Why LinkedIn Doesn't Want You Going "Viral"

0:00From 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.

0:21If you are a person who posts on social media, what would you say is the basic marker of success? It's virality, right? It's going viral, which is why it's pretty interesting to hear someone very, very high up on a social media platform say this. We're not looking for virality at all. That is not how LinkedIn measures success. That is Dan Roth. He is LinkedIn's editor-in-chief. And I know what he would say about the things that I just said, which is that LinkedIn is not a social media platform. LinkedIn is so much more. That is true. But, you know, it does have a social media component. And a lot of people, myself included, utilize that social media component to reach people to post content and so on.

1:07So anyway, let's just go with it. LinkedIn, at least the parts of LinkedIn that are social media, not interested in virality. There's nothing in our systems that reward virality. And if you are a person who is interested in going, okay, I guess not viral on LinkedIn now, but you know, posting on LinkedIn so that it's seen by a lot of relevant people. How about that? Well, then something Dan said there is going to be of particular interest to you because he said, there's nothing in our systems that reward virality, which of course begs the question, well, what do your systems reward? And the answer to that has changed pretty significantly in the past six or so months as LinkedIn has made a lot of very strategic changes to its feed.

1:53And that is what LinkedIn offered me the opportunity to dig into with Dan and one of Dan's colleagues, Alice Chong. I'm Alice. I'm a director of product management at LinkedIn, and I lead our search and discovery products. So here's what's happening on this episode of Problem Solvers. If you are interested in reaching people, growing a following on LinkedIn, this is a must listen, because we are going to dig in very granular detail into how LinkedIn works, the changes that they have made, and what it takes and means to succeed in posting content on LinkedIn. This conversation is super interesting.

2:32It has changed the way that I think about posting on LinkedIn. And if you follow me on LinkedIn, and you should just search Jason Pfeiffer, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you know I post almost every single day there. So this was a very, very relevant conversation for me. and I know from many others. And we're gonna get into it right after the break. The world is not short on advice. If you want advice, if you want instruction, oh, it is everywhere. It is so difficult to follow because it's just so much of it. And don't you wish there was someone who just made it simple? Well, that someone is me because my newsletter, One Thing Better, just gives you one way each week to improve your work and build a career or company you love.

3:13I keep it simple, friendly, straightforward, and really, really useful with anecdotes that show you how to take complex ideas like overcoming fear or finding purpose or just answering the question you're really stuck on and make it practical and possible. These are the tricks that I have picked up by interviewing the smartest entrepreneurs in the world, as well as just by trying stuff out on myself. One thing better. Get it in your inbox each week by just going to one thing better dot email. Yep. Just plug that into the browser. One thing better dot email. All right, we're back. I am talking today with Dan and Alice from LinkedIn.

3:55And before we get into the nitty gritty details of the changes that they have made to the feed, I asked them to start big picture with some context of where LinkedIn is and what it is trying to do, and then how we can use that to understand the decisions that they have made. And Dan starts it off. Jason, first of all, thank you for having us on. It is awesome to talk to you and exciting to talk to your listeners and to your readers. One interesting thing about LinkedIn is, in a sense, how little it changes. So the mission of LinkedIn has not changed at all. And I've been at LinkedIn for almost 12 years or 12 years this month.

4:35Our mission is to connect the world's professionals to economic opportunity. We want to make sure that everyone everywhere finds through their use of LinkedIn becomes better in what they do or what they want to do. And that means different things to different people. And how we reach that mission, how we succeed in connecting people to economic opportunity does change because we learn all the time what people want and what works and what doesn't work and what success looks like. And that changes as we learn more about the platform and how people are using it. And it changes based on what professionals want in their lives and what they want, how they think about what success looks like for them.

5:13So as a framing mechanism, the one thing to think about is like, why does LinkedIn do any of this? It is because we believe in this idea that if we can help people be better at their jobs or whatever it is, their job that they want to get to, or building a company or expanding their company or finding the right people to work for them. If we can make that happen, everyone gets better. A rising tide raises all boats. And so that's the idea. One of the things that we have seen in the last few years is the importance of knowledge sharing in how that works. Members are, and we call our users members, members are, when they come to LinkedIn, they're coming for a specific purpose.

5:53You know, we want, when people open the app or when they log in on the desktop, they're doing it during work. They're doing it often during the busiest times of their day. They're doing it at a time when they could be doing a million other things in their business and they're choosing to go to LinkedIn for a reason. And often that reason is to be able to get smarter about something that they need to get smarter about. Or sometimes it's to find a job or to hire somebody. But it's often they open up LinkedIn with a job to be done. And that job is frequently, that sort of job to be done is frequently like, help me get smarter about this particular area of my world.

6:25And they do that by asking questions or by posting what they know. So we've seen a 27 % increase in content viewed on the feed in the last two years, so since 2021, and a 42 % increase in content shared over the last, in that same period. And you're seeing people just come and they're just trying to learn and they're posting more, they're getting more comfortable with this idea of sharing what they know and how they've learned and asking these questions about other people. You use the word community. What we see is that people build communities through the sharing of knowledge. And so what we're talking about here and this idea of getting people to share what they're uniquely qualified to talk about or what they uniquely want to know is the change in the feed.

7:03You want to make sure you're seeing the right content, the right content that matters to you, and that we're helping you get those ideas out of your head in a way that makes sense and that you can then reach the right people so that they can learn and get something from it and out of that community develops. So maybe I'll hand it off to Alice to talk a little bit about how we're doing all of that. That's great. Alice, yeah, please take it. I mean, I have a million follow-up questions, but I want to hear what you have to say first. Definitely. So as Dan mentioned, a big part is that we are investing in making feed more valuable to our members.

7:33And when we ask our members, what do they find the most valuable in their feed? It's becoming overwhelmingly clear. People are telling us that they find it most valuable when the content is grounded in knowledge and advice. And they found it most valuable when the content is from people they know and care about sharing what they're up to so that they're feeling connected to their connection. And they're feeling the most valuable when they're getting opportunities out of the feed. And this is exactly what we did for feed, which is such an essential, such an important part on feeling our overall ecosystem.

8:09Two changes that we did. Number one, we're bringing better reach to connections and your followers. What does that mean? People in your network as a creator, people in your network and people who are following you will be more likely to see updates from you. And this is because we hear from members that they find this to be the most valuable. We saw a near 10 % increase of content viewed over the past few months for people viewing content from either their connections or people they follow. And just to be clear, so I understand what you're talking about. You're saying that the feed is prioritizing seeing posts from people that you follow over posts from people that you do not follow.

8:50Is that what you mean? That's one part. There's the second part. So the one part is the focus on your connections. The second part is we ask members what they find the most valuable for feed and any content grounded on knowledge and advice. For example, a young Lequin, who is an AI machine learning expert, sharing something about AI and machine learning for someone who is a machine learning practitioner is incredibly valuable content, even if they're not connected to yet. Or a connection sharing some knowledge and advice about how to negotiate salary, how to research company trends. These are valuable content that we're also getting a lot focused on.

9:35So over the past few months, we've seen close to 40 % increase of people checking out and viewing content that is grounded on knowledge from people that is out of their network. So the two takeaways from this, one, more from your in-network and people you follow, and from a creator standpoint, is better reach to the audience that you intend to build. And two is giving members better access to content that is grounded on knowledge and advice, and ultimately leading them to economic opportunities. Got it. This is an interesting place to start because, and by this, I mean asking your members what it is that they want and value.

10:23Because if we know anything about human behavior, what we know is that people don't actually articulate necessarily what it is that we will do or engage with. Because if you ran this experiment at Facebook, for example, we're just going to use Facebook as a random example here, not asking you to specifically comment on Facebook. But I would bet that people on Facebook would have said, what I value is personal updates from my friends. But when you let the feed be dictated by what people actually engage with, even though they would never tell that to a surveyor, what they start engaging with is a whole wide range of things that we might just want to call like algorithm hacking.

11:03People who are posting things purely because they know this is the kind of stuff that people will watch or click or share. And that has happened with basically every single social platform. And I know that LinkedIn is a lot more than a social platform, but just for the purposes of talking about a feed, that's what happens with everyone. And the upside is lots of engagement. The downside is a drowning out of what you would consider actual value. So I'm curious to hear from you about number one, the decision making process that's happening at LinkedIn to separate what is of value versus what might just get a lot of engagement.

11:45Because I bet that your data shows, and I'm not able to see it, but your data shows that a lot of stuff that people probably don't think of or categorize as valuable does get a lot of engagement on LinkedIn. And so if you're going to make a change, you're going to make a change away from some stuff that maybe is low value, high engagement. And so tell me about that decision-making process and what you are particularly hoping will result from it. I can take a first pass and then feel free to go. Jason, I think it's super important for us to put it in context of LinkedIn's vision. Yeah. Our vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.

12:28And ultimately, when we're measuring whether we're making that progress, our mission is, are we actually connecting the professionals? Are we getting them to be more productive and successful? So in what you just shared, for us, the most important part of the equation is, do we believe we're getting closer in getting our members to be and feel more productive and more successful? It is not just about, it definitely is not just about like viral, I mean, things could go viral on LinkedIn, but our system is actually not designed for that. We think ourselves as we are really a social professional social platform that enables people to be more productive.

13:09And in terms of how members are reacting to these changes that we have started rolling out over the past half a year, we're happy to share that we're seeing very promising early signs. we've got an 80 % job of members sharing that. So we used to get complaints of members telling us, hey, I don't like my feed. My feed quality isn't good. I wanted to see something different. Over the past few months, since we started to evolve the feed experience, we've seen an 80 % job. And that is a lot. I'm sorry, 80%, 80%, what's the change of? 80 % of members sharing that they don't like their feed. Oh, I see.

13:49complaining about feet got it an 80 drop in complaints exactly got it that's really interesting you asked this kind of question of of like how does this compare to other places and i think like just to really amplify what alice was saying is we don't we're not looking for virality at all that is not how linkedin measures success there's nothing in our systems that reward virality it's not an ad driven platform where you know ads are a component of how we make money but it's not that is not the way that LinkedIn is. LinkedIn is not dependent on that. And what we are dependent on is people coming back every day and feeling like this is a place that is good for their professional identity.

14:28Because if you think about it, I think this is just helpful for when people are figuring out, and we talk to a lot of people who are trying to master LinkedIn, and they're like, I want to be amazing at LinkedIn. And the advice I always give is like, one of the pieces is just think about where, what the incentives are for any place that you are spending your time. And it's important that LinkedIn's incentives are, We are more successful if people are here with their real identities, if they feel like this is a good place for them, if they feel like this is a place they want to have open on their desk at work and checking when they start their workday and that they finish their workday, it's a place where they are recommending to other people that they come.

15:04because that way recruiters, when they come, they are like real people they're reaching out to and they know what those people care about. B2B advertisers know exactly who they can advertise against. Salespeople can see who it is. They're reaching the real people who are like, who can actually make buying decisions. So all of those things are incentives. That depends on us having really high quality content and high quality people who are representing what they are really good at. And so if you think about like where this drop comes from, this 80 % drop and people telling us that they don't, that they're unhappy with their feeds, A lot of that comes from both making sure that we have the right content for them.

15:37That content comes from saying, like, these are people you are following. So you're telling us you want to hear more from them. And also, this is the kind of topic that you care about. And we're showing you not just people talking about this topic, but someone with the skills in this area talking about that topic. And I think that's a really important component of this, is that if it's me sharing as a journalist and someone who is, if you look at my background, it's like all J school and linguistics minor. And if I'm sharing content about how to be a great geologist, that is useless. And I don't know what I'm talking about.

16:11And even if it sounds good, like, and I'm writing some, I'm trying to like go viral with geology content. I'm not sure why that would go viral, but let's say that's totally going viral. In some parallel universe, sure. So if I put that up there, LinkedIn, we have a duty as LinkedIn to be like, hey, this is not, like this isn't the highest quality content. Dan has none of the skills in this area. And this isn't, we have not seen him have success with geology content in the past. And so why would we show Alice who cares about geology content, something from Dan when this is not his area of expertise?

16:40And so there's all this because we have the professional profile of record. It helps us also be able to make sure that we are getting the right content to the right people, even if it's not someone you're following yet. Care about this topic. We think this is high quality content from someone who actually knows what they're talking about. That's super interesting. I want to follow up on that in a second and understand how LinkedIn is identifying what is valuable content, because what you just said there is one part of it. But just to put a real button on it about the question about virality, and for anybody who has used LinkedIn for years, and I am on there every single day, we saw it.

17:14We saw people who would post real earnest pieces of value, and that would show up in your feed, but also so would a lot of selfies and a lot of people just taking like viral crap that they found on the internet and posting it there and doing basically the stuff that gets rewarded really well on other platforms. And so I just want to put that to you so that people can like hear you react to that speaking to people who are on LinkedIn all the time, right? Instead of speaking about like broader strategy here, you're basically saying, we hear you and we don't want that stuff on the platform. Is that right?

17:47That is, let me give you a sort of a nuanced answer. Okay. Which is, the answer is that we want to give people the kind of content that helps them be better at what they do or what they want to do. And that leads them to economic opportunity. There was a point in time where that sort of content was actually pretty useful to people. And then it really wasn't useful. And then it became sort of a flood. What Alice said earlier, is like we are not looking for when things go viral on LinkedIn, usually that's a sign to us that we need to look into this because it's not that's not celebrated internally.

18:19That's like, let's just make sure this is actually like high quality content that's showing up. Why is this piece of content going viral is the question that we'll talk about internally if something is suddenly doing well. You want to look out what's going on. I said that's very interesting. That's that would seem to be the opposite of how anybody else in the whole universe in the internet thinks about something going viral. Totally, but if you think about what are, how LinkedIn works, we're often a, we're sort of a proxy or like a digital version of a workplace. And there's very little content in the workplace or conversations that go on in the workplace that are right for everybody.

18:53There's something that's right for you on your team and for someone else on their team, or that's okay to talk about at a business lunch or whatever conversations you're having at work. But it's usually, it's very rare where someone stands up with a megaphone and shouts to the whole office and everyone's like, great, I want to hear more from this person yelling at us with this megaphone. So if stuff's not going viral in the workplace, it shouldn't be going viral on LinkedIn. But if it is something that's super interesting, let's say, for instance, yesterday, a lot of really incredible posts about Apple's new headset and people who are in VR and AR talking about what this means and what the difference is.

19:30These are people with expertise talking about that. That content did incredibly well. So did to go viral. I mean, it's not, it depends on how you define it, but it reached a large group because there was a lot of demand for that particular content. If people are still talking about that a week from now, a lot less demand for it. That's a normal cycle. That's like the way it should be. But it is not a, so during that, you asked the question about like, what happened to this content? Like people were sort of earnestly, you know, were people posting selfies and all that stuff? That was during the pandemic.

19:57There was sort of this point in time where people were talking about there, our homes and our work lives got meshed in a way that people really wanted and they were kind of craving and you couldn't avoid. That's past us. That phase is beyond. And now what we hear from members, and this is, I think, a large part of this sort of 80 % drop is they're like, I don't want to see that anymore. That was, I'm done with that. Great. Tie a bow on it. Different point in my work life. That is not the kind of stuff I want to hear from now. Now I want to learn how to get better at what I'm doing. Yeah. I wanted to quickly add from the valuable standpoint, an important part is also the perspective from a viewer standpoint, feed viewer standpoint.

20:34Let's take an example. If say, Jason, you and I are connected, I'm in your network. If I share a post about a very successful product launch I led, or I share a post about a very successful team offsite that I ran, Jason, you're probably going to see it and even like my post, it's like, yeah, now I'm understanding what Alice is up to. But imagine just because you like my post, some of your connections who has no idea who Alice is, will now, that was the before state, before we introduced these changes. What they used to see is that they would see, hey, Alice just had a great offsite. Who the hell is Alice?

21:16People didn't find that being valuable, right? So it's like, it is very important that we still encourage people to bring their authentic selves to LinkedIn. We're still encouraging people to share their stories, but it's very important to understand who is the best audience for that kind of content. It is people who actually know you and care about you. And the same goes for like when you're looking at others' content, you probably only care about the personal updates from people you know and care about. So that's a very important distinction. That's interesting. Can you unpack that just a little bit more, maybe from the perspective of the user who is just having a fairly binary experience, which is, I either saw this or I didn't, or here's how I saw it.

22:02So in the example of Alice launched a product, and let's say I comment on it, what you're telling me is that the platform is trying to make a decision about how this post is going to be relevant to people a circle away. And break that down a little bit more because I'm thinking about my own experience on LinkedIn. And I'm thinking that on my feed, sometimes I do see a post from somebody I don't know. Usually it's because somebody I do know commented on it or liked it. And that's actually the first thing that I see at the very top is you tell me which of my contacts liked or engaged with this post.

22:47But are you saying that there's a sort of secondary consideration here, which is that you're trying to better refine which posts are worth amplifying to the network of whoever it was that engaged with the post to begin with. Is that what you're saying? You're absolutely right. Where we're thinking about it is that we, it is your feed is always going to be a combination of different types of things that's valuable to you. There There will be updates that will make you feel more connected. There will be updates that are getting you that knowledge and advice when you need them. In fact, we're also investing in big strides in making LinkedIn the destination for knowledge.

23:29So a lot of investment around encouraging more people to bring out the knowledge in their head, share onto LinkedIn. A lot of investment in making LinkedIn really a place for discovery of knowledge. If I have a question in my mind, I should be able to go to LinkedIn to ask my question. I should do a search and find the answers. I should ask the question directly. So there's a lot of focus on knowledge. But at the same time, we're not losing grounds in the connection aspects. We believe that is what makes LinkedIn so unique. And that is what makes LinkedIn stand out. Jason, can I just add one thing?

24:06If you're a user, and this is, from my point of view, I deal with a lot of contributors. and we sort of walk them through how to work well on LinkedIn. This can get confusing at times. What Alice is pointing out is such an incredible point. And your point about this sort of like figuring out the right circle, it's the way I like to think about it is that every piece of content sort of has its own total addressable market. And you have to kind of think about, well, who am I trying to reach with this thing? And it can be frustrating sometimes as a contributor or as a user, you post something and you're like, well, I got a thousand views for this and I only got 200 views for that and I don't understand it.

24:40But what Alice is describing is exactly what's going on behind the scenes, which is we look at that and we're like, well, this is great. This is Alice showed this. She showed a selfie from her last offsite. That is a perfect thing to show to her team or to people who are connected with her who have shown an interest in how Alice's team operates. When Alice explains the intricacies of how search engine works and what she's learned, that has a much larger total addressable market. That is anyone who is in the search business or anyone who's a technologist or someone who's a PM. And so you're doing that matching on a content on a post by post level.