Don't Take LinkedIn Algorithm Hacks Seriously, LinkedIn says

Listen to the podcast interview featuring Jason Feifer, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine and host of the?podcast, Daniel Roth (LinkedIn editor in chief), and Tim Jurka, a senior director of engineering at LinkedIn.

If you're interested in growing your reach on LinkedIn, you've probably seen people posting reports about how to hack the platform's algorithm.

These reports usually analyze large swaths of LinkedIn posts, and then draw granular conclusions — about the optimal time of day to post, optimal length of a post, how to include hyperlinks without dampening reach, and more.

Roth doesn't mince words: "That understanding is often incorrect."

The problem is twofold, he says. First, LinkedIn is constantly adjusting its algorithms, so signals from yesterday might not reflect the product today. But the larger issue is this: "It's a lot of causality, but not really understanding how things work."

Roth offers an example. Years ago, experts claimed that LinkedIn loved a certain style of longform writing. As a result, lots of people started writing in that long style.

But was LinkedIn actually rewarding posts in that style? No, Roth says.

"There was a button that said 'read more,' and when people clicked it, we were like, Well, this is a sign that people are getting knowledge out of this," Roth says. But as LinkedIn would learn, that wasn't true: The "read more" button just signaled that readers were curious about what came next — which didn't necessarily mean that the post itself was valuable to them. "As soon as we realized what people were doing, and that we had incorrectly attributed the 'read more' button as a signal that people were getting some value out of [a post], we just stopped using that as a signal."

Of course, the authors of these reports might beg to differ — arguing that their reports are a well-sourced snapshot of trends on the platform. But for people who want to optimize their posts, Roth offers this advice: Don't chase trends. "If you can just share knowledge into the world, I guarantee you things are going to work out," he says. "They won't always work out for every single post, but over the length of your posting, it is going to work out for you."

Read the original article at https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/with-this-linkedin-algorithm-change-your-best-posts-could/470219