How to improve organic reach on LinkedIn in 2022

In this article, you’ll learn how to improve organic reach on LinkedIn for your company page by optimising your posts for LinkedIn’s algorithm.

LinkedIn uses an algorithm called FollowFeed that prioritises and personalises the content that appears in users’ feeds. This is a good thing. Otherwise, you’d be bombarded with boring, badly formatted or spammy content and using LinkedIn would be a horrible experience.

So the starting point for improving your company page’s organic reach is fairly straightforward: don’t post horrible content. Instead, you want to make lovely content that will delight both LinkedIn’s algorithm and, more importantly, your intended audience.

The problem is that LinkedIn doesn’t fully share how its algorithm works. It does, however, have an engineering blog that explains why FollowFeed exists.

FollowFeed has two main responsibilities:

Wider distribution: LinkedIn’s member base has grown from 200 million to more than 400 million in the last three years. At the same time, LinkedIn’s network graph has become denser, which means that content shared by a member gets distributed to a wider audience.

Improved relevance: Because of increased content inventory, we needed algorithms that produce better recommendations in the feed, thereby requiring computationally complex scoring and ranking that can impact real-time performance.

In various blogs, their engineers make some hints at how FollowFeed ‘improves relevance’. From what they’ve written, I’d suggest the algorithm’s main factors for increasing posts’ relevance (and therefore reach) can roughly be grouped as:

• topical relevancy
• user experience
• engagement.

In this blog, I’ll dig into each of these in turn, and make Social Media Optimisation (SMO) recommendations for improving your posts.

How to improve the relevancy of your content on LinkedIn

Make the topic of your post crystal clear

LinkedIn’s bots are trying to categorise your post by topic. To do this they’ll conduct a “content quality assessment”, by reviewing your post’s text, media and external landing page (if there is one).

If the bots can successfully categorise the post, it’ll increase the chances of that post being shown to users who have an interest in that topic.

Using keywords also means that hashtags are important as you’re not only categorising the posts for your followers, but for LinkedIn itself.

Write naturally and don’t spam

“Keeping the LinkedIn feed relevant by identifying unprofessional and spammy content is critical to maintaining the quality our members’ content consumption experiences.”

-Rushi Bhatt, LinkedIn’s former Director Of Engineering

This is an important caveat. You should NOT spam your posts by stuffing in keywords and hashtags, because LinkedIn has a spam filter; if you go overboard your posts will be quietly penalised. The best advice here is to write as naturally as possible. Clear, engaging posts will not only be easier for LinkedIn’s bots to categorise, but they’ll also make for more pleasant reading. If you can’t be clear in a short post do not be afraid of writing a longer, more detailed post. Longer posts will make your text richer and allow you to naturally add more keywords for LinkedIn to review.

There’s a whole other blog that can be written about hashtags. For now, the best advice is to stick to between 2-5 relevant hashtags. Do a little bit of research to make sure that these hashtags are being used by your target audience and try to use a balance of popular and niche hashtags.

Use LinkedIn meta tags on your website

Finally, if you are linking externally to your website make sure that you have a well-optimised landing page. If it’s well optimised for search then you’re probably fine but also make sure that you’ve included LinkedIn’s meta tags on your page. Helpfully, there are clear instructions for your developer on making your website sharable on LinkedIn.

How to improve the user’s experience of your content on LinkedIn

Use LinkedIn’s recommended resolutions

The “content quality assessment” also takes into account the format of your post. It’s therefore important to think about how your post looks to users on both a desktop and (more importantly) on mobile. You can find LinkedIn’s recommended image and video sizes on their Image Specifications page.

Content should be mobile-first

When designing your videos and images, remember that 57% of people use LinkedIn on a mobile, either on their app or on a mobile web browser. A lot of pictorial content falls down on LinkedIn because of text-heavy images and infographics can easily become unreadable on a small screen.

If you have a killer infographic with too much detail to be clearly viewed on a mobile, my advice would be to either repurpose key metrics into bite-sized chunks and link back to your full infographic or perhaps consider turning your infographic into an animated video.

Use long-form text posts on LinkedIn

Long-form posting is when your post is more than a few paragraphs long. It’s perfectly acceptable for your updates to be so long that they read as a blog! LinkedIn’s algorithm is increasingly favouring longer posts as they see them as more authoritative and the freedom will probably allow you to write more meaningful posts.

Also, not everyone wants to jump off of LinkedIn and onto your site (LinkedIn would certainly prefer it if you stayed on their platform). Long-form posts are often 100% on LinkedIn with many updates not even including an external link. While this isn’t always practical or desirable, it’s a great way of boosting visibility and engagement.

Publish articles

An alternative to writing long-form posts is to use LinkedIn’s own ‘Articles’ feature (formerly known as LinkedIn Pulse). This can be a powerful tactic for your engagement strategy on LinkedIn as you can bet that the algorithm favours posts that keep users within its app.

Tell the full story with images

Again, users often enjoy consuming content that lives entirely on LinkedIn. Anything that requires them to leave the page or jump out of the app can spoil their experience. Therefore if you can create images with quotes or stats that make sense independently (without the need for reading a blog or an article to flesh out the full story) they’re much more understood, enjoyed and interacted with.

How to improve engagement on LinkedIn

The role of the LinkedIn feed is to provide timely, professional content. What may pass as acceptable content on a general social network may not be a pleasing experience for a professional social network like LinkedIn.

– Rushi Bhatt, LinkedIn’s former Director Of Engineering

Engagement comes first

It’s understandable to want to focus on conversions in any marketing strategy, but that won’t cut it on LinkedIn as their algorithm focuses on “velocity of likes, shares, and comments” all of which are engagement metrics. Therefore, if you want to increase your organic reach, you will have to create content that’s likely to entice users to interact with your post.

Ask questions or ask for feedback

LinkedIn has repeatedly said that they favour content that ‘starts a conversation, which strongly that their algorithm favours comments over shares and likes. The best way to drive comments is to directly ask questions. You should really be asking questions anyway so that you’re not just broadcasting, but you’re listening to your audience. LinkedIn is a social network after all!

If a question doesn’t seem right for your post, you can still encourage a conversation by simply rounding off your post with ‘we’d love to hear your feedback’ or ‘please share your own experiences’. Even if you receive negative views this can still be really useful customer feedback and it creates an opportunity for you to resolve any issues that you come across.

Post content that’s relevant for LinkedIn

LinkedIn actually has a ‘relevance team’, who are pretty good at what they do. Think of all the problems that Twitter, YouTube and Instagram have suffered from NSFW content. LinkedIn has successfully avoided these sorts of controversies.

Engineers from the team have stated that they do try to keep content relevant to professional networking, career development and recruitment (which isn’t a surprise considering what most people use LinkedIn for), so therefore posting career content can really make a difference.

Connect with users using emotion and rich media

59.1% of LinkedIn users are between the ages of 24 and 34 (born between 1988 and 1998). This stat is crucial because your content needs to be engaging to a tech-savvy millennial audience who value emotion. This means that you should be focusing on honest, persuasive and humorous messages that are delivered through rich media such as video and podcasts.

Hubspot has written a pretty-comprehensive guide on The 10 Most Engaging Topics on LinkedIn, which I can’t really improve upon so I’ll just swipe their recommendations for your ease of reference:

1. Sensational Infotainment Videos Posts
2. Relatable Humor Posts
3. Heartwarming Story Posts
4. Challenging Conventional Wisdom Posts
5. Question Posts
6. Data-driven Perspective Posts
7. How-To Posts
8. Personal Story Posts
9. Tactical Tips Posts
10. Failure Content Posts

I strongly suggest that you read the full article, as it greatly expands on why each type of post works and it has useful examples to inspire you.

Encourage employee advocacy

A great way to give your content an initial boost is for your employees to engage with it. LinkedIn favours personal updates over company updates, so the more employees share your social media posts, the more people you’ll reach!

For this to work well, it’s important that the relevant employees comment and share the posts. For example, if you have a big financial announcement following a profitable year, then it makes sense for your CEO and CFO to add their own voice. If you post a ‘how-to’ blog on how to make the most out of an application then it might be more appropriate for your developers or product managers to lead the conversation.

If everyone engages with everything, it can come across as spammy, so be careful not to overdo employee advocacy (see below).

But don’t go overboard with employee advocacy

Having a large workforce that’s willing to like and share your content could actually count against you, if you go too far, as your engagement has to be earned. LinkedIn has a robust spam-fighting strategy that flags content with high engagement to human editors who will demote content that looks like its engagement has been manipulated (see LinkedIn’s helpful diagram below).

If you have any other tips on how to optimise your posts for LinkedIn, or if you’d like to drop me a line to talk about your B2B social media strategy please do get in touch.