Why I Ignore The LinkedIn Algorithm

How I imagine the LinkedIn algorithm would look if it was a physical thing

There are a lot of suggestions on LinkedIn these days about the “how to beat the LinkedIn algorithm now”.  “Do this and get 3% more views, do that and you get penalized 6% of your views.” All these tactics to grind out better visibility for your posts. 

Well, indulge me here, let’s do a little math and I will show you why I at least am living in a post algorithm world, where “post” refers to “afterwards”, not a piece of content. 

Let’s say you have 1,000 connections and followers. 

You publish a post. 

Generally accepted LinkedIn wisdom says that LinkedIn puts that post in front of 5-7% of your followers and connections. But, and this is a big “but,” that has been the accepted wisdom for a couple years now, and we know that post distribution has gotten lousier. Let’s say it has gone down by a third. So Linkedin these days puts your post in front of 3-5% of your followers and connections. In your case, with your 1,000 connections and followers, that would be 30 to 50 people.  

But, being a savvy LinkedIn user, you use all the trendy tricks and suggestions that are being bandied about to increase your reach. You put all that work in and increase your reach by, oh, 50%. Big deal. An extra 15 to 25 people. 

You just put all that work in to have your post put in front of maybe 75 people. And these people don’t necessarily even see your post, they just have the opportunity to notice it in their feed. 

Instead, what if you just published your posts as LinkedIn newsletters? Based on how my clients introducing new newsletters are doing lately, new newsletter writers tend to get 16% of their followers and connections to subscribe. So if you have 1,000 connections and followers, you should get 160 sign ups. Those 160 people will get notified every time you publish a post as one of your newsletters. 

So let’s compare:

• Post plus latest algorithm tricks: maybe 75 people will see your post
• Post published as a newsletter: 160 people will get notified that you published.

Why would anyone post on LinkedIn except under the banner of a newsletter? 

And I haven’t even talked about the added bonus that no one knows about. But for context, let me circle back to a couple examples. 

Back in April I published a regular post, not under my newsletter, but just a regular post. Linkedin put it in front of 1535 people (that’s the number of impressions the post received). What no one talks about is that aside from notifying your subscribers, LinkedIn also puts your newsletter in front of people just like it was a post. I checked and my last ten newsletters average 1670 impressions. In other words, I get the same distribution in the feed for a newsletter as a post plus LinkedIn sends notification to my subscribers. 

So really we need to change the bullet points above as follows 

• Post plus latest algorithm tricks: maybe 75 people will see your post
• Post published as a newsletter: 160 people will get notified that you published AND maybe 50 more people (because you didn’t have to do crazy algorithm tricks) will see your post. 

The only reason I post anymore is to have data for articles like this one. Who cares about the algorithm? Who needs to care whether a post has a photo, how many words appear before the “More” button, whether it’s a carousel or a PDF?

The way I look at it is who needs to worry about the LinkedIn post feed algorithm when they have the LinkedIn newsletter algorithm on their side? 

With a newsletter, I can concentrate on writing good content for my target audience, not finding algorithm beating tricks.