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SOCIAL NETWORKS
Advice for marketers on how to better use and understand LinkedIn
By our News Team | 2022
With marketers increasingly using LinkedIn as a business tool, an initiative to provide transparency into how it operates will be welcomed.
LinkedIn has become an increasingly important platform for African marketers to share content, promote B2B products and services, identify sales targets, and connect with key decision-makers.
But like all such platforms, the algorithms that determine what users will see in their feeds tend to be opaque and seemingly subject to random changes at the whim of the platform. The consequences for carefully planned campaigns can be dire, indeed.
Recognising this, LinkedIn has announced a new initiative to provide more transparency into how it operates and is working to improve users’ LinkedIn experience.
Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay
“A resounding theme that we continue to hear is the desire for greater transparency and understanding of how the LinkedIn feed works, wrote Sabry Tozin, the LinkedIn Vice President of Engineering, in a recent blog post.
“We’ve also received questions about the types of conversations that are welcomed on LinkedIn, how content is distributed on the platform, how our algorithms serve certain communities, and what we do to address bias.”
New series of blog posts and on-platform content
To address this, LinkedIn has begun publishing ‘Mythbusting the Feed’, a series of blog posts and on-platform content that will tackle these and other questions. The aim to provide greater insights as to how the platform works, as well as address common misconceptions and assumptions.
The first two videos of the series expand on two questions: ‘What kind of conversations are welcomed on LinkedIn?’ and ‘What does it mean to be professional when it comes to content on LinkedIn?’
Additional videos in the pipeline include: ‘How the Algorithm Works and Personalising the Feed’ and ‘Content Distribution and How We Work to Address Bias’.
Notes the industry website Social Media Today: That’s interesting insight to have – but really, what LinkedIn users more likely want to know is what gets more traction on the platform and what’s likely to be penalised by its algorithms.
“LinkedIn hasn’t traditionally provided a heap of insight on this (hence this new initiative), but it has previously noted that:
- It factors ‘dwell time’ into content ranking, which means that LinkedIn calculates how long a user spends looking at an update or link as a measure of relative interest.
- LinkedIn posts with double-spaced text, which are designed to lure clicks because the user has to tap on the post to see the full message, are now being penalised with less reach.
- Posts which expressly ask or encourage users to engage via likes or reactions will see less reach.
- It’s now taking active steps to limit the amount of polls that users see in-stream.”
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