LinkedIn? Is Testing Boosting Personal Posts. What’s It Mean?

We have had LinkedIn? ads for years. A couple years back, LinkedIn? introduced paid post boosting for Company Page posts, and then recently introduced boosted posts by company employees. Should we be surprised that post boosting for individuals could be next??

When you post, people in the test group are seeing a pop up that informs that says you could achieve a lot more views if you boosted the post. If you choose to boost the post you're taken to the LinkedIn? ads platform to set up your goals such as reach or clicks, and set up your target audience including variables like location, industry, job function, and job title. Boosting initially does not apply to polls, events or - no surprise here - job posts.?

While it is early days, here are some aspects I will be following.?

1) This may dilute the feed even further. It seems that every second post in my feed these days is boosted or promoted content of one type or another. Will it tip even further to more than fifty percent?

2) Will this drive more people away? There is conjecture that people will now find the feed of less value, but I am not so sure about that. If a television network changed from eight minutes of commercials per hour to eight and a half, would it suddenly drive a huge percentage of their customers away? Not if the other fifty one and half minutes of content in that hour were worthwhile.

3) As reach has diminished, this is an attractive idea. This also ties in with something most LinkedIn? users don’t really take into account: your reach is what I call “unstructured.” When I post, LinkedIn? will put my post in front of a small sample of my connections and followers, maybe five hundred people in my case. But…LinkedIn? selects those five hundred people, I don’t. And my connections and followers are made up of people who may wish to use my services, but also friends, colleagues from previous jobs, people whose services I use myself and so on. So out of those five hundred people who could see my post, maybe twenty percent of a hundred are in my true target audience.?

The big difference is that the boosted post is much more highly targeted than my regular post.?

4) People may be tempted to post more often to make up? for further declining reach. With the prevalence of AI this is something I can see happening. If I was posting on, say, Notifications, I could ask ChaptGPT to take that post and express it slightly differently four ways. Now instead of one post this week, I have my original and four more. Of course I risk having my core connections and followers not being impressed with my repetitive slight variations of the same post.??

5) Advertising on LinkedIn? has its weaknesses.? And the big one is that it is most effective for large audiences. This has to do with the way people use the platform. Around ten percent of users log in to LinkedIn? at least once a week. So if I want to reach four thousand people with my boosted post in the next week, the audience I set up with LinkedIn? needs to be at least forty thousand people.?

If you are looking at a small audience, boosting just may not be that effective.?

6) This whole discussion also ties in with my thoughts on the feed being diminished as a primary source of content on LinkedIn?. I have moved my thinking over the past couple years to the subscriber model of things. I subscribe to newsletters and via the profile bell to be notified about new content from people whose content I really want to see.?

Subsequent to this, I get almost all of my content via my LinkedIn? notifications. So I suppose in the end, boost away, I just don’t use the feed that much anymore.

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