Newsflash! Important LinkedIn Update!

Newsflash exclusive!

LinkedIn has been busy making a lot of changes lately, including going niche with algorithm changes and adding ‘Documents’ to the summary of your Activity details.

LinkedIn Goes Niche with Algorithm Update!

LinkedIn has recently announced that algorithm changes made over the past 12-18 months will favour conversations in your feed that cater to niche professional interests, as opposed to the algorithm giving more visibility to viral content.

This is great news for those of us who are regular users of LinkedIn!

News feeds that were fundamentally built to connect one voice to many have been struggling to deliver value as communication trends move to more personal and short-lived conversations.

You may have noticed that your notifications or engagement on LinkedIn has increased lately.

LinkedIn has done this because internal research found that participation wasn’t even across the platform. Much of the attention on LinkedIn was skewed towards the top 1% of power users.

At last, they wake up, I say!

Algorithm changes that will impact the content in our news feeds include:

• Elevating content that users are most likely to join in the conversation about.
• Highlighting a post from someone closer to a users’ interests or network if it needs more engagement.
• Giving more visibility to conversations with things that encourage a response (like opinions).
• Elevating niche topics of conversation that will perform better than broad ones.

 
Note: You can save your favourite Topics on LinkedIn to improve the quality of your LinkedIn news feed by:

1. Simply add the word for the topic you are interested in into the search bar on LinkedIn, prefixed with a hashtag (for example ‘#marketing’) and away you go!
2. This will bring up posts related to the topic/hashtag you just searched for.
3. You can save a number of your favourite topics by Following certain hashtags which will increase the chances of filling your news feed with more valuable content.

You can find out more about the algorithm updates, including statements from LinkedIn themselves over on Social Media Today.

The recent algorithm changes explain why some of my Connections, specialist corporate and executive coach for female lawyers, Nikki Alderson, independent contractor in sales/business development on B2B IT support, Natalie Hughes and networking organiser, Tracey Earl to name a few, have reported receiving LinkedIn notifications about posts that are ‘trending’ prompting them to engage with popular topics or subjects the platform thinks will interest them.

Business broker, Alexandra Dodgshon commented:

“That all sounds very positive and much fairer for us local guys who have to fight through the global viral posts.”

Digital and Social Media Marketing Professor, Denny McCorkle also added:

“Hopefully, this [the algorithm changes] will encourage engagement on the more career relevant posts, not just the hopping on to the mass popular posts to be seen.”

I hope the updates don’t just prompt more engagement on career-focused posts, but on any posts that improves my knowledge and expertise in my areas of interests… and yours too!

However, some of my Connections such as Nicholas Comley, remain skeptical about the changes (as they have every right to be):

“Surrounding people with people just like them sounds like a recipe for increased polarisation and parochialism.

Social engineering gone wrong in my opinion!”

What impacts do you think the new LinkedIn algorithm update will have? A positive or negative effect? I guess we shall see…

‘Documents’ Added to Activity Summary

‘Documents’ has just been added to the summary of your Activity details. Again, I think this recent change is brilliant!

In addition to ‘All activity’, ‘Articles’ & ‘Posts’, ‘Documents’ has now been added.

This is an opportunity to differentiate your profile by adding valuable content in the form of documents.

I see a number of uses, here are a couple:

• Share knowledge and value to inform and educate your audience.
• Create a specific PowerPoint document to introduce yourself.
• LinkedIn also selects any documents you have posted in the past, providing a very useful library of ongoing material.

 
Is a document similar to an article you may ask? I guess all the content that a document could contain could also feature in an article but the look and feel of an article is more website-led. A document *could* be printed out, for example, and could be more branded in favour of your brand, rather than looking like a blog. On reflection, I think I’ll aim to create both documents and blog LinkedIn articles!

As food business growth consultant, Jo Crebbin pointed out, the ‘documents’ tab only seems visible when you access LinkedIn via desktop (laptop or PC) and hasn’t been rolled out onto the mobile app yet. For me, personally, 95% of my quality time spent on LinkedIn is done on the desktop/laptop anyway but hopefully, LinkedIn will roll out the feature to the mobile app soon too.

The new documents feature certainly means I will be sharing more documents in the future, like my latest one ‘LinkedIn Privacy Guidelines’.

What might you use it for?