If you’ve been active on LinkedIn recently, you’ve probably noticed your feed getting cosier, with more posts from the same people, and receiving fewer notifications than before. Well, that’s no accident.
LinkedIn has been fine-tuning its algorithm to enhance the relevance of your homepage feed. They have been tweaking how posts are distributed by factoring in more engagement signals, taking notes of how you engage with hashtags, who you chat with, and the stuff you click on.
For the tech-heads out there, here’s LinkedIn’s explanation about utilising engagement signals:
“Our Homepage Feed produces billion-record datasets over millions of sparse IDs on a daily basis. To improve the performance and personalization of the feed, we have added the representation of sparse IDs as features to the recommendation algorithms which power these products.
Our focus is on transforming large corpus sparse ID features into embedding space, using embedding lookup tables with hundreds of millions of parameters trained on multi-billions of records. Embeddings represent high-dimensional categorical data in a lower-dimensional continuous space, capturing essential relationships and patterns within the data while reducing computational complexity.”
But for those who prefer a less technical explanation, simply put, all of this means they’re using a sophisticated system within the new algorithm to display content that aligns with your interests. Consequently, here are the main changes you’ll notice in your feed:
- The familiar faces parade: LinkedIn now keeps an eye on who you chat with the most and shows you more of their updates.
- Hashtags are hip: Hashtags are receiving the VIP treatment, as the platform places a greater emphasis on engaging with hashtags to spotlight relevant topics for users.
- Notification chill: Your notifications are getting pickier. LinkedIn’s trying to keep things quiet and tell you only what matters. No more noise, just meaningful updates.
- Posts need a little time to shine: Posts are now more likely to go viral on the second and third day, rather than experiencing their peak engagement on the first day.
Though personalised feeds may seem like a dream come true, some have voiced concerns that their feeds are becoming excessively familiar and narrowly focused amid the new algorithm changes. They fear that this could potentially cause them to miss out on the broader horizons of updates they once enjoyed. This leads us to ponder: Is LinkedIn creating our dream feed of personalised content, or have we been sealed in the ‘silo’?
So, how do you make the most of these changes? Engage with creators you like, explore niche topics, join discussions, follow hashtags and collaborative articles, and participate actively.
The more you get involved, the better LinkedIn gets at understanding your preferences and showing you a variety of relevant content in your feed. In a nutshell, just be yourself, stay active, and let LinkedIn handle the rest.
By Ala Shashaa, Netizency‘s Data and Insights Director
