Guessing at what the LinkedIn feed rewards is an expensive hobby, so the most useful source on the subject is LinkedIn itself. An employee named Gus published a six post series called the LinkedIn algorithm explained and how to beat it, and we go through it post by post and pull out the parts that change your reach. One idea sits underneath all of it: LinkedIn wants to serve good content and keep people on the platform longer, so every rule below is a version of that. Reach shifts over time, so treat this as the place to start testing rather than a fixed set of laws.
What you will learn
- The three buckets a post can land in, spam, low quality or high quality, and the quickest ways into the first one: sloppy grammar, a link in the post body, tagging more than five people, posting more than once every three hours, and hashtags like follow, comment or like.
- Where a link belongs instead: in the comments, about an hour after you publish, and never as the first comment on your own post.
- What earns the high quality bucket: three hashtags, a genuinely niche audience, a question or clear call to action so people have something to do next, and the five words you would use to describe the post appearing in the post itself. Polls get a response because they are the easiest thing to answer.
- The golden hour, meaning the first sixty minutes after you post. We share it with colleagues, in Slack or on WhatsApp, reply to every comment, and go engage with other people's content so they come back to ours. Gus puts the best window at 9am to 11am Tuesday through Thursday, though Mondays and Fridays are worth testing.
- Two format numbers worth acting on: posts with images get twice as many comments as text alone, and video gets five times the engagement, mostly because both take up more screen space and hold people on the post longer.
- Why we delete and repost rather than edit: editing a live post weakens its reach every time.
- The first 200 characters carry the whole post, because that is all anyone sees before the see more link, and a see more click is a stronger quality signal than a like. Break the rest into short lines so people keep reading. The Social Selling Index in Sales Navigator, scored from 0 to 100, tracks whether you are doing these things at all.
If you want your content and your outreach pulling in the same direction, book a call with our team.
