What it now takes to be successful on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has changed its algorithm. From now on, quality comes before quantity. If you regularly post on LinkedIn and want to be seen doing so, you should adapt your posts to the requirements of the new algorithm. This article explains many of the the LinkedIn rules 2023.

Where did the change come from? 

The reason for the changed algorithm was indirectly the Covid19-pandemic. While home office and contact restrictions became the rule and personal exchange a rarity, more and more people felt the need to share their thoughts online. Quickly, even LinkedIn, which had previously always been kept professional, became a platform for sharing individual opinions and private problems. There were many topics: Loneliness and challenges in the home office, the now brutally apparent lack of digitization, and the management of children when schools and daycare centers remained closed.

But while people still enjoyed reading through personal stories and looking at private pictures in the beginning, more and more users felt that the platform no longer offered them any added professional value. LinkedIn degenerated into a kind of second Facebook. And it wasn’t just typical Facebook content that could be found on LinkedIn; Twitter-like tendencies were also evident: More and more frequently, political opinions or statements on current world events were posted. Mostly polemical, without background knowledge of the respective authors and with a lack of context. It is obvious that it is not necessarily good for one’s own reputation to angrily express one’s opinion in comment columns. “If you’d kept quiet, you’d have remained a philosopher,” applies here to most posts and comments that would have been better off on Twitter.

In order to retain its users, the platform therefore set itself the task of returning to its own roots and delivering more professionally relevant content to its users on the front pages again.   

 What users really want 

LinkedIn recently identified two main needs of its users: first, to get new knowledge and real added value, and second, if possible, from people already known in their own network. To meet these needs, LinkedIn now automatically identifies posts that have the potential to deliver knowledge and real value. 

 Therefore, anyone who wants to continue to be seen on LinkedIn should keep the following in mind: First of all, posts should be aimed at a specific target group. Posts about general challenges and their solutions, which everyone already knows anyway, are not interesting. Expert knowledge is the trump card! So it’s not good for your own visibility to report that coffee wakes you up in the morning. Everyone already knows, everyone already does it. In addition, you should only post what you really know about. LinkedIn compares the content of posts with the professional qualifications of its authors. If there are discrepancies here, the reach is lower.

If a lawyer writes about the challenges in the nursing profession, this is not conducive to his visibility. In addition, articles with a personal perspective and point of view are preferred. If someone describes an issue or a situation from their personal professional perspective, it attracts positive attention. If a recruiter reports on application processes from her perspective and underpins this with a personal experience from her job, this will probably also have a positive effect on her reach. 

These tips can be used to increase your own visibility: 

• Commenting on others’ posts also draws attention to oneself. 
• Your own posts should be posted regularly, at least twice a week. 
• The ideal number of hashtags is between three and ten, especially your own personalized hashtag is helpful #wordup 
• The perfect LinkedIn post is between 1200 and 1600 characters long. 
• Linking to other people or organizations in your own post is risky: if the tagged person/organization responds, it increases your reach. However, the opposite is true if the tagged person/organization does not react. Then the reach is limited. 
• LinkedIn pays attention not only to the content of the posts, but also to that of the comments: Many meaningless comments consisting only of single words are not conducive to reach. On the other hand, a few comments over several sentences that contain a reasoned opinion about the post are an indicator of its quality for the algorithm. Here, too, you can play a role yourself: Comments under your own post should be answered within one hour. 

Back to the roots 

In summary, this means: Quality comes before quantity. Before you publish a contribution, you should ask yourself: Who can I help and how, and do I really have the competence to do so? 

The content of the posts may have changed in the meantime, but LinkedIn’s goal has always remained the same: to give its users a feeling of productivity and success. The new algorithm is the first step back in the original direction.