reprogrammed that to look for reaction emoji images.

It's no coincidence that this change is happening in conjunction with the final one mentioned...

This was long overdue wasn't it? It's been in place for a while now and my feed is better for it. Polls are useful and occasionally interesting but we saw way too many of them. The explanation is a bit weird, suggesting we previously saw polls from people we didn't follow...which never happened unless someone you followed reacted or commented on the poll. We just saw stacks of them because LinkedIn decided to count a vote as equal standing to a comment!

A 16 year old gets his post taken down due to high engagement...or maybe something else!

This is a weird tale of a young lad who is really good at chess and wanted to find sponsors on LinkedIn so he did this post;

Elliot only had 19 connections so it was a bit of a shot in the dark...then something very strange happened, the post gained 80,000 impressions within 1 hour!!

WHAT?!!!

1.5 million impressions were reached within 12 hours before LinkedIn took the post down.

So what happened here?

Elliot is a chess grandmaster and clearly a very clever lad...had he worked out a way to game the algorithm?

Did LinkedIn notice that a very large number of reactions had come from the same IP address?

Or maybe it was just noticed by someone who has a very large network and decided to comment on it very quickly.

LinkedIn investigated this and decided to put the post back up, either because they found nothing suspicious or they wanted to avoid bad publicity...footnote: a big thanks to Bruce Johnston for tipping me off about this article

If you click on the image post above, you can see the translation and you will see that there is nothing in the post to cause it to be banned. It can only be suspicious engagement activity that led to the problem and whether Elliot was involved in that or not will remain a mystery.

What do you think happened?

Connections

I've seen a lot of debate recently about the benefits and otherwise of connecting vs following, largely driven by the enforced profile change that those that enable Creator mode have to make in changing their primary profile button from 'Connect' to 'Follow".

So I thought I would wade in with my thoughts on this matter.

To be clear, I enabled 'Follow' as the primary option a long time ago and well before it was forced on Creators.

I firmly believe followers should be different from connections.

A connection should be someone you already have, or wish to develop, a relationship with.

This is what I believe, but I totally understand why people connect outside of this because LinkedIn allows many more privileges with those we are connected to. I think LinkedIn want us to follow the above statement but if are serious about that, they need to change some things.

Let's first list those features unique to being connected;

1. Free, limitless direct messages
2. You can write/receive a recommendation
3. Skill endorsements
4. Their primary email address is visible in contact info (default setting)
5. You will see posts they react to in your feed (depending on your relevance to them)
6. You will see posts they comment on, together with their comment
7. You can see a list of some of their connections and you can filter that list (if their settings allow - default does)
8. Their 1st and 2nd tier connections become part of your network and thereby visible to you in your search results (not applicable to Recruiter licence holders)

Points 1-4 and 7 all make perfect sense to me and are appropriate only for those you want a relationship with.

Points 5 & 6 however are less obviously suitable for connections only. As the saying goes 'comments are content' so I would want my followers to see my comments and posts I engage with, equally, I feel I would benefit from seeing the engagement of those I follow. This fact makes it tempting to connect with people so that I can influence and be more visible to them from my engagement activity, it is after all at least 5 times more frequent than my posting activity.

Point 8 is one that Recruiters (without a Recruiter licence) tend to be most aware of and one of the reasons that they seem to connect to pretty much anyone they can! If you want to be easy to find on LinkedIn, you do need to connect with quite a lot of people (thousands not hundreds) and you can't possibly maintain relationships with that amount. It does seem to be an incentive to over connect for those that understand the impact it has on your visibility in search results - that said, it's probably true to say that not many LinkedIn users would know that.

Exception: Whilst I advocate the relationship approach to connecting for most people, I would have to agree that when you first start posting content, it can be very difficult to get any momentum without followers and one easy way to get followers is to connect with lots of people! It's not ideal but it's probably worth connecting with a wider range of people until you can get to a position where your content is able to get decent traction.

At this stage, I would advise switching your profile to follow as the primary option and then only connect with people you wish to develop a relationship with...despite this, you will still get a steady stream of invitations to connect and you will need to reject the vast majority of them but that's OK because they now automatically become followers (which is probably all they wanted anyway).

Post Of The Week

There is so much to like about this gem from Enrique. He manages to mention his coffee business whilst simultaneously revealing elements of his personality and providing us with a thought-provoking message. c47,000 agree plus 2,230 comments - bravo, well done sir!

That's it for this week.

I hope you find these newsletter interesting and useful. Let me know if you have any feedback or topic suggestions for future issues.

This article has also been recorded as a podcast;

Linkedinformed on Google podcasts?/?Linkedinformed on Apple podcasts