In short
Podcast Episode Notes: LinkedIn's Algorithm Changes, Explained
Podcast Information
- Title: Problem Solvers
- Host: Jason Feifer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine
- Description: A podcast that delves into business problems faced by entrepreneurs and solutions that worked for them.
Episode Overview
- Episode Title: LinkedIn's Algorithm Changes, Explained
- Description: The episode explores the recent changes to LinkedIn's algorithms, the impact on users and creators, and insights from LinkedIn's executives.
Key Guests
- Dan Roth: Editor-in-Chief at LinkedIn, overseeing content and the professional community.
- Tim Yurka: Senior Director of Engineering at LinkedIn, leading AI and data science teams.
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Main Topics Discussed
- LinkedIn's Algorithm Changes
- Background Context:
- LinkedIn adjusted its algorithm to improve user experience by prioritizing professional knowledge and advice over viral content and personal posts.
- Changes aim to reduce "junk" content in user feeds.
- User Reactions:
- Many active users reported decreased visibility of their posts, leading to complaints about engagement and reach.
- Users felt their posts were not reaching as many people, with reports of significant drops in reach metrics.
- Philosophy Behind Algorithm Changes
- Core Mission:
- LinkedIn's mission is to connect professionals to economic opportunities, which guides all algorithm-related changes.
- Emphasis on sharing valuable knowledge rather than gaming the algorithm for reach.
- Advice to Users:
- Users should focus on providing valuable knowledge rather than trying to optimize for algorithmic tricks or hacks.
- LinkedIn encourages sharing authentic insights that can foster meaningful connections.
- Creator vs. Professional Identity
- Shift in Terminology:
- LinkedIn is moving away from the term "creator" to emphasize the identity of users as professionals.
- The change reflects feedback that many users do not see themselves as creators, but rather as individuals sharing professional insights.
- Insights on Improving Visibility
- Personalized Content Delivery:
- The platform is working towards delivering content that matches users' interests and professional needs rather than relying solely on recent engagement metrics.
- The idea is to surface high-quality content when a user needs it, rather than when it was posted.
- New Tools and Features
- Verification Badge:
- A tool for users to verify their identities on LinkedIn, which can enhance trust in content and profiles but does not directly impact reach.
- Custom Call-to-Action Buttons:
- Premium users can add custom buttons to their profiles to drive traffic to personal websites or services.
- Collaborative Articles:
- AI-generated articles that encourage community engagement and knowledge sharing. Users can contribute their insights to the articles, helping to build their reputations as experts.
- Thought Leadership Ads:
- Companies can promote individual posts that resonate well with audiences to enhance visibility.
- Future Directions
- Suggested Posts:
- LinkedIn aims to develop features that proactively deliver content tailored to users' needs, based on their professional identities and interactions on the platform.
- Long-Term Engagement Strategy:
- Users are encouraged to engage with the platform through meaningful contributions over time, rather than seeking immediate viral success.
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Conclusion
- The conversation emphasizes the importance of authenticity, the evolving nature of professional networking, and the long-term benefits of sharing valuable insights on LinkedIn.
- Dan and Tim stress that successful engagement is about building a professional identity and trust within the LinkedIn community rather than focusing solely on metrics.
Call to Action
- Listeners are encouraged to share their thoughts on the episode and their own problem-solving experiences at [jasonfeifer.com](http://jasonfeifer.com) and subscribe to the newsletter for ongoing insights.
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Key Takeaways
- Focus on providing genuine and relevant content that can help others in their professional journeys.
- Understand that algorithm changes are iterative and should not dictate your content strategy.
- Embrace LinkedIn as a platform for professional identity rather than just a place for creators.
These notes summarize the critical discussions from the episode, providing insights into LinkedIn's evolving platform and strategies for effective engagement.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
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1:33There's no safe like SimpliSafe. From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.
2:21talking about the algorithm, the algorithm that rewards certain posts or that keeps other posts down, the algorithm that decides how many people will see your ideas. Well, when people say it's the algorithm, my team builds the algorithm, which is a cool thing to be able to say. But before I get to the people that you'll hear today, here is some important context. Last year, as you may or may not know, LinkedIn started to adjust its algorithm. Users were complaining that their feeds were full of junk and LinkedIn wanted to make the feeds more useful. So it started rewarding what it calls knowledge and advice.
3:00This means that people's selfies and viral style video posts would not get as much traction. And instead, LinkedIn's algorithms would be crafted to reward posts that contain authoritative professional information. There were all sorts of ways it would do that, including evaluating the expertise of the author, watching to see what kind of comments rolled in, and so on. I broke this news in June of 2023, and it was so interesting to see what happened after that. As a user, my newsfeed definitely did become more professional, but as a creator on LinkedIn, well, the experience was more complicated.
3:36Very active LinkedIn users started to tell me that their posts were reaching fewer people and that it was harder to build a following. Reports started flying around LinkedIn saying that post reach was dropping rapidly, sometimes by very specific large percentage figures. And as a user who posts every single day on LinkedIn, I started to feel this dampening myself. Although to be fair, I don't actually have data to prove it. Just kind of felt that way. So recently I called LinkedIn's senior director of communications and I said, hey, can we do a follow up? I would love to know what LinkedIn is thinking and whether you're hearing the same complaints that I am.
4:11And they said, sure, because a lot has happened and LinkedIn is actively rolling out a lot of new tools to help people grow on the platform. And also on this question about whether people's reach is down on the platform. Well, LinkedIn sees this issue very differently than professional creators do. And I think you'll find that really interesting. So we set up the conversation that you are about to hear now. All right. Who are we talking to today? First, there is a familiar name for anyone who pays close attention to LinkedIn. I'm Dan Roth. I'm LinkedIn's editor-in-chief. So I oversee a team of editors and community managers and producers whose job it is to help build the voice of the professional world through news, ideas, and community.
4:57And we were also joined by the guy whose voice you heard a moment ago, the man, among many others, who is behind the algorithm. Although, as he would say, it's really algorithms because there is no singular algorithm. Anyway, his name is Tim Yurka. Hey, I'm Tim and I'm a senior director of engineering at LinkedIn. I lead the AI and data science teams that build LinkedIn's consumer products. In this conversation, we are talking about a bunch of stuff. We'll start out by talking about the impact of the algorithms changes and then get into stuff like why LinkedIn is moving away from the term creator, why LinkedIn says you shouldn't trust reports on how to optimize your posts.
5:35interesting new tools to help LinkedIn users grow. And honestly, the real news out of this conversation comes at the end when we start talking about a super interesting new product called Suggested Posts, which could boost the visibility of your best posts for years. So stick around for that. It's all coming up after the break. On this show, we talk a lot about entrepreneurs who tackled business problems and came out the other end more successful. It's about learning from those experiences so that you can grow your business the smart way. Well, now U.S. Bank is offering a new product called U.S.
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6:54So work smarter, not harder with this great credit card that puts more point earning power in your pocket. Apply for the U.S. Bank Business Altitude Power Card today at usbank.com slash bizpower. That's usbank.com slash biz, B-I-Z, power. Limited time offer. The creditor and issuer of this card is U.S. Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from MasterCard International Incorporated. MasterCard is a registered trademark and the circle's design is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. Some restrictions may apply. All right, we're back talking with Dan and Tim of LinkedIn about all sorts of things.
7:36And we're going to start with the algorithm changes, the algorithms changes. And I started the conversation this way. I said, look, I've been talking to a lot of very, very active LinkedIn creators. It's my network. And they have feelings. They have feelings on these changes. And before I tell you what they are, I'd like to know what people at LinkedIn are hearing or how LinkedIn feels about the outcome of the changes that have happened so far. And Dan went first. I think maybe if you don't mind, I'll just explain like what our philosophy is here, because I think that it is important to know when you start talking about algorithm changes and what's what's different on the platform.
8:21All of this, and this has always been true, everything that we do ladders up to what our mission is. We are trying to connect the world's professionals to economic opportunity. So when Tim and I are in meetings and we're talking about what we're rolling out or we want to roll out or what our long-term plans are, everything goes back to that question of how are we helping people connect to economic opportunity. And when the case of content and the case of like posting, the desire is, and this has always been, I've been on LinkedIn for almost 13 years now. And it's always been the same, which is that we believe that the sum of the world's professional knowledge is locked, is in the heads of professionals everywhere, and that our job is to get it out and to get it flowing.
9:03And we've always been in the mission of trying to do that. So we can talk about algorithm changes, we'll talk about how things are, you know, what's happening around the margins, what we're introducing. But what I always encourage people to remember is what the true north is for LinkedIn, because trying to keep up with the algorithm changes is a losing game. There's a million, there is no one algorithm. And Tim is the expert here on this, but there are always lots of different experiments going up. You cannot keep up as a user or even someone as an employee with the number of experiments and with what the machines are learning.
9:36The way that you succeed on LinkedIn is by thinking about, am I getting new knowledge out into the world? Am I connecting to people? Is it helpful to them? Are they gaming something? Are they sharing what they know uniquely back into the world? and is a conversation then being formed out of it. So that is super simply, like everything that we do goes back to that. Are we achieving that mission? I'm curious if when you were just saying, if you're trying to keep up with the algorithm, changes is a fruitless battle. Is that in some way a response to the copious amount of guides that people post on LinkedIn about how to succeed on LinkedIn?
10:12I see a ton of data where people do studies about how posting it this time during the day leads to this engagement level. And if you don't put a link in for the first hour and then you put a link in after the first hour, after you post something, it'll do better. Are you saying that those things are either not useful or maybe they are pinpointing something that is real, but that by the time I'm reading it, it's changed because the algorithm is so often being updated? Two things I would say. One is, I think what people are doing often is they're trying to look at what they've done on their posts and trying to back out a kind of understanding of how LinkedIn works from that.
10:58But often that understanding is incorrect. There's a lot of causality, but it's not really understanding exactly how things work. So an example of this, this is from years ago. We had an issue at one point where people were writing really long posts. And they decided that LinkedIn loves really long posts that were broken up by lines. I remember that. That was why, you remember this whole thing about broetry. So you started having all of these people writing, LinkedIn love broetry, this style of writing works really well. What was going on behind the scenes is that we had coded the button, there was a button that said, read more.
11:36And when people clicked Read More, we're like, this is a sign that people are getting knowledge out of this and they want to learn about this. All we were doing was looking at that Read More button. As soon as we realized that people were using that, we had incorrectly attributed the Read More button as a signal that people were getting some value out of it. We just took it, we stopped using that as a signal. But it was never broetry. It never had to do with two lines pieces. So we see that all the time we're in these guides. It's people trying to guess. They're trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes.
12:05This is why I would say, think about what we're trying to achieve. And if you can just share knowledge in the world, I guarantee you things are going to work out. They won't always work out for every single post, but over the length of your posting, it is going to work out for you. Tim, I'll put it to you. The original question, though, take it wherever you want, was what are you hearing since this latest round, let's say, of specific algorithm shifts? So I think we're hearing everything across the spectrum and it reflects what Dan was alluding to, which is when we are making changes to how we distribute content, it's highly personalized.
12:42And there are so many factors that will go into this. Dan was alluding to maybe some of the signals we use, but if you even take an example of, let's say you're talking about the latest breakthrough in sustainable agriculture and you're in sustainable agriculture as like an industry, there could be maybe not the size of the audience that you're expecting on LinkedIn. And then you're making inferences about when I put a comment in this post, it got better reach. But what you're not realizing is there's other factors. Maybe the audience size is different than like a different industry. Maybe there's something about the specific field of sustainable agriculture, like some sort of niche in sustainable agriculture that you're talking about that resonates with a smaller audience.
13:20If you then try to extrapolate out how to hack the algorithm, that's not going to matter for people in, I don't know, pediatric nursing or forestry management, right? Like it's deeply personalized to connect to an audience that's looking for that knowledge. It could be, like Dan said, a signal that we're using. It could be the supply and demand for a particular topic on LinkedIn. There are just so many different factors that go into it. And like Dan said, we're continuously iterating on this day in, day out, even probably during the course of this interview. My team is shipping new changes that try to tweak things like, hey, can we increase maybe the freshness of content in the feed?
13:57because we're noticing feedback that maybe we see posts that are one day, two day old, and we want to increase the freshness a little bit. Like all these tweaks are happening continuously. And so pinning it down when it's so personalized is a challenge and very hard to generalize. So that's why when we run these tests, we actually run A-B tests. We look at very diverse sets of metrics to understand what's happening more broadly in the ecosystem. And guided by our vision, which is we want to create an opportunity for people. We're saying, did this change actually lead to the outcomes that we're expecting when we look at these broader sets of metrics?
14:29Right. And I know that you're also very interested in positive user experience, which is what drove a lot of the changes that we've been talking about. Let me tell you, and I'll just mix in my own personal experience with others, and I'll acknowledge we're using the word algorithm and people use the word algorithm. And maybe, Tim, you certainly know what it means because you're building them. most people don't. But what they're really saying is whatever the magic thing is that I don't see that determines whether or not something I post is seen by lots of people. That's ultimately what people care about.
15:02And what I think is really interesting about the way that people on LinkedIn think about this is that unlike on other platforms where reach might be something of a vanity metric, On LinkedIn, as you guys know, your mission is to connect people with economic opportunity. And there is direct economic opportunity tied to the performance of individual posts. I'll give you an example for myself, which is I post every single day on LinkedIn. And when a post of mine does well, when it traffics highly, when it gets, let's say, more than 100 ,000 impressions, subscriptions to my newsletter go up. There is a one-to-one correlation to that.
15:48And that's because I put a CTA for my newsletter in almost every post of mine. So when I see a post do well, I see my newsletter do well. From my newsletter, of course, all sorts of other things happen. Now I have book sales. Now I have people signing up for my premium community. And therefore, I feel very incentivized, as do many people, to figure out how to engage on LinkedIn in a way that's going to reach the maximum number of people. And that's why people care about this. And what I experienced personally, it was really interesting. Dan, when I spoke with you and your colleague Alice in June, I hadn't felt like anything had changed for my own experience on LinkedIn.
16:31But in the following months, something definitely changed. And what changed was that posts that typically would have maybe gotten in the hundreds of thousands of impressions suddenly gotten the tens of thousands of impressions. It felt harder in some way to crack like 10 ,000 impressions. And I know as I say this, part of what is going through your guys' heads is, why are you thinking that way? It should be about sharing information. But the practical reality is, of course, like I just said, that every post is an economic opportunity. And so I want to maximize that economic opportunity. And what I'm hearing from lots of other creators, people I know very well, who also post every single day on LinkedIn is the same thing.
17:13And a real concern that growth on LinkedIn is harder, that reaching people on LinkedIn has become harder. And I wonder what you make of that, if that concerns you at all, if you're surprised by that. Tim and I have been working on this for together for, what is it, a decade now, Tim? And I can't think of a time when someone didn't say that their reach was getting, it was getting harder to be able to get reach on LinkedIn. So let me just say, this is a problem that I think people feel. When you feel it, you really feel it. And I don't want to diminish that at all, but it is always like you have a good post and then you're like, oh my God, I'm not getting the reach that I used to get.
17:56It is constant feeling. There's a couple of things that are going on here, I think. One is that you're a different kind of creator and maybe who you're hearing from are different kinds of creators. People who are out to get as much reach as possible is a particular subset of users. Yes, it is a subset of users. So I'll give you like an example. This is one that I just got. We keep like a running room going on people who are like celebrating success on the team. And this one, I just saw this one yesterday, which was a nurse who started as a bedside in nursing. He started posting his insights on LinkedIn, and then he was recruited by his own employer to take on a corporate role to help improve nursing at this hospital.
18:36That was economic success for this person. The only people that he needed to reach with his posts were people who worked in this hospital. If you are running a small business or if you're running a, if you are someone who just wants to reach chief information security officers, you should think about getting a million people to read your hundreds of thousands of people to see your posts. It's not super useful. You want the exact right 100 people or 1 ,000 people. That's, I think, the solution that Tim and I are trying, and our teams are always thinking about, is how do we get this person, the audience that he or she needs, or in the case of a company that they need, to be able to meet their economic opportunities.
19:18And so with the creator, people were just like, I want massive distribution, totally different problem. It is, and I don't think it's one that's really representative of entrepreneurs or people in the working world in general. And I think that we have been trained to think that we should think that way. I think that over time, we've come to believe that the key is absolutely spamming as many people as possible with our posts because it's better if the more, the bigger the ocean, the better chance that our net will pick up something that'll be useful to us. But our belief is that we can do it better and not need for you to be able to drop something in the ocean, that we can actually get you exactly where you want to go.
20:00And we hear these success stories from people all the time where they are getting through their posts, through sharing knowledge, that they are reaching the right people that is having that economic benefit on them, even if their numbers aren't going up. It's the right numbers that we think about. Tim, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's spot on. And at the heart of it, I think comes down to what LinkedIn started with, which is it's your identity, right? It's starting with understanding that I am this professional. I'm not a creator. I'm a professional who creation is a tool I will use to achieve some sort of outcome in my career.
20:37And what LinkedIn is like, what we're putting our entire effort behind is then saying, okay, we understand who you are as a professional. You've put your public professional persona on LinkedIn. We want to help match to the right audience when you're trying to use that tool. Again, if you're, if you are somebody who's in forestry management, we want you to get the latest trends with, I don't know, AI applications in forestry management. We want you to connect to that community because either you're going to learn new skills. If you're creating, you may actually establish yourself as a thought expert in the area.
21:10And that is where your thought leadership is really going to resonate as opposed to just maximizing impressions and hope there's a conversion down funnel to something. And so I think we're trying to be much more targeted here with how we support professionals on our platform who use creation as a tool. This is a really interesting way of approaching it and quite different, I would note, from what people are trained to expect on other platforms. Trained was a word that you just used, Dan, because when you look at where is Twitter slash X tilting or what has TikTok rewarded, the answer is creators.
21:50The answer is people who are creating something for mass reach. And to hear you think about the user in a totally different way is very interesting and weirdly counterintuitive in the tech space. it reminds me for whatever it's worth, slight tangent, but related is that I give similar advice when small businesses pitch entrepreneur for coverage, because a classic example I love to go back to is a guy with a food truck business in DC who wanted coverage in Entrepreneur Magazine. And I told him, I just met him at a conference and he was trying to pitch me. And I said, look, you don't actually want coverage in Entrepreneur Magazine because it's going to reach 99.5 % of your audience who can't go buy a hot dog in DC.
22:37And that's actually the point of press coverage for you. And so you should really only be spending your time trying to get inside of publications that are going to reach your core audience, which is a smaller audience than the international audience that you find an entrepreneur. So I totally appreciate that. And in just a moment, we'll pivot to what new tools and opportunities are being rolled out on LinkedIn. But let me just spend one more moment on this interesting shift in thinking. Tim, you just said it. I think your exact language was people don't think of themselves as a creator. They think of themselves as a professional.
23:16LinkedIn has, for the last couple of years, been using the word creator. There were programs to help creators become better creators. I was a part of one. Dan, you had a newsletter that used the word creator in the title called Creator Weekly. Thank you. And I've noticed a shift away from that language. Creator Weekly was sunsetted in its place is now a new newsletter called The Insider. And I wonder, aside from the point that you've just made there, which I think is well taken, that the vast majority of the user base don't identify with the word creator. and so when you speak in terms of creator, you may not reach them or make them feel like it's a place for them.
24:04I understand the shift that you're making, but what of people who do see LinkedIn as a place to create in some way, which is a reasonably sized audience of people who see being good as a content creator of some kind as a driver of economic value and LinkedIn as the primary place to do that if you want to reach professionals, if you're in the business of reaching professionals. What's the message to people who do relate with that framing? Yeah, first of all, you're exactly right. This is, let me just say that like, the reason why we shifted away from using the term creator was because our members told us that it was not something they identified with.
24:43So this is on me. I had a team that was focused on, we were using the word creator, we were approaching people and the feedback we kept getting is, I'm a lawyer. Why do you keep using this word creator? I'm a lawyer and I'm posting. And or I've run this business, but I'm not a creator. It was, it almost, it put them off. On the other hand, there are people who are creators. This is the way they identify as professionals. We want to support people who are creators on LinkedIn. But when we support creators, so the, what they tend to do, what we talk about on LinkedIn is the business of creating.
25:15How do they think about setting up? What equipment are they using to be able to do their creation? What have they learned about social media marketing? How do they gain a bigger audience? What's working for them? What's not? And that is the key. The sort of behind the scenes business of being a creator is doing really well on LinkedIn. That reaches other people who identify as professionals as being creators. And that's doing really well. Now, I will say to your question, if you want to reach people in a big way, you can definitely reach people in large ways on LinkedIn. If you think about how to do that, there's a lot of topics that cut across.
25:50any role or industry. So topics like leadership, management, big ideas, marketing, time management. Exactly. The study that always works on LinkedIn is talking about how to deal with questions about whether you are adequate in a job or should you apply anything that has to do with getting ahead in your job or applying to jobs. Like all that stuff does really well. So you can write about that and you can reach a pretty large audience with it. But the things I would say is number one, it's really crowded. There's a lot of people. That is something where the barrier to entry for that kind of content is almost zero.
Read the full transcript
26:21Everyone has an experience applying for a job, getting ahead of the job, managing people, thinking about leadership. So you're entering a really crowded field to do it. We wouldn't tell anyone not to do that. It's a big part of what we think about as professionals. You should be posting that on LinkedIn. It's a core part of the LinkedIn content experience. But that's how you reach big, big audiences because it applies to everyone. But it's also the hardest way to post on LinkedIn. That's fair. All right, let's move on to what's new. I'm going to start with something that's small, but has been visible.
26:54And then I'd like you to drive where else people should be looking for interesting new changes that, as you say, drive economic opportunities. So the first one I'm going to bring up is the custom button, which I think some people are seeing now. What I'm describing here is that you'll be seeing underneath some people's headshot and bio is a clickable link that says, visit my website or some small number of other items. Mine is visit my website because that was the closest thing to subscribe to my newsletter, which wasn't an option. I'm seeing more of that. And I know that kind of thing is going to be growing.
27:31What can you tell me about it? The custom button is a very, first of all, it's new. This thing is going to continue to increase. This is something that you have access to as a premium subscriber. So Jason, I assume you are a premium user. That's why we're seeing this option. It's like a personalized call to action that you can use to send people to. It's really useful if you have, say, you're a photographer, you have a portfolio that you want to steer people to. If you're a small business owner and you have a store, it's really phenomenal. If you're a consultant, you can ask people to sign up for a demo or get time with you.
28:05So it's really useful in these parts of the professional world where you are trying to get people to get closer to you. And it shows up wherever you post or comment on LinkedIn. I highly recommend people, if you have premium, use it. I actually use it. I send people, it doesn't, you're right, it doesn't say, go to my newsletter. I think we were talking to the team about that. I'm hoping we can get that in place soon because that's exactly the call to action I would like to see also. But yeah, it's great. And this is, and Jason, if I could like point to another way of thinking about what is value for LinkedIn.
28:33A way to think about these custom buttons, this is another way as people think about how do I gain LinkedIn or understanding how LinkedIn operates. For a lot of places, a lot of sites want to keep you on their site as long as possible. LinkedIn, since we are about creating economic opportunity for people, we don't really care how long you spend on LinkedIn. That is not something we are measuring. We want to know that you've come to LinkedIn today. You had a great experience. This helped you be better at what you do or what you want to do. And then you go, if in the feed, I see your post and I see this, go check out my website and it takes me somewhere else.
29:09That's totally fine with us. Completely fine. It doesn't make any difference to us if you're doing it because you should be, as long as members feel like they get value out of LinkedIn, that is then the next best action they can do is go visit your website or go to your store or go schedule time with you. That's a win for us. We have now created economic opportunity for one of our members and then we'll get someone back to go find more. I just want to highlight that what you just said there is counter to a lot of the how to hack LinkedIn advice, where some of the conventional wisdom there is don't put a hyperlink in a post because that drives people away from LinkedIn.
29:45and LinkedIn doesn't want that, which is the reason why posts with hyperlinks get less spread. When I had talked to one of your colleagues and I said, I noticed that when I post something that just has, it just drives to a link to something, it does get less engagement. And he said, yeah, that's not because of some algorithmic thing. That's because people are clicking on it and then they're going and reading it, but they're not coming back and engaging inside of LinkedIn. So LinkedIn isn't recognizing it as a thing that people want to engage with. This is exactly what Tim looks at all the time.
30:12It's like, how do we understand what someone likes or gets out of something if they then go off site to go read an article somewhere. Yeah, and it's challenging as soon as you leave LinkedIn's boundaries. Like we don't know what the value was to you. And we're looking for proxies that you saw value, that you engaged in a conversation, that maybe you spent some time, like meaningful time reading the content. And we just, if we don't know it, we're like, okay, this got a click. And if you look in the industry, a click with no, nothing else is okay. Person bounced. That's what that means, right? And so if we don't have that downstream signal to really say, okay, this was valuable, it's very hard for us to approximate.
30:49And that's why you may see some of this. It's just we can't attribute it back. Right. That's really interesting. What other things should people be looking for? I'll name one other that I'm aware of that I want you to take me into other directions, which is the verification badge. Tell me about that. The verification badge is great. This is a way to be able to say that you have worked at a company that you are saying that you've worked at or that you've gone to a school that you have worked out. Close to 30 million professionals have already verified on LinkedIn. It is a free system where it is to make it super easy for you to say that you are who you are in this world that we are in today.
31:27being able to have assurance that you are talking to someone who is who he or she says they are is essential we are it's just going to become more important we want to make sure that we're doing it it is just going back to the mission we are doing the opposite of connecting you to economic opportunity if you find yourself talking to a bot or someone who is pretending to be something else you've now wasted your day maybe you've lost time you've lost money who knows what could go wrong the more we can make you feel comfortable that you're actually dealing with someone who is exactly the person they're representing themselves as.
32:01That's better for everyone that removes friction from the system, makes it easier for us to learn from each other. You're going to hate me for asking, but I know that someone listening is asking. So I'm going to ask it, which is, does it help in any way with reach awareness or is it just a trust builder for people who are looking at your profile? Being verified. It's a trust builder for people who view your profile. This is something that follows you around on LinkedIn and builds confidence in any place that you interact with other members on LinkedIn. If your content shows up as suggested on LinkedIn, people will know, okay, this is coming from like a verified individual.
32:37This is not some Gen.AI generated like mass produced stuff. There's actually a real person behind this with credentials. And I know who that is. It's really about giving that extra sense of confidence in who you're hearing the message from. So yeah, the question is, does it? So there is nothing where we are saying if you are verified, you're going to get extra distribution on LinkedIn. Yeah, that's what I'm asking. But if you do it, and if people are trusting in your content and they're engaging with you because they see that you're verified, that helps you on LinkedIn. That helps our algorithms understand that this is a person who has some expertise or is trusted in this area.
33:08So there are downstream implications of getting verified, but it is not something that is being used by us to be able to decide what gets extra juice and doesn't. Sure. What else should people be looking for, thinking about what's new or coming? I'll give you three from my list. And I don't know if Tim has other ones here. Three I would point out. One is thought leadership ads. I think this is really cool. It's a way for companies to be able to take what someone is posting and put some dollars behind it and make sure that they are boosting someone else's voice that helps them. And so if you are a big company or small company and you want to, someone said something great, you can now start boosting that and having someone be able to use someone's voice to be able to magnify your own brand.
33:50So that's really cool. That's new for us. Is that something that an individual user can do or it has to be like a corporate account boosting? It's from a company page. So if you have a company page, you can do it. And there's still no way for an individual to pay to boost themselves. Not yet. Ooh, not yet. I always say not yet. It's not like that. That doesn't mean it's on me. That doesn't mean that we have some secret plan going. It just means you're not. Everything is one of the great... One of the things I love about working here is that every answer is not yet. You never know what inventor, builder, prioritize.
34:23There is collaborative articles are, I think, really cool. These are articles that intend, these are very focused on the idea of getting niche knowledge out to the world. So the way collaborative articles work is they are a AI written article that talks about particular and very niche subjects. It could be like something about how to pull off one particular part of something within your marketing tech stack. The AI written article, though, is just we use the AI written article as a way to get people talking. One of the things that we know is that it is much easier for people to respond to things than it is for them to create from scratch.
35:05So that's probably not that's definitely not true for you, Jason. It might not be true for a lot of people who listen to this. but for the majority of the professional world they prefer to react rather than create that that facing the blank page is terrifying so this yeah i written an article which is they're okay they're pretty good but they are not that is we consider those to just be the start and like the almost like the way to just generate this kind of flywheel to get real movement going and so then you as a professional you start you can start adding your own voice actually this is there's one I weighed in on recently about how to prepare for a speed or how to run a panel.
35:41And so I gave my tips on how to run a panel that all of those member comments on how they do that particular skill, how they pull off that particular skill, what they've learned, that then becomes the hero and the AI article starts disappearing. And so these are great. We got 5 million expert, over 5 million people already contributing their expert advice. It's now in French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. And then you get a badge if you do enough of these. If you do these in your particular area and you're uploaded on how well you are, how useful this information is, you can get a badge that says you're skilled in that particular area.
36:20And the last one I'll say is newsletters. Love newsletters. These newsletters are doing incredibly well. We've got 550 million professionals who have subscribed to 156 ,000 newsletters already. The amazing thing about newsletters on LinkedIn. First of all, professionally focused, which is great. And this is how everything, all content works on LinkedIn. But the distribution of newsletters, we take all the work of distributing and generating new subscribers for you. So every time you post a newsletter, it gets sent out as an email, it goes out as a notification, and it shows up in your subscribers' feeds.
36:55Every time someone, if you have an active newsletter, when you follow somebody. So let's say Tim has an active newsletter. If I follow Tim, I will be subscribed to his newsletter also. So we do, we make it easy for you to gain this big readership for your newsletter. And the great part about the newsletter is you don't have to worry about, the algorithm is just, these whole question about algorithms gets put on the back burner a little bit because you're reaching your subscribers every time you post. And so you can get benefits from the algorithm that might say, I'm going to introduce this to more people.
37:29But you'll always reach the people who've said they want to be able to get your newsletter. Now, will they always open it? That's up to them. And it's up to the headlines you use or the topics you're weighing in on. But we guarantee distribution to every single person who's subscribing. So what I love about it is it just makes everything so much easier. All you have to think about is the knowledge you're sharing. So those are all really helpful. And I've engaged in some way or another with all of them. I'd love to ask you a couple quick questions about some of those products. Let's start with newsletters.
37:59I used the newsletter tool a while ago, and you'll have to update me because possibly my experience is outdated at this point. But there wasn't a lot of data available. I couldn't see my open rates. I couldn't actually see the subscriber list. And I couldn't download the subscriber list and port that over to somewhere else. I felt like I was really stuck between, as a user, I'll just give you some feedback. I felt like I was stuck between two really hard decisions where I could go to a convert kit, for example, which is going to give me a lot more data and flexibility. And also I could have more ownership over my base, but it's harder to grow than having that direct access to the LinkedIn user base that you're just describing.
38:44I'm curious why that kind of robust data and functionality hasn't been built into the newsletter product. And if that's the direction that it's going, so that ultimately your vision is that it does become as functional and as data rich as a beehive or a convert kit. Yeah, I can just say quickly, this is exactly the direction that we want to go in. There is a lot of work being done here to solve the exact problem that you're facing. You are not the only person who's saying this. More analytics, deeper understanding of who my audience is, easier way for me to be able to talk to them or help them, help convert them into some other areas of economic opportunity for me.
39:30All things that we are actively working on right now. So I would just say stay tuned. Okay. On the collaborative articles, I spent a whole bunch of time posting in collaborative articles because I was curious what was going to happen as a result. I love the idea and I love the problem that you're trying to solve with it. It's really interesting to hear how that solution almost gets reverse engineered from you have a large user base who creates more by reacting than by starting with the blank slate. But what are you seeing in terms of, let's just be mercenary about it, direct benefit for the people who are participating in it?
40:08Do they get a lot more visibility? Do people go to their profile pages more when they find it? When I posted, I saw a lot of people liking the thing that I posted, but I couldn't tell if anybody was discovering me as a result, for example. Yeah. So this is really a place where we're trying to start identifying people who are true experts on our platform and are getting responses from the community that the kinds of things that they're providing are insightful, like insightful tidbits for a specific area. And this actually starts opening up new channels for discovery for these experts. first their contributions are distributed via feed and notifications via targeting to the right audiences and we can talk a little bit more we haven't even touched on this but we've been investing a ton in in matching on topical interest of a person is really interested in this particular space let's get insights about that space to that individual from creators that are actually sharing those insights so i'd love to hear more about that so that's one place we're investing to really get that matching through like feed notifications.
41:09This also opens up channels where people might be searching for these questions during their workday, like meeting them in their moment. Hey, I am about to enter a panel discussion. Like how do I prep for this? They might search this on Bing or Google and they see this article, collaborative article that says, hey, like I am about to prep for a panel discussion. What do I do? And they click into it and they discover these experts that have provided their perspectives. They have gotten the insightful reactions of community around them. And it's like a new discovery entry point from meeting people in their moment to discover these experts and discover this entire community.
41:44So that's like where we're going with collaborative articles right now. But it also is somewhat of a segue and a stepping stone into this entire broader strategy around really rich topical matching of content to people and what they're interested in as professionals. Can you break that down for me? What does that mean? Dan was asking from my top three list. I probably only have a top one list of things I'm excited about because I spend 75 % of my time working on this right now at LinkedIn. And you may see it today in your LinkedIn feed as something that shows up as a suggested post. Maybe this starts tying together the whole conversation we've been having today.
42:21Sure. We've been talking about how you can reach your connections, you can reach your followers, your subscribers, but the insight that you might need for opportunity could very well live beyond the confines of a network of your followership. It could be anywhere amongst LinkedIn's billion professionals. And we're trying to take all the information that we have, that you put your public profile on LinkedIn, we understand who you are as a professional, we understand the kinds of content you're interested in. And we really try to match creators or professionals who are creating in that space and matching that content to you when that insight would be super valuable to you in that moment.
42:55And this is becoming, it's going to be something that really transcends the boundaries of just follow or subscribe to meet me in my moment where I need this particular insight. And you start seeing everything we've been talking about today really converge here, right? You start seeing trusted identity and the verified badge. And like when I see a suggested post from a verified author, I know this is coming from somebody who is authentic and I know their credentials. That creator can put a custom CTA on their profile that shows up when their post is suggested. If it's providing rich, insightful knowledge to an audience, they're going to see that particular suggested post in their feed.
43:34They're going to see the custom CTA. And they have an opportunity now to directly engage with who they're trying to engage with while also providing value to that person who is seeking an expert to provide that tidbit that would have made their workday better or their particular moment in this career, like the next job they're trying to find. They just got that insight, that unlocked something for them. And so that's really where I personally am spending a lot of time. LinkedIn is spending a lot of time to really start building this out. And it's very early days. But Dan and I are particularly spending a lot of time in this area.
44:07That's super interesting. Can I just say it back to you in totally different words from a user perspective to see if I understand what you're saying? I'll probably get it wrong and then you correct me, which is let's just say that I am trying to understand newsletter growth And that is something that LinkedIn has identified as something that I'm interested in based on either the content that I'm posting or the things that I'm reading and engaging on. LinkedIn is going to proactively identify the strongest advice that someone has posted on this subject and then surface it to me, which would be different than what's happening now, which is that the stuff that I see is what LinkedIn is deciding in the moment.
44:57based on the last, whatever the window is, amount of time that someone has posted where I'm more likely to see that post. And then it's making some value judgment about how many people engaged with it and what the quality of that post is. Whatever it is that I'm describing that is the reason that I'm seeing stuff that's posted right now. But it's not necessarily because it is hyper-specifically identifying my needs in that moment and surfacing a specifically chosen post to show me. You're saying that in time, and there's no way to game this, it sounds like, right? This is going to frustrate anybody who wants the hacks.
45:34But over time, your aspiration is to be able to have the system identify the most useful posts and then be surfacing those posts, no matter when they happen to originally be posted, to people when they are looking for, and they're not even telling you that they're looking for it, but based on their actions, they're looking for that kind of information. Do I have that right? That's spot on. And there's so many benefits back to the folks who are actually surfacing these insights, right? Historically, the way you build an audience is you'd be recommended in a follow recommendations module where there's five faces.
46:10And I don't even know, Jason, okay, he's editor-in-chief at Entrepreneur Magazine. I don't even know what he posts about. Now, people see your content in the feed with a follow CTA if they're not following you. And it's richly contextualized And it's meeting them in that moment because they wanted that particular insight about how to build their newsletter following, whether it be on or off LinkedIn. And Jason has a custom CTA that now lets folks tap in even deeper to the kind of space that Jason has established himself as a thought leader. It becomes a very kind of powerful ecosystem when you put together all of these different capabilities on a roadmap.
46:44What's so interesting about that, I'm thinking about what is the version of that kind of delivery and user behavior that you're harnessing and replicating in a new way. And the closest thing that I can come to is that the reason why somebody is incentivized to post on entrepreneur.com or on their own blog, a detailed, instructive article designed for specific uses. So for example, how to build a quality newsletter or something, but not just like some dashed off lazy version of it, the real true, let's get into it, hyper valuable piece of content. The reason why they do that is right now, largely SEO, because what they're hoping for is that when people search for that exact thing, there's intent driven search that people will find that article.
47:39And if you can do that really well, then you can capture people at their moment of need. You're taking exactly that. And I think I'm going to say it to you just to see you react to it. I think that what you're talking about here is number one, creating an incentive structure for people to be posting that kind of useful content on LinkedIn. Because if there is the potential that it can be surfaced over and over again at the moment when people need it over a long period of time, that's a pretty strong incentive to be creating that kind of content. But then number two is you're actually trying to go a step beyond intent-based search, where instead of somebody having to actively search for something on Google, you know they want it because of their behavior, and therefore you're able to deliver it to them without them even having to do the search.
48:28Am I right about that? It's, yeah, spot on. We are trying to unleash the, exactly as Dan said, some total of professional knowledge on our platform and make sure it surfaces whenever you need it in particular. We're trying to identify whether it's ephemeral or evergreen, whether it's in your interest area, right? Whether this is relevant to your industry, whether it's at this moment in your career or if it's going to provide an insight for you three years in the future. And right now, I think a lot of newsfeed products and content products, content lives and dies very quickly. But when you have so many professionals sharing what they know and their insights on a platform like LinkedIn, that stuff is useful for everyone and at many points in time.
49:14It could be useful for a new student that just left undergrad and is looking to enter a sector. Yeah, maybe this is old news for us, but maybe it's the key unlock for somebody who's starting off in a field. And so the goal is really to meet them in that moment and surface this content when they need it. If it's ephemeral, it's in the right moment when it's breaking news. If it's best practices that are evergreen for an industry, surfacing it when somebody needs to learn those best practices. And what should people be expecting to see on this? You said that you're testing it out now, but is this early days?
49:46It's early days. You're going to start seeing suggested content show up in your LinkedIn feed. If there is something that is particularly, particularly, we think is particularly relevant to you in the moment, we might notify you on that. But it's still a small scale test that we want to see how we really nail this because you really need to maintain that high bar for insight, authenticity, knowledge sharing. And you need to use a lot of tools in your toolkit to make that happen. It's our global editorial team that Dan leads. It's our AI algorithms working together to make sure that the right tone is set And folks are really participating in this community in a way that provides value and insights.
50:28And that's going to be the journey that we embark over the next several years. Can you say one thing? Please. Just to take this back to really where we started this conversation, which is, if you listen to how Tim has explained this massive investment that we're making. By the way, what he's talking about is exactly what Alice and I were hinting at the last time we had talked. Tim is just giving you the full deep. We were just starting this. Now we're further along, but this is exactly what Tim's talking about. But the way that we started this conversation with the question of how do you hack the system and get the tips and tricks to be able to get better right now?
51:06What's working? What's not working on LinkedIn? This is LinkedIn, like with anything in business is an investment. What Tim is talking about is matching up expertise in the moment or over time with the right person who needs that expertise. but if you're going to trust someone or trust some piece of content that that gets built over time you start building up your your knowledge you build up who you are to the world if you're speaking if you're let's take this back to the real world or the in-person world if you're in a meeting just speaking once in a meeting doesn't suddenly get you promoted it is you building up your reputation over time and so my encouragement would be for anyone posting on linkedin is first of all, everyone should be posting on LinkedIn, but that when you do it with a long-term focus in mind, do it for what you need rather than with the hope that you're going to get 10 ,000 views on something and then feeling like you failed because you didn't do it.
51:59You should post what matters to you, that knowledge you think needs to be out in the world that you think would be useful to someone. And that piece might not hit right now. It might not hit ever, or it might actually catch fire in a week, might catch fire a year from now, or might catch fire right in the moment. But the way that you should think about it is over time, have I built my voice? Have I increased my following? Or am I reaching, if I increase my following even better among the people that I want to be reaching? That's the key to success on LinkedIn. It's really the key to success in business in general.
52:28And all LinkedIn is a reflection of the professional world. We are just in a digital version of what you should be experiencing in the workplace, whether that workplace is your a hot dog vendor in his truck or whether it's someone working at a multinational company. That's what we're trying to bring about in the world. Dan, to just emphasize your point, the number one comment people make to me if they're emailing me or if I meet them at a conference is, I love your stuff on LinkedIn. People do this. It's very interesting. And it's that kind of feedback loop that encourages me to engage so heavily on LinkedIn and to want to understand it better.
53:06And therefore, I want to have conversations like these. So Dan, Tim, I really appreciate you taking the time that you have to walk me through it. And that's our episode. I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you solved. You can find me at my website, jasonfeiffer.com. J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com. Also, I have some more useful stuff for you. I write a newsletter about how to future-proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic. I would love for you to sign up. It is at jasonpfeiffer.bulletin.com. Also, check out my other podcast. It's called Build for Tomorrow.
53:43In each episode, I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think. Problem Solvers is a production of Entrepreneur Media and comes out every Monday morning. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode. Thanks to Deepa Shah for production. My name is Jason Pfeiffer. See you next week.
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