When you log in at LinkedIn.com or use the LinkedIn app, you’re immediately taken to your homepage feed. This page acts very much like the Facebook feed, where you see updates from your friends or Pages you follow.
You’ll notice, however, that your LinkedIn feed doesn’t show everything your network is posting by default. That’s because it’s only showing content it believes is relevant to you.
Note: users can switch the posts they want to see based on “recent” activity (but this has to be done manually).
So, how can you, as a social media marketer, ensure your content appears in as many feeds as possible?
Bonus: Download a free guide to discover four time-saving tools to help you grow your LinkedIn network faster. Includes one tool that lets you schedule a week’s worth of LinkedIn updates in just three minutes.
How the LinkedIn algorithm works
LinkedIn’s algorithm is designed to make homepage feeds more enticing and user-friendly. The social network has published a lot of articles on the updates and improvements they continue to make to the algorithm, including:
- Distribution of Your Articles – LinkedIn’s Publishing Platform (applicable to writers posting on LinkedIn’s blogging tool)
Note: there are other LinkedIn algorithms that may affect things like search, or spam messages in your inbox. But those are not what we’re talking about here. We are specifically focusing on the algorithm that organizes the homepage feed.
To begin with, your LinkedIn feed has a spam filter, which determines:
- Whether your content shows up in the feed (it’s rare it will be taken down, though)
- How far of an audience it reaches within LinkedIn (the most important part)
- Whether to take you down as a spam user (also rare)
Below is a diagram showing how the LinkedIn algorithm works on the feed, and the four stages of the content review process:
Keep in mind these stages are not completely sequential or divided. Multiple factors affect how far a post spreads throughout the network, and these algorithmic decisions happen over time, sometimes moving the post backwards and forwards in the process.
Stage 1: Content is posted and passes an initial, computerized filter
Every time you post an update to LinkedIn (even if it’s an image), a bot immediately places the content into one of three categories:
- “Spam”’
- “Low-quality”
- “Clear”
You want to be in the “clear” category. But if for some reason your content gets placed the “low-quality” category, you may still have hope, and could still move on to the next stages.
Stage 2: Content is left on the feed temporarily to measure engagement
At this stage, indicators of initial engagement from your audience (such as likes, comments and shares) will signal that your content is good enough to pass to stage 3 of the algorithm’s spam filter.
However, if users flag your post as spam, or hide it from their feeds because they don’t want to see it, LinkedIn’s algorithm will draw more negative conclusions.
To avoid having users “hide” your content from their feeds, consider the following:
- Is my post annoying or offensive?
- Am I over-posting?
- Would people in my network care about this post?
- Is my post so unique and insightful, people would want to share with others?
- Is my post relevant to others’ professional lives?
When determining your answers to the above, you may want to re-think your post, or tone it down a bit. We’ll give more tips on hacking the LinkedIn algorithm below.
Stage 3: Content passes a computerized “virality” check
After users engage with your content to signal its quality score, the algorithm looks for clues as to the quality of the poster and the poster’s network to determine if the content is spam or not.
This is because a spammer could technically have posted garbage and gotten hundreds of other spam accounts to like and comment on the post within an hour, still successfully making it to stage 3.
Besides checking your credibility, the algorithm may also be determining the relevance and usefulness of the post to the network (i.e., the connections and followers receiving the post in their feeds) at stage 3.
As such, this stage is also when the algorithm decides whether to “demote” your content, sending it backwards in the queue for another chance at winning credibility. If your post looks “suspicious,” but the algorithm doesn’t want to make a definitive call on it (giving you the benefit of the doubt), it will remain in the feed but not show very highly or very frequently. At this point, it’s up to your audience to give your content the engagement metrics mentioned in stage 2. If it gets more engagement, it moves back to stage 3.
PRO TIP: This is why posting at the right time, plus optimizing your headlines and images for click-through-rate (CTR) are important. See below for more on this.
Stage 4: Content is reviewed by human editors
Part of the LinkedIn algorithm’s uniqueness is that it uses real humans to filter through user-generated content, and to learn more about what makes a post noteworthy (or not).
This is the stage where those humans determine whether your post is valuable enough to continue displaying in the LinkedIn feed. If your post continues to get engagement, the cycle continues, and it keeps getting shown.
There’s a lot of speculation that, at this stage, if your content is amazing, it may get a boost and reach more people. It might even show up on a LinkedIn Channel (see below for more on this).
Take a look at the sample post below. At the time of the screenshot, it was two weeks old. But, it had plenty of likes and comments (i.e., LinkedIn engagement signals). It was also liked by someone in my own network, and was relevant to content in my personal profile (such as marketing). You can’t see it in the screenshot below, but this post was ranked above another that was up for less than a day!
As a result, the post kept showing up in my newsfeed, exemplifying the recirculation power of the LinkedIn algorithm:
Note: Pulse is now integrated into your homepage feed. But Pulse articles from the LinkedIn Publisher tool work a little differently when being shown to your audience, or on Pulse Channels.
8+ tips on how to “beat” the LinkedIn algorithm
Now the fun part: learning how to make the algorithm work in your favor (a.k.a. getting your posts seen by as many people as possible).
1. Understand the type of content that LinkedIn craves
LinkedIn sources are fairly clear on what they want the focus of their platform to be: the professional world.
Instead of animated GIFs, Ellen videos and “texts-from-my-mom” screenshots, the LinkedIn algorithm aims to show users news, job posts and timely, popular content related to your career (or those of peers you’re connected to). This kind of content can be images, videos, LinkedIn article posts, external webpage links or text updates.
Any content you post should:
- Be of value to someone’s career (whether as a business owner or employee)
- Offer a tip related to business growth, or a career
- Inspire someone in their work life
- Be relevant to the industry in which you operate in
- Come from a credible source
For examples, take a look at the types of content LinkedIn promises to deliver in its Pulse app.
Also, remember that part of the LinkedIn algorithm is designed to find a factor of relevance to the audience a post is being shared with.
How does LinkedIn determine relevance? By looking at people’s profiles. And user profiles are all about their careers and businesses.
Take a look below at some of the posts that LinkedIn thought I’d be interested to see on my homepage feed.
An inspirational leadership quote (22 likes in 15 hours):
An article from the BBC (a credible source), trending in an industry I work in (1,078 likes and 18 comments):
A blog post written on LinkedIn by one of my connections. It only had 1 like in 7 hours, but notice the hashtag usage. Can you guess what stage in the algorithm this post was likely in, at the time of the screenshot? Hint: it’s possible it was stage 1 or 2!
An article by a LinkedIn Influencer that someone in my network had commented on. It had 60,715 likes and 1,846 comments…
