As user activity on LinkedIn grows (the platform has reported engagement growth for six quarters in a row), the potential for nuisance posters spamming your feed has grown with it.

From wannabe influencers posting “broetry” to struggle-spam, polling dross and even occasionally marketing managers using sneaky techniques to drive growth and engagement! LinkedIn sees you…

Cleaning up your feed

LinkedIn is taking several steps to clean up feeds and show users more content from their connections than high-engagement posts or algorithm inspired content.

One way the social network will do this is the crackdown on engagement bait – a method of boosting engagement that we saw over on Facebook when it introduced reactions.

Linda Leung, Director of Product Management, LinkedIn

“We’ve seen a number of posts that expressly ask or encourage the community to engage with content via likes or reactions – posted with the exclusive intent of boosting reach on the platform.

We’ve heard this type of content can be misleading and frustrating for some of you. We won’t be promoting this type of content and we encourage everyone in the community to focus on delivering reliable, credible and authentic content.”

But, the crackdowns won’t stop there.

LinkedIn has gone on a bit of a rampage with its latest updates. It will also introduce controls to let users limit how much political content they see in their feed and provide more options for users to signal the types of content they’re not interested in.

Linda Leung, Director of Product Management, LinkedIn

“We heard from some of you that you don’t want to see political content. To fix this, we’re testing a way to give you the option to reduce political content in your feed.

While we’re only testing currently in the U.S., based on feedback we receive, we may further develop the feature and expand it to more regions and languages.”

Polls? Yes, no or hell no

There will also be a reduction in the number of polls you see in your feed.

LinkedIn has twigged that people are getting a bit sick of the near-constant tyranny of polls and will reduce the number of them you see from people you aren’t connected with.

Polls have been a great way to boost engagement, but it’s reached a tipping point where there are too many around. So, the next time you want to run one on your account, think about whether it’ll benefit your following or if it’s a bit of an engagement bait ploy.

More meaningful stuff

These changes have been made with a few to do two things:

1. Give you more updates that matter to you.
2. Give you insights from people you can learn from.

As part of this quality control, LinkedIn will be showing more activity from your network and less from people you don’t know.

However, to make sure you don’t miss out on people with genuinely insightful things to say, the network will create new ways to follow people in feed, so you can still learn from the best in the business.

Robust feed controls

If you feel like you’re seeing too much content that doesn’t interest you, LinkedIn has some feed controls to help you customise your experience on the platform.

It’s recommended that you only connect with people you know and trust and build personalised recommendations to follow relevant industry big-wigs.

Don’t be shy with the unfollow tool to signal to LinkedIn what accounts or conversations aren’t of interest to you and mute Pages or individuals you don’t want to hear from.

Doing that can tailor your feed. By telling LinkedIn what your likes and dislikes are, you should have a far more harmonious experience on its pages. You can click ‘I don’t want to see this’ or hide posts from your feed.

Other ways you can tell LinkedIn what you want to see is by liking, commenting or sharing posts or by using hashtags.

You can also decide who sees your posts by indicating which audience you want to reach and choose who is able to comment on your posts.

An increasing force

LinkedIn is pretty popular right now. According to Microsoft, its revenue is up 34% year-on-year to $3.44 billion, while user engagement has hit ‘record levels’.

In the first quarter of 2022, sessions were up 22%, and there are now 810 million members from across the globe. The U.S leads the way with over 185 million members, while there are 12 million in Australia and 2 million in New Zealand.

So if those types of numbers are in your wheelhouse, and you’re looking to prove your expertise in a professional field, LinkedIn should be in your content plans.