• The Robin Hood of Algorithms   

Excerpt from HubSpot

LinkedIn announced today that it plans to overhaul its feed ranking system to help more creators get better engagement on the content they share.

The changes were spurred when the professional networking site discovered that the top 1% of content creators -- also known as "power users," or perhaps influencers -- were receiving the vast majority of engagement with their posts.

Meanwhile, the remaining 98%, the site says, was "receiving less [engagement] than ever."

Here's how that skew in engagement happened -- and how LinkedIn has changed its algorithm to address the problem.

Why LinkedIn Changed Its Feed Ranking Algorithm

Year over year, LinkedIn has experienced noticeable growth in overal engagement with posts appearing in its feed -- an average increase of over 50%, the company says. 

Much of the time, that engagement results in a post going viral -- that is, LinkedIn members engage with certain posts to the point where the content earns "tens of millions" of likes, comments, and reshares.

On the surface, that seems like a positive development. But, LinkedIn says, there was a problem: The engagement was not evenly distributed, and the site was "in danger of creating an economy where all the gains in viral actions accrued to the top 1% power users."

Typically, the most popular posts on any social network tend to gain more visibility, which is what was happening to content shared by top influencers.

Emerging brands and content creators, meanwhile, were actually receiving less and less engagement on their posts.

Source: LinkedIn

Besides the obvious issue of this uneven distribution of causing the "richest" content creators on the site -- the influencers who already have a large following -- to become "richer," the lack of engagement with the remaining 98% of followers was actually discouraging them from posting again in the future.

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