LinkedIn’s decision to allow individuals to pay to distribute their posts to a wider audience on the platform may just be the final nail in the coffin of organic reach.
This year has seen a multitude of changes leading to vastly reduced post impressions and with it a decline in visibility. Changes have included a deluge in AI generated posts and comments, moving audio events to a 3rd party platform, a higher ratio of commercial content in our feeds and adding a standalone video feed.
Combined, these have lowered reach on posts and made it much more difficult to get in front of those we might potentially want to do business with, be employed by or get to know for other reasons.
However, old habits are hard to break and creating content on LinkedIn has long been the go-to strategy for getting noticed, building networks and finding new business or jobs. For years we’ve enjoyed strong distribution of our content to our networks and further afield. Now, those glory days are behind us.
We have 2 clear options in front us: fight on in the likely vain hope things will change (plot spoiler: they won’t) or look for new ways to achieve current or better results.
Looking at what’s been working this year despite the changes is one place to find answers. And three tactics have continued to do well or even done better than previously.
- Live events – the near-demise of audio events aside, events on LinkedIn have grown hugely in popularity in the past 2-3 years as more people have become familiar with them. Lives and audio events are now on the same platform and while it’s unclear whether audiences will adapt to or abandon them, there’s no doubt that events are an ideal way to attract and interact with new connections and followers.
- Video – by launching a standalone video feed, LinkedIn has signalled its increasing support for this format. While only available on the app, videos appear to be receiving an algorithmic nudge. Much opacity surrounds the new feed and it is unclear how results are measured separately from video posts in the main feed. The main concern is that videos appearing in the new feed (not a feat yet easily achieved) won’t receive the level of engagement usual in feed videos as they are too simply scrolled past.
- Newsletters – by contrast, there is plenty of transparency around the performance of newsletters. We can easily see the number of new subscribers and a percentage increase/decrease over 7, 14, 28, 90 and 365 days. As well, there are metrics for impressions, engagements and article views. Subscriber demographics can be useful in determining whether we are attracting the right audience.
The positive results delivered by live events, videos and newsletters, however, do not a content strategy make. So, if we are to maintain a strong publishing presence on LinkedIn, we need to also include also-ran formats.
Whether there is an appetite for continuing to post non-performing posts merely to retain visibility will depend on other factors such as resource availability, potential ROI and FOMO.
Our own strategy will be to slightly decrease our publishing presence and ramp up other visibility tactics which include increased engagement and more personalised direct messaging.
We’ll be talking more about how this will look inside our members’ community. You can check out what that looks like here.