LinkedIn is the latest social media platform to add in algorithmically recommended posts from across its network, expanding the pool of content that it can display to users in-stream, with the addition of new ‘Suggested Posts’, that will be highlighted to you based on your interests.
As explained by LinkedIn:
“In the last year, we’ve seen a 2x increase in people engaging in posts sharing knowledge, ideas, and support. There are many rich conversations happening across LinkedIn, but it’s hard to know what you’re missing out on unless you follow the right conversations. To help you discover more relevant content that you might not otherwise know about, we are testing Suggested Posts in your Feed. With Suggested posts, we’ll do the heavy lifting to find out what’s trending amongst professionals in your field and surface great conversations on topics that might be very relevant to you.”
As you can see in the above example, suggested posts will appear with a ‘Suggested’ label in your feed, with LinkedIn’s algorithm seeking to highlight content that may be of interest, based on your engagement activity.
Which effectively follows the lead of TikTok in expanding content recommendations beyond your social graph. On TikTok, the emphasis is on the content itself, not the people that you choose to follow, which enables TikTok’s algorithm to highlight the top performing content from across the platform, as opposed to restricting what it can display based on your own, manual selections.
That leads to much higher engagement, and a much more compelling feed – which is why Meta and Twitter are now also trying to squeeze more recommended content into user feeds, as a means to boost discovery, and keep people scrolling for longer.
Though it also seems to negate the justification for a feed algorithm. Both Meta and Twitter have implemented algorithms to ensure that the best, most engaging posts are displayed to you every time you log in, because users eventually ended up following so many people and profiles that showing that content to you in chronological order no longer made sense.
But now, they’re inserting even more content from profiles that you don’t follow. Seems like that will mean that you see even less of the content that you’ve chosen to see in each app.
Regardless, the high level of engagement on TikTok has prompted more consideration of this element by virtually every other app, which is why LinkedIn is now looking to get in on the action.
That could also mean that your LinkedIn posts have more chance to be seen by people who are potentially interested in what you’re posting about. It’s not clear, as yet, what sort of additional boosts these posts will get, but it could be something to monitor over the coming months.
