There’ve been close to 150 changes, updates or new features in the last six months. And while this could be partially attributed to better reporting, it could also be that more than ever has changed.
LinkedIn™ (the company) is working harder to make more money and every tweak made has the potential to increase revenue. Not least because the most useful new features are behind the Premium paywall. At least for personal profiles.
For pages, it’s a different story. Unleashed just 2 months ago, Premium for pages has been a huge disappointment. Benefits are few and the results less than stellar. We can’t in all conscience recommend Premium to our clients. Although we hope this will change.
The major change this year, which is still rolling out, is the addition of a new video feed. This is separate from the main feed we’re used to seeing on desktop and mobile, and at this point is mobile-only.
Videos you post in the usual way could end up in this feed but quite how the algorithm determines this is, as yet, unclear. In fact, there are a lot of questions with no answers. Such as:
How do you know if your video shows up in the new feed?
Will metrics be measured any differently and how will they be communicated to us?
What can we do to help our videos get published in the new feed?
Only time will give us the answers to this. But one thing is clear, video is the new black on LinkedIn™. Anyone who isn’t using video on their profile and in their content is missing out.
Video increases visibility and makes you memorable. It’s the reason why the Link∙Ability team hosts two LinkedIn™ lives a month and I do at least two video posts a week.
The third major change seen on the platform so far this year has been a significant reduction in organic reach. For us, that happened in April but for others the drop occurred earlier in the year. Regardless, the result is posts not reaching as wide an audience as previously.
On the plus side, however, engagement is still strong especially on posts that involve others in some way. Choosing the best post format is another way to keep engagement high and multiple image and document posts are effective for this. Polls score strongly in organic reach but at the bottom of the pack for engagement.
LinkedIn™ is still aiming to wean us off vanity metrics (reach, views and impressions) and onto other more useful forms of measurement, such as engagement rate. That’s because the number of feeds a post is delivered to is unimportant; what’s critical is the number of people who see and respond to your content.
What’s next for LinkedIn™?
Predicting anything about LinkedIn™ is futile. It rarely does as expected and sometimes even what it has previously indicated it will do never comes to pass. Many features spotted as new, for example, have a limited run then disappear for ever.
About the only thing we can be (relatively) confident of is that video will continue to increase in importance. If you do nothing to improve your LinkedIn™ presence, I urge you to at least consider that.