Best Practice Guidelines: Wait, you don't do this when you post to LinkedIn?

Recently I was working with a client and they had lots of questions about using their company's LinkedIn business profile. They're an active LinkedIn user themselves however, when it came to the business side, they weren't too sure what to do.

I worked with them to understand their pain points further and created a LinkedIn guide for them that turned out to be game changing.

These are my best practice guidelines when posting to LinkedIn.

2024 LinkedIn Algorithm

At the time of creation of this article, these guidelines were in place.

Meaningful Interactions & Knowledge Sharing

In 2023, LinkedIn introduced significant algorithm changes, guided by user feedback. The changes were aimed to achieve two primary goals:

1. Promoting content that shares knowledge or advice. Sharing your expertise can significantly improve the visibility of your content.

2. Strengthening connections among people who know each other. Your network is now more likely to see your content, especially personal and professional updates. These changes mean that there will be less content in their feeds from people they are not directly connected with.

To make the most of this algorithm, content should focus on adding value, foster genuine connections and align with audience interests and skills.

Spam, Low Quality V High Quality

Content could be flagged as 'Spam' if it:

• Includes bad grammar, multiple links in one post, posting is too frequent (every couple of hours), too much tagging (5+).

Once LinkedIn confirms that your post isn't spam, it will be distributed to a selection of your followers. If the post gains a lot of engagement, it will be shared to a wider audience. If the post doesn't gain a lot of engagement, unfortunately, the post will not be shared further by LinkedIn.

This all happens in the first hour after you post therefore it's important to know when your audience is online.

High Quality Posts are:

• Posts that encourages engagement, easy to read, tags appropriate people who are likely to engage or interact with the post, uses no more than three hashtags.

Low Quality Posts are:

• LinkedIn deems posts that are not engaging users as 'low quality' posts and it won't be shown as frequently.

Tips for working with the algorithm:

• Post when your audience is online.

• Tag relevant people, businesses and users (avoiding 5+ tags).

• Use keywords.

• Use images or videos.

• Include 2 or three relevant hashtags (avoiding spam-like hashtags).

• Encourage engagement.

• Encourage employees to show that they work at the company and use the company hashtags.

• Use LinkedIn Analytics to understand what posts perform the best and why.

• Don’t include multiple links in a post.