LinkedIn Algorithm 2023
LinkedIn Algorithm and How it Works in 2023
The LinkedIn Algorithm is your closest ally when it comes to maximizing your exposure on the platform. As you might already know, LinkedIn is a professional networking platform that forms a tight-knit network of professionals, businesses, and job seekers.
With a vast user base exceeding 875 million members across 200 countries and regions, LinkedIn has established itself as a highly popular and widely utilized professional networking platform. It serves as a hub for professionals, enabling them to connect, collaborate, and explore career opportunities on a global scale.
Navigating the LinkedIn algorithm has become crucial at a time when professional development, networking, and knowledge sharing have become the foundation of the corporate sector. LinkedIn is primarily a social network that, like others, depends on algorithms to customize the kind of content a user receives.
If you want your posts to be received by the right people, it is important to understand what factors influence the LinkedIn algorithm. Engaging with your audience can become that much easier if you figure out the ropes of the LinkedIn algorithm, and we are here to show you how it works!
What is LinkedIn Algorithm?
The LinkedIn algorithm is a computational formula that is used to determine the visibility of specific content to individual users on the platform. Its primary objective is to enhance engagement and user retention by curating a personalized newsfeed that is both relevant and captivating. By evaluating an extensive volume of daily posts, the algorithm prioritizes authentic, substantial, and pertinent content, positioning it prominently in users’ feeds.
As a user, the real task comes in when you are trying to grasp the complex functioning of this algorithm.
How Does the LinkedIn Algorithm Work?
On LinkedIn, posts in users’ feeds are not displayed in chronological order. Instead, the platform’s algorithm determines the prioritization of posts, which may result in older or more popular posts appearing before recent ones.
The LinkedIn algorithm considers various factors that impact this prioritization, and these factors are subject to regular changes and updates.
Filters content into three categories
Upon posting content on LinkedIn, the algorithm performs an assessment to distinguish between spam, low-quality, and high-quality content. While high-quality content is promptly approved, low-quality content undergoes further scrutiny.
Spam: The content filtered into this category is identified by indicators such as poor grammar, excessive links, tagging numerous individuals, utilizing an excessive number of hashtags (including overly prescriptive ones like #follow, #like, and #comment), or multiple posts from the same user within a short timeframe.
Low-quality content: While not considered spam, such content lacks relevance to the intended audience. It may be difficult to understand, tag irrelevant people, or cover broad topics that fail to engage users.
High-quality content: This is funneled according to readability, how much the content encourages interaction, incorporates relevant keywords, limits hashtags to three or fewer, and reserves outbound links for comments. Essentially, it provides valuable content that captures the audience’s interest and encourages meaningful engagement.
Escaping the spam bucket is easy, however, the main task is keeping out of low-quality content and remaining in high-quality content.
Importance of the "Golden Hour"
The post’s success is mostly dependent on the first hour after the content has been uploaded. During this “golden hour,” LinkedIn monitors the engagement and decides whether the post has value to move on into various people’s feeds.
This first hour is crucial because if the content does well in that time frame, it will most likely fare well throughout the days to come. To ensure this,
- Try posting at a time when your followers are online.
- Drive engagement by asking questions.
- During the golden hour, interact with other posts as well.
- Maintain a posting schedule so that your audience knows when you will post next.
- Try not to edit the post after uploading.
Utilizing the Ranking Signals
To expand the reach of your post, the LinkedIn algorithm employs three ranking signals – personal connection, interest relevance, and engagement probability. These signals assess the relationship between you and the potential viewer, their interest in the post’s topic, and the likelihood of their interaction.
- Personal Connections: In 2019, LinkedIn made a strategic shift by prioritizing content from users’ personal connections over mega influencers. The platform considers factors such as users’ current and past colleagues and their past interactions on LinkedIn to determine their connections. Consequently, users now see posts from those they frequently engage with and from consistent posters at the top of their feeds.
- Interest Relevance: LinkedIn incorporates an “interest graph” to assess the connections between users and various subjects. This enables the algorithm to gauge user interest levels, and interrelationships between topics, and identify connections who share similar interests.
- Engagement Probability: Engagement holds significant importance in determining the ranking of a post on LinkedIn. Users who consistently engage with posts in their feed are more likely to receive interactions on their own content, increasing their visibility in others’ feeds.
How to Generate LinkedIn Algorithm Worthy Content?
LinkedIn employs a diverse range of content types, each with varying rankings within the algorithm and eliciting different responses from the audience.
Outbound Links:
LinkedIn discourages linking outside the platform, leading to potential penalties. Sharing links is advised in the comments section instead.
Shares:
While re-sharing is acceptable, user engagement tends to gravitate towards the original post rather than the one who shares.
LinkedIn Articles, LinkedIn LIVE, LinkedIn Carousels:
When a social media platform introduces new or distinctive content formats, they often prioritize those formats in users’ newsfeeds.
Photos and Videos:
Unless images directly support the accompanying text, there is no inherent algorithmic advantage in incorporating unrelated photos. Considering the limited attention spans on social media, concise and easily digestible content tends to garner more audience engagement compared to a video. Capturing attention promptly is crucial.
Text-based posts:
Text-based posts generally yield superior results on LinkedIn, not because the algorithm favors them over video or photos but due to the audience’s inclination towards reading text posts more frequently than watching videos.
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