The LinkedIn Algorithm Explained + How to Make it Work for You

LinkedIn is a great place to get your content seen by the right people, but you need to know how the LinkedIn algorithm works to make sure you are maximizing your exposure.

To put it in simple terms, LinkedIn measures dozens of factors to predict how relevant your content will be to your audience, and they rank it accordingly. It then pushes your post to a small sample of your audience and waits to see if they engage. Depending on how that first test goes, it then decides whether to push it to more people and continue testing, or to stop showing it in the feed.

*1. When you post, LinkedIn puts it in one of three buckets.*

1. Spam

2. Low quality

3. High quality

So what separates LinkedIn identifying your content as spam, low quality, or high quality?

Getting around the spam filter is easy...

* Use bad grammar

* Don't use multiple links

* Don't tag more than 5 people

* Don't post more than every 3 hours

* Don't use hashtags like "follow," "comment," or "like."

Now getting distinguished as high quality vs low quality is the tricky part... here's some things to keep in mind...

* Only tag people if you know they will respond

* Use around 3 hashtags, one should be more broad, the next a little more niche, and the last very niche (example: "#socialmedia," "#b2bsocialmedia")

* Format your post so it's easy to read

* Go niche vs broad on your topics

* Post things that encourage a response (easy way to do this is by asking a question)

* Don't use outbound links (put them in comments)

* Use strong keywords

*2. If you passed "go," your content temporarily appears in your followers' feeds.*

This is where "Golden hour" comes in. What is golden hour? It's the FIRST hour after you share a post on Linkedin, and it's vital to your post's success.

LinkedIn measures the initial engagement to see if it's worthy of moving on into other people's feeds. If your post does well in the first hour, its much more likely to do well all day, week, or month.

If no ones sees your post or interacts with it in the first hour... well... rest in peace to that post.

*When it comes to golden hour, here are some do's and don'ts*

DO:

* Post at a time when your followers are online.

* Ask a question to spark engagement.

* Interact with other posts while your post is in its first hour.

* Follow a consistent posting schedule so your followers know when to check for new posts.

* Respond to anyone who engages.

DON'T:

* Just post and forget. You need to come back to the post and interact with any comments.

* Tag people unless you know at least one of them will respond within an hour.

* Go back and edit your post. In my experience, this weakens the reach.

*3a. If they’re liking it, commenting on it, or sharing it, you’ll make it through to the next filter and appear in more feeds.*

If you want your content to continue into more and more feeds, you NEED to be constantly re-engaging with comments and interactions.

Golden rule of golden hour: Don't just post and ghost.

*3b. If people mark it as spam, hide it from their feed, or just ignore it, LinkedIn is going to penalize your content.*

Don't spam your followers, please.

*4. As long as it keeps getting engagement, your post stays in the mix and continues to be distributed in the feed.*

Linkedin has three ranking signals to determine what you see in your feed:

1. Personal connections

To determine which posts are most personally related to members, LinkedIn considers...

* Who you work with/have worked with

* Who you’ve interacted with before

2. Interest relevance

* LinkedIn algorithm evals what groups you're in & the hashtags, people, and pages you follow

* The algorithm also looks at the language of the post, and the companies, people, and topics mentioned in it

3. Engagement probability

* First the algorithm evaluates the likelihood that you will share, comment, or react to a post

* The model also takes into account timely feedback to content creators. (the quicker it starts raking in interactions, the more likely LinkedIn is to include it in the feeds of others)

The more you interact with others daily -> the more people will engage back -> the more you'll be seen in other people's feeds.

"BUT WHAT SHOULD I POST!?"

LinkedIn has several content types which all rank differently in the algorithm and get much different responses from your audience.

OUTBOUND LINKS

LinkedIn wants you to stay ON the platform, so if u link OFF of the platform, LinkedIn will penalize you. To share a link, leave it in the comments.

SHARES

Re-sharing is fine but people won't engage with you- they will engage with the original post.

LI ARTICLES, LI LIVE, SLIDES, ETC

Any time a social media platform releases a new or unique content type, they usually try to favor that content type in newsfeeds.

PHOTOS

If the images are unrelated or doesn't really support your copy there isn't an inherent advantage in the algorithm to support using them.

VIDEO

People have very short attention spans on social media, so your audience is more likely to engage with something that is more easy to digest than video. Get to the point right away and keep it brief.

TEXT BASED POSTS

Text gets better results than anything else here on LinkedIn. It's not because LinkedIn ranks text any better than video/photo... but because people tend to read text posts more often than they watch videos.

"BUT WHERE DO I START!?"

Here's my advice: LinkedIn is an incredible place to share content. There's over 500 million users, and only 1% post regularly. So if you just start posting ONCE per week, you'll instantly be in the top 1%.

Diversify your content types- video, text, etc. & see what works for you. Find the outliers & identify what type of post they are. Then go heavy in that direction.