BEHIND THE SCENES: The REAL LinkedIn Algorithm Secrets

0:00Alright, so we're going to talk about the secrets behind the LinkedIn algorithm. them. But this one, this episode is a little different because this is from behind the scenes. So when we're talking behind the scenes about doing this episode, Neil's like, we did this already. But I was like, Neil, my friend this morning told me there's actually a lot more that happens behind the scenes. And this is my friend talking to a person that actually works at LinkedIn. So Neil, do you want me to let her rip here? Yeah. Cause I didn't talk to your friend who has a friend at LinkedIn. So. Okay. I was like, Hey, I was like, Hey, do you want me to give you credit?

0:26He's like, no, no, no. I'm going to get banned if you give him credit. So I'm not going how they're doing things is a trip right now. I talked to a person who runs their influencer program and she said it is totally rigged. And I mean, hand selected air quote, what they do is you get traction on stuff. Your account hits a list that they manually review. So let's, for example, let's say I had a picture and it goes viral and has 4 ,000 likes on it, right? They're like, okay, that triggers a manual review. I didn't know that they have a criteria, race, gender, topic age school etc and if you don't fit their current initiative they tag you and they down rank you and once they do it's almost impossible to get out of their system you want to pause for a second i have more here keep going keep going just right so she said if your followers stopped growing significantly last year it's because there are too many people going viral that don't fit their criteria and they basically down rank them all but the few that they did let through most of those people.

1:24So they did let a few people through, sorry, but most of the people that don't fit their initiatives, they essentially throttle your account down. She said, it's the most manual filtering of any platform. I'll pause for a second. Again, I got more. Keep going. Okay. Just keep going. I asked her what would be an example of the worst account you'd want to delist. Okay. Guys, this is the messenger. Don't shoot us. Okay. We get called out for this all the time. So she said, young, white growth hacker, get rich quick guy. And then young, pretty fitness model, health supplement girl. And then rich white tech pro.

1:56I said, who would you uprank and give extra priority to? She said, disabled black immigrant financial professional. Number two, Harvard educated Asian doctor health and fitness content. Number three, LGBTQ plus tech manager. She said the criteria changes per country too. And it's really in line with the corporations that need to use LinkedIn for the premium HR products. Okay. And that algo does not actually give preference to the best performing content because then all the growth hackers and marketers would get to the top. So they have to manually filter so the ad inventory works best for corporations, diversity and inclusion initiatives.

2:31Final thing I'll add here. I asked her, as a white dude, what should I talk about? She said, inclusive leadership. I said, if you're Asian, what should you talk about? She said, health and wellness. And I said, if you're black, she said personal finance. So guys, I'm switching over to health and wellness, guys. Wow. Dude, you know, at the end of the day, they are a corporation. They're going to do what benefits them. One interesting thing, though, that you said that I didn't actually think about, but it totally makes sense. They adapt it per country because culture in each country is totally different on what companies and people want.

3:08The one thing that I don't hate on and I expected this is they adapt their algorithms to make them the most money. Facebook does that. Instagram does that. Twitter does that. They all do that. Here's another thing. So there are four languages or four different levels that they have. Okay. So if you're a vetted person on LinkedIn, it's basically someone from LinkedIn that wait, so vetted means they've chosen you, right? Standards, AKA someone has an initiative. So it could be LGBTQ that that could be an initiative, right? Valuable that's determined by the internal review team at LinkedIn. So it's a team instead of an individual.

3:42Unique is, for example, like a white tech guy talking about tech bro stuff is not unique. for example, LGBTQ tech person talked about product management tech stuff is. So take it for what it is, but it just reminds me. So I have the statue over here. It's this one. So this one's Charlie Munger. You can't quite see his full face, but he always says, show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Everyone is driven by incentives. Every company is driven by incentives. So dude, yeah. Well, it's business too. Question for you. All right. Here's a real question. What would you do if you're LinkedIn?

4:13I think I'd do the same thing. Yeah, I would modify the algorithm for me to make the most money. Yeah, they're a publicly traded company. Well, no, sorry. No, Microsoft bought them. So they're still publicly traded, I guess. They have numbers to hit and they want to make the most of this acquisition. So I don't fault them for doing it. I think transparency would probably be a little more helpful. I think that would be nice. But then what happens is like my friend said, marketers will come in and pollute everything. So it's best that they keep it under wraps. So sometimes there's no clear cut answer.

4:42There's no clean cut answer. and there's a lot of variables. So yeah. One other thing I'll say too. So he linked me to someone else's profile. He's like, use this guy's profile as a case study. So this account has massive followers. Posts were going viral big time. One day he talked about Russia and they smacked him hard. And so he ended up deleting a bunch of posts and he's kind of on a bounce back right now, but he used to post every day. So it just goes to show you again that, you know, at the end of the day, you're living within these kind of gardens and you have to play within the rules and you have to understand each game that you're playing.

5:14Dude, you know what's so funny? A lot of these social networks are posting their algorithms online, right? And they're talking about like, hey, here's transparency. Here's what's affecting our rankings. I bet you a lot of them do this kind of stuff and they don't post all this online, right? Like when you're just saying, hey, we're gonna open source algorithm, here it is. I'm like, yeah, you probably are not showing everything. Yeah. You know what's interesting? I don't think LinkedIn necessarily is, but I kind of feel like Elon is. Because like, you know what I mean? Like the Twitter files, the code and everything, I think he is, right?

5:47Like I think other companies, like there's more stuff to hide or whatever. But this guy, I mean, he took to a company private, right? I don't know if there's that much for this guy to lose. And I don't think this guy really cares. And so, by the way, here come all the haters for us that support Elon. Elon and Twitter are a little bit different because I don't think he actually cares what people say or think if he just is transparent. He doesn't need to care anymore. But I think a lot of the other social networks are different. He's not running – yes, he has to make Twitter profitable, but his original intention of buying it wasn't for business purposes from what it seemed like.

6:22He just believed it's like a great town hall, and he just wanted to make sure that it kept doing well supposedly, right? Well, I think eventually he tries to push it toward x.com, his original vision for that. But that's for another episode. So anyway, we hope you all enjoy this one. This one's a little behind the scenes. Let us know what else you'd like us to help find out behind the scenes. Don't forget to rate and subscribe five stars, please share this with your friends, family, dog, and we'll talk to you later