LinkedIn is a platform full of quirks, and while no one outside of LinkedIn will ever fully understand how it works, there are some practices which may impact your reach and are, therefore, best avoided.
These are gleaned from 5 years of using the platform regularly and devouring content from a range of LinkedIn experts.
Tagging
You want to thank people or highlight a team of people who worked on a project, so you reach for the @ key to tag.
But be careful. Excessive tagging is sometimes used as a ‘hack’ by spammers to try and draw attention to a post.
LinkedIn doesn’t like hacks or its users getting spammed. If people don’t respond when they are tagged in a post, it can be a black mark against your content.
Yes, tag, but tag sparingly. And if you are legitimately tagged in a post, make sure you respond, even if it’s just hitting a reaction.
Posting too frequently
LinkedIn isn’t like X/Twitter, where you can fire off Tweet after Tweet without any problems.
Posts have a longer shelf life, and posting again too soon can affect your reach.
24 hours between posts seems to be the consensus.
So if you’ve got a lot to say or lots of news to announce, try and spread it out if you can.
Sharing posts
Even though LinkedIn has a ‘share’ button, shared posts rarely get the same visibility as a post you’ve written yourself (a native post).
There are exceptions. I occasionally share a BBC News post, and those always seem to do quite well.
But otherwise, it’s much harder to get traction with a shared post.
If you do want to share a post, say why you are sharing and encourage comments and conversation.
That way, you are giving people a reason to spend their valuable time on that post, and comments will help boost your post.
Including weblinks
You want to use LinkedIn to promote content published elsewhere or maybe an event you are hosting, it’s natural.
But posts that include a weblink never seem to get the same level of impressions as posts without.
Is it that LinkedIn doesn’t like you sending people off the platform/app? Perhaps.
So what do you do? Make sure you write enticing text around your link and encourage people to comment. LinkedIn likes conversations around content.
Some suggest adding the link to the comments of the post instead or adding the link after you’ve published the post by editing.
But the jury is out on whether this makes any difference. You might need to experiment.
And finally, two common misconceptions about LinkedIn
The number of impressions on your post doesn’t mean the number of people who have read it. ‘Impressions’ is how many people it’s been shown to (the number of feeds it’s appeared in).
The only way of knowing if someone has actually read your post is if they comment on it.
Not even hitting a reaction is a guarantee – people can hit ‘like’ without reading.
This is why comments are the head of the family when it comes to content engagement.
Secondly, that point about how many people have seen your post in their feed, it’s LinkedIn’s algorithm which decides who sees your content.
Just because you have 5,000 connections/followers doesn’t mean all those people will automatically see your post.
For a start, not everyone is active on LinkedIn. And not everyone who is a connection/follower and active on LinkedIn will see your post in their feed.
What LinkedIn tip would you add?
LinkedIn experts to follow:
John Esperian, Richard van der Blom and Lea Turner are good people to start with.
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