LinkedIn's Reach is Broken (2024 Testing In Action)

If you've found this article through social shares & mentions here or on Twitter or other social directories like reddit, I'll preface this with the following:

I've been a LinkedIn supporter for over a decade, and I want the network to work again.

Seriously though, I joined 16 years ago and have been a pretty heavy user way before it was cool:

So, while most users would vent once and just leave a platform or site for good (there's plenty of fish in the sea), I'll keep trying.

The Delicate Balance of User Engagement

That social (and digital) exodus is more common than not.

• Myspace was the original social network
• Altavista and Yahoo were the definition of search
• Internet Explorer, Netscape, and partially Opera were sharing the browser market
• Snapchat came and took over some users from existing networks, until it didn't
• Instagram conquered the space... And got acquired by Facebook

Bottom line, small mistakes adding up lead to people bouncing to the next TikTok or another new kid on the block ready to provide better value and higher engagement.

Algorithm Changes and Transitions (2016 - today)

As a power user with over a decade of content production here, I wouldn't call myself an expert or a veteran, but I'm fairly acquainted with:

• The different content types available
• The rise and fall of content styles over time (video was the bomb in 2017-2018 and then declined and Documents took over)
• Some lesser-known or used features related to events, live streaming, my all-time favorite Newsletters (I was one of the first beta testers of Series before it became Newsletters)

And as an entrepreneur with an engineering degree, I rely on data patterns and trends when deciding to pivot. I also use additional tools to help measure data at scale (and compare with other platforms I'm active on).

So while algorithm changes kick in all the time and ruin our scheduling or content planning for good or bad, that tends to be a transition to a new type of format - long-form vs. short-form, selfies or stories (yes, LinkedIn had stories briefly), video or documents, more live events, more commenting - similarly to other social networks.

What I have NOT dealt with is such a heavy shift of reaching direct connections vs. the rest of the community.

Mind you, LinkedIn is boasting about 750 million users worldwide . With the current limit of 30,000 connections, stressing on contact reach vs. community is alarming - but that's not what I'm talking about here.

The 2024 Reach Is Broken

After dealing with a Q4 slowdown on LinkedIn (partially due to being swamped with Black Friday to Christmas campaigns and end-of-year contracts and deals), I dove deeper into the reach dynamics and discovered troublesome discrepancies.

• Document posts I've been posting weekly for years that used to generate 10,000+ views each dropped to about a thousand over the course of a few months (a 90% reach drop is a first). My last deck got 87 impressions with 20K+ followers in my circle!!!
• Some of my regular text posts received 200-400 views when they used to reach over a thousand users consistently
• While my follower count kept growing from about 18,000 to 21,000 over the year, my engagement kept going down

And even if the stats are wrong or the algorithm now favors a different content style, my professional peers suddenly stopped seeing my content.

We've been discussing decks and walkthroughs and articles and more over the past few years on business calls, partnership meetups, and masterminds - and out of nowhere, my content disappeared out of their feeds.

While I would assume it's been shadow-banned, I discovered that others in Bulgaria face similar challenges:

Others reached out directly and complained about feed visibility outside of the area.

I jumped in and looked into my general analytics - LinkedIn, Shield, and recently Taplio - and the results haven't been favorable at all.

The Reach Is Localized! ????

Here's what my subsequent discovery looked like (shared in a second post ):

Now about half of my content views come from Bulgaria while 20% of my contacts are in the US and another 20-25% are in Europe. Asia, South America, and other regions like Canada are adding up quickly as my network has been predominantly international for the past decade or so.

I made a few tests to verify that and it checks out across every single post. If I publish at 10pm or 11pm local time, I'll get a hundred views until the next day even though 5000 US and Canada contacts of mine and another 190 million LinkedIn users are awake and browsing.

Why Localized Reach is Not Universal?

Under normal circumstances - let's think of Facebook - localized reach may be okay more often than not. Why?

• People use Facebook to chat with high school friends, see their neighbors getting married, schedule walks in the park, talk about social issues in the municipality or regarding the town mayor and the like
• People search for restaurants, coffee shops, bars on Facebook, track down reviews, look at menus, schedule hairdressers or manicure appointments in the area
• Facebook is not a professional social network but rather a localized community platform of people you meet more often (school, classes, PTA meeting arrangements, family).

What makes this a dumb idea implemented in LinkedIn terms?

• LinkedIn is a B2B network. Professional relationships are international more often than not in a B2B environment
• Most people in B2B work in corporations. MNCs are international (as in global) and local reach may as well be discriminatory if staff members aren't given equal opportunities to influence decisions or make an impact on the organization
• Sales is often international. SaaS, products, most services are sold globally, with a heavier impact on 1st world economies, especially the English and Spanish-speaking countries
• Having more local contacts is normal - basing that decision on local network is a false premise. As mentioned earlier, high school alumni or local peers in business settings are bound to connect easier and faster - but that doesn't justify limiting the international reach
• Executives should connect with their teams, partners, clients internationally, not just situated in their hometown or their current city of origin. This is discriminatory again
• With the pandemic and remote work, millions of nomads have traveled and lived in different cities. How does that shape where they conduct business and who they want to connect with?

LinkedIn , Lift the Berlin Wall

In a world of globalization and with wars threatening our existence...

• the European Union sees additional demand and applications from countries like Ukraine to stay safe
• Bulgaria and Romania joining the Schengen area for easier travel and business relationships
• China and the US reigniting their business relationships after 5+ years in a trade war together

As Germany lifted the Berlin Wall in 1989 to unite Eastern and Western Germany, limiting the reach is the least sensible thing for a business professional network.

Many tens of millions of international students, full-time workers, solopreneurs follow the lessons of international industry influencers like Alex Hormozi, Gary Vee, Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, Dave Ramsey, Steven Bartlett, Brendon Burchard, Simon Sinek on networks like YouTube, Instagram or TikTok not limiting reach.

Experts thrive in different hubs but act globally - from the Bay Area in tech to the spreadout across cheaper states for tax reasons, to digital nomads, trade in Hong Kong or China, art, fashion, cooking in France or Italy, and so many reasons to travel or live somewhere and lean your contacts in a given direction.

My LinkedIn Transformation Experiments Now

Unless I hear otherwise from LinkedIn or the algorithm magically gets itself fixed, I'll take specific actions to try to balance the system and reach out.

First, starting with the Why?

• My agency has maintained about 70% US portfolio presence since 2012
• Our Shopify business has over 50% US stores
• With 400+ consulted clients via Growth Shuttle, only 15 of them were local and 320 in North America and Western Europe
• Out of my 15 angel investments to date, only 2 are local and 10 are in North America

What my network tends to represent locally is:

• Former contacts from school, universities, other peer networks (which may deemed as irrelevant or stalled for anyone changing interests, habits, or behaviors over time)
• Contacts met at conferences
• Lots of students and conference attendee at training courses or events I've spoken to
• A LOT of followers based in Bulgaria following my international content (blog, newsletters, videos, training content covering the global macro news with a heavier US focus)
• Recruiters
• Students of my content and training videos recorded a decade ago when I was still teaching technical courses as well

And while I have nothing against my local network WHATSOEVER, it appears that LinkedIn leans in on local contact ratio heavily.

To mitigate this, here's what I'm testing at the moment:

1. Shifting my posting times exclusively to very late European hours. More consistent US coverage may or may not help eventually (in the meantime, I'm dragging with 100-200 views per post - less than what a random tweet or an Instagram post of mine gets with no intent or value)
2. Cleaning up contacts based in Bulgaria. If you've been affected, I'm sorry and it's not personal - it's part of this experiment to try to maintain a certain balance of location and job types (titles or industries). I hope it's not permanent - but I'm also mindful of the 30,000 connections limit coming up eventually
3. Connecting with more US-centric contacts from older circles - companies I worked at, clients of ours, folks at networking events, community friends from my WordPress days - just leaning on US-centric contacts to test it out

I will keep iterating on these for the next few weeks and measure again.

But in the meantime, if anyone can escalate that to LinkedIn for a more sensible solution, that would be the best path forward.

Because once again, LinkedIn is not Facebook in a good way, and we better maintain and improve the B2B community here.