Hey {{First Name | there}},
LinkedIn's own team has been talking a lot lately.
Not gurus. Not "LinkedIn experts" guessing. The people who actually build the feed.
So this week I'm covering two things: what they said about the algorithm, and the selfie trend taking over my feed. (Spoiler: I'm not a fan.)
Who's talking
Lucy Quick is a Senior Creator & Community Manager at LinkedIn. She co-leads Next Gen Voices, LinkedIn's Gen Z creator pilot.
Sam Corrao Clanon leads creator product at LinkedIn.
Next Gen Voices is an invite-only, 12-week program for Gen Z creators. Members test new features, give feedback and meet the LinkedIn team. You can't apply. You get invited.
This week Sam did a Q&A with the group, and a few people who were there shared their notes:
→ Lindsay Stathakis (her notes)
→ Bella Rose Mortel, Social Media at Zapier (her notes)
→ Tara Crymble (her notes)
Here's what came out of it.
What they said about the algorithm
1. Hashtags don't matter.
AI reads every post and works out what it's about. Then it shows it to people who care about that topic.
2. Your profile has to match your posts.
LinkedIn checks your headline, your About section and your industry setting to decide if you know your topic. I wrote a whole issue on the industry field. If you skipped it, now's the time.
3. Longer isn't better.
LinkedIn cares about how long people actually spend on your post. Lindsay's notes say the sweet spot is around 175 words. Their goal is “non-regrettable time spent.”
4. More people who don't follow you can see your posts.
Lindsay's notes say about 70% of the feed now comes from people's networks. It used to be over 90%.
5. Links aren't punished.
A link in your post doesn't automatically hurt your reach.
6. Scheduling is fine.
Scheduled posts get the same reach as posts you publish live.
7. You can post twice a day.
Just pick two different topics and post them about 6 hours apart.
8. There's a new Dashboard.
Your drafts, scheduled posts, old posts and stats are all in one place now. Lucy shared the full list, including pinned comments coming back.
My take: honestly, I was already pretty sure about most of this just from practice. Hashtags? Obviously not. Links, scheduling, posting twice a day... we've been doing all of that for a while.
But it's interesting to hear LinkedIn say it directly themselves.
The selfie thing
Then I saw this post from Lucy.
Her colleague Melissa Cantor noticed something in the Next Gen group. Gen Z creators were using selfies and their own faces all the time. Way more than any other group LinkedIn is running, even on posts where the photo had nothing to do with it.
It turned into a Business Insider story. One of the creators in it, Tara Crymble, started showing her face last December. She went from about 1,000 followers to 6,000, and she says that's how she got her current job.
So I scrolled my own feed to check.
I went through 108 posts. 25 of them were selfies or photos of the person's own face.
That's about 1 in 4.
And honestly? I'm not a fan.
I prefer the graphics. The screenshots. The posts that actually show me something related to the post, so I understand why I’m stopping my scroll.
Even pictures and selfies when they have SOMETHING TO DO with the actual post.
Not because I’m a strange 26 year old Gen Z that doesn’t like taking selfies, but because what I caught myself doing is just stopping on a face, not because of the topic of the post, purely because of the face and not even actually reading the post.
Basically… mindlessly doom scrolling.
Subconsciously, we just like human faces.
So your brain stops to get curious and see what the face is about.
But I'm not learning anything. I'm not taking in any content.
I honestly hate it.
Talk soon,
D.
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