One Year, One Post a Day: What I learnt about LinkedIn, Google Cloud and myself

Exactly one year ago, I published the first of overall 350 References of the Day (ROTD). In these daily stories, Google Cloud customer success cases and their learnings are summarized in a few sentences. I want to take today’s milestone to reflect on what I learnt about LinkedIn, our Google Cloud business, and myself in the 12 months.

LinkedIn’s algorithms

It was interesting to see how LinkedIn’s algorithms changed over time. In the first few months, posts saw engagement for various days. Even though my (Google) network was significantly smaller by then, the amount of views per post per week was around 30% higher than it is today (12,000/week vs. 9,000/week). Over time, posts needed to attract the attention of the audience within the first hour; otherwise, they would significantly underperform. These days, it is also rare to see meaningful engagement on a post after 6-8 hours. It feels like this is not only a result of an overall & general higher amount of posts on LinkedIn, but a strategy to get people to post more in ever shorter time spans.

Although the average amount of views per post saw decreasing trends over time, the reverse was true for the conversion of views to likes. In the first half of 2020, the ROTDs typically needed around 80 views per like. In 2021, the typical numbers are usually below 75. Arguably, the most recent customer stories are not as cool as the ones in the first months — even with Google’s immense portfolio, it gets more and more difficult to identify incredible references —, but the trend does not reflect this at all. 

The primary reason is probably that the algorithms have become a lot better in predicting who to serve the ROTDs to: the share of Google employees that see the content has gone up over time, and friends from other (meaning: non-Google) companies tell me that they see the customer stories less often. I do understand that algorithms need to be optimized on KPIs for commercial success, but I feel that this trend towards echo chambers and increasingly closed communities is unfortunate, particularly on a business platform such as LinkedIn. I would really like to see more input from different sources, but my timeline these days pretty much is only filled by Google Cloud content. If this continues, I am not sure if I will stay here long-term. LinkedIn has always been a place for me to learn, and it feels like this is increasingly harder and harder to achieve.

You don’t know your audience as well as you think

Numerous times I was totally sure that a certain ROTD would turn out to be very popular, just to see it lacking engagement. And then there were stories such as the ones from Swiss Re (31,000 views), Starling Bank (14,000 views), Media Markt Saturn (8,000 views) or Decathlon (8,000 views) that saw broad and unexpected success.

Digital Natives saw a bit less of success than Traditional corporations (78 vs. 76). Retail (65), Life Science (69), Tech (70) and Public (71) saw the highest popularity.

Regarding the product portfolio, the customer stories with the best view/like ratio were:

• Infra Mod (70) — e.g. Compute Engine (GCE), VMware Engine (GCVE) or SAP on GCP
• Machine Learning (74) — e.g. Contact Center AI, Dialogflow, Document AI, IoT, Talent AI and Vision AI
• Collaboration/Workspace (75)
• App Mod (78) — e.g. Anthos, Apigee, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine (GKE)
• Smart Analytics (78) — BigQuery, Looker and Marketing use cases
• Other (81) — e.g. Maps, co-innovation partnerships

Motivation changes

One year ago, greenfield accounts constantly looked at us in disbelief when we mentioned that Google was doing more than just Ads. The ROTDs were a direct answer to this (frustrating) status quo. The original goal was to 1) better understand the value Google Cloud can bring to traditional corporations and society, and 2) indirectly capture the attention of IT decision makers in our customer base. We have seen many benefits throughout this time, but sales conversions was not one of them — at least nobody in my customer base ever mentioned that it affected their decision for or against Google Cloud. If this is what you use LinkedIn for, it might not be the best medium to dedicate your energy to.

Having said this, plenty of other great things derived from the initiative, such as internal networking with colleagues from all over the globe, or external partners reaching out for more information and identifying collaboration potential on certain accounts. With Covid-19, posting ROTDs every day at 8.30 AM in the morning was something that had a decisive positive impact on my mental well-being. It was what gave my days at least some structure, and the visionary customer use cases made it clear to me why I do what I do. It has also helped to have an arsenal of war stories for customer interactions, which is highly useful for bringing life to technological solutions that are not always easy to grasp. 

My personal key learning is that a structural approach to the Why, What and How is something that gives me energy and great returns. Independent of whether the ROTDs continue or not in my working life, I plan to transfer this learning also to my private life.

All of the views above are my personal opinion and shall not be considered an official opinion of Google/Alphabet.