Is LinkedIn Beyond Hope as a Content Platform?
- Yoel Frischoff
- Aug 14, 2024
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 25
Published: 08/14/2024
Updated: 03/25/2025
It's time for LinkedIn to strike a better balance between quantity and quality of its feed content, to enhance user experience and marketing efficiency.
LinkedIn, originally designed for professional networking and knowledge sharing, has evolved into a content platform. The content quality of its feed, however, is compromised by a high volume of low-value posts, or “noise,” impacting user experience and marketing efficiency.
To address this, LinkedIn should consider implementing a quota on free posts and charging for additional ones, akin to trade publications, to reduce noise and increase the visibility of high-value content.
Origins: Mission and Materialization
LinkedIn's original mission statement, "Connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful" materialized in the form a platform for networking, knowledge sharing, and career opportunities.
Built on the "Six Degrees of Separation" concept, originating in "Chain Links", a 1929 short story, the platform sought to boost business relations by enabling marketeers reach out to key decision makers, befriend them, and once trust built, convert these interactions into meaningful business discussions.
Many bytes flowed since across the web since... and the debate rages on: Does LikedIn actually live to this promise?
LinkedIn - A Platform Content Deriving Value From Engagement
But what makes connections valuable are the interactions they generate.
Practically, the question is: What would transform a set of personal contacts from a public Rolodex into a trust infrastructure for professionals, fostering business relations?
LinkedIn's solution was to create a vast UGC platform, exposing users to their contacts' generated content, and inducing them to create such content themselves.
Unidirectional content, however, does not create interaction. Social reactions, reposts, replies and mentions came to be. Influenced by facebook, LinkedIn even tried to create professional communities for collaborative learning and development.
All this, in an effort to increase engagement, stickiness, supposedly aimed to capitalize on the traffic generated to create income opportunities.
User Segmentation and main personas
LinkedIn denotes itself as a platform for "professionals", but I find this term to be too broad.
In trying to distill a value proposition for the platform, let us segment its users into several sub categories, and identify their needs and interests:
Professionals: Share learning and knowledge
Marketeers: Promote products and services, outreach to prospective customers
Job seekers: Find job opportunities, and promote their own capabilities
Recruiters: Recruit prospective employees
Now let's focus on the data flow between professionals and marketeers on the feed:
(In this discussion I exclude job seekers and recruiters, as they have a dedicated area. Nevertheless, job opportunities do occur on the feed)
User POV: The impact of noise on feed quality
This is an issue users encounter daily: The desirable data flow described above, feed experience is deteriorated by lower quality posts - "Noise".
The valuable information promised in LinkedIn's vision is somewhat obscured by that noise, alienating and putting users off.
When have you browsed LinkedIn just to get industry news?... Thought so.
Users have not remained cool about it, either: See a word-map of common criticism:
Below, you can see a somewhat informal poll:
State of the Feed - Marketeers
Content marketeers also voice criticism on LinkedIn feed as a content platform. Some of the key points:
Lack of Audience Ownership: Marketers can't fully control or own their audience on LinkedIn. The platform retains control over audience data, limiting marketers' ability to build direct relationships or collect valuable information like email addresses, which is crucial for growing and engaging an audience independently.
SEO Limitations: Content published on LinkedIn tends to underperform in search engine optimization (SEO) compared to content on personal websites or blogs. This hampers marketers' ability to boost search visibility and drive organic traffic from search engines like Google, positioning LinkedIn more as a content distribution channel rather than a primary platform for content creation.
Content Saturation and Quality: The LinkedIn feed is often perceived as oversaturated with content, much of which might not be relevant or of high quality. This saturation makes it challenging for individual posts to stand out, diminishing the impact of content marketing efforts.
Algorithmic Challenges: Changes in LinkedIn's algorithm can unpredictably affect the visibility of posts, sometimes showing content from unfamiliar sources. This disrupts the user experience and complicates marketers' efforts to reach their target audience effectively.
Note the following stats of interest for marketeers:
Average session length was 7'40" (DemandSage)
16.2% of LinkedIn users in the United States log in daily (Business in Apps)
LinkedIn posts receive about 8.63 impressions per 100 followers on average (RivalIQ)
It looks as a perfect storm, in which no one seems to be happy
How Did We get here?
Originally, As a content marketplace, LinkedIn faced the 'Cold Start' problem, having the need to bring both readership and content. As a result, it put a practically null price on publishing content. In this paradigm, content supply must be secured as it serves as the fuel for attention.
No limits were therefore put on creation of commercial or personal content.
"Follows" are a core concept in LinkedIn's feed, meaning that the algorithm will expose users to content of their followed accounts. Every time users connect, they - by default - follow their new connections. Additionally, they can follow organizations and individuals they are not associated with.
The platform induces its users to accumulate contacts (hence follows), and also spurs them to publish content, with the core concept of increasing engagement through user generated content. Only that it appears that not all content is created equal. While some of it is of educational and commercial value or otherwise newsworthy in the professional context, a growing majority of the content published testifies to a lack of self control or awareness.
The result is diminishing opportunities for high quality content reaching to relevant and interested audience.
A Balancing Act is Due
To improve the feed as a meeting place of readership and publishing, The platform could resort to the age old concept of trade publications.
Those were the days when you could leaf through industry news, including announcements, products and service comparisons, interest group discussions (who mentioned regulation, or perhaps more exhilarating, technological revolutions).
Oftentimes, these publications evolved with and about trade events, mixing organization of the expo, content curation, and dissemination of the news breaking during the shows.
Can LinkedIn become a hub for professional publications, increasing high value content?
Can the platform, on the other hand, limit potentially irrelevant content?
Instead of inducing users to post - no matter what, maybe a good idea would be to pose a quota on free posts, and charge for additional ones? This is bound to reduce the noise in the platform.
From Theory to Practice
In this post, I show how... and there's a demo as well
What are your thoughts?...
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