Silly me, I thought links would help people get more information on a topic but apparently, LinkedIn punishes posts that have links in them.
This is the first post I will make that doesn’t have a link. If it gets a disproportionate amount of traffic I will write another one and let you know. Also helpful to read is this article How Does the LinkedIn Algorithm Work? [2024 Changes Explained] by Hootsuite. I’d share the link but that would ruin this post’s experiment.
Isn’t it crazy? To be successful you have to both “provide engaging information” and “not take people off the LinkedIn platform”. Sounds like LinkedIn gets all the benefits and what do you get? A fleeting number of views, and mostly people who are not financially supporting you or helping you. That isn’t fair, is it?
Now let us be clear. If you provide LinkedIn with free content then they will ask you to take part in articles to collaborate with other authors to provide more free content. I was asked to do this and didn’t respond. Microsoft can afford to buy some writers. Why do I write here? I write first on my blog and share it here. Perhaps it helps some people on LinkedIn but to be honest, I get far more traffic from the web/search engines, and my LinkedIn traffic is small by comparison.
Or is my traffic small? I did some research to better understand the role of how impressions are calculated on LinkedIn and it’s tricky and nonintuitive. They track it by user, so if a user looks at something more than once it isn’t counted. Other people said that they had content that showed 10,000 impressions and when they looked a week later it only showed 2,100 impressions. Is LinkedIn arbitrarily reducing the amount of impressions to make people’s content seem less valuable, and therefore their platform more important as a way to share content? Social media devalues compensating the content creator which then calls into question their entire model.
Social media has shown that they resist paying for news sources and other sources of content. Yet they charge advertisers on the back of other people’s work. Information wants to be free, but when we allow gatekeepers like social media/LinkedIn to determine what we see we all lose.
My intuition says that LinkedIn has two sets of books. The real engagement/impressions and the minimized amount they show encourage ad sales and the adoption of a higher-cost account. I don’t trust any company that can control information. No company is transparent, and we shouldn’t accept anyone at their word. There should be a public trusted third-party company that handles accountability and the lack of it makes us all worse off.