LinkedIn's Algorithm Changes, Explained

From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not talent. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Feiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine. If you post a lot on LinkedIn or engage a lot on LinkedIn or want to get more value from your time on LinkedIn, well, I have got a conversation

for you today because there are changes you need to know about. On this episode, I am talking with two leaders at LinkedIn who help shape the experience that you have there. Like, for example, people on LinkedIn are always talking about the algorithm, the algorithm that rewards certain posts or that keeps other posts down, the algorithm that decides how many people will see your ideas. Well, when people say it's the algorithm, my team builds the algorithm. Which is a cool thing to be

able to say. But before I get to the people that you'll hear today, here is some important context. Last year, as you may or may not know, LinkedIn started to adjust its algorithm. Users were complaining that their feeds were full of junk and LinkedIn wanted to make the feeds more useful. So it started rewarding what it calls knowledge and advice. This means that people's selfies and viral style video posts would not get as much traction. And instead, LinkedIn's algorithms would

be crafted to reward posts that contain authoritative professional information. There were all sorts of ways it would do that, including evaluating the expertise of the author, watching to see what kind of comments rolled in and so on. I broke this news in June of 2023 and it was so interesting to see what happened after that. As a user, my news feed definitely did become more professional.

But as a creator on LinkedIn, well, the experience was more complicated. Very active LinkedIn users started to tell me that their posts were reaching fewer people and that it was harder to build a following. Reports started flying around LinkedIn saying that post-reach was dropping rapidly, sometimes by very specific large percentage figures. And as a user who posts every single day on LinkedIn, I started to feel the stampeting myself, although to be fair, I don't actually have

data to prove it. Just kind of felt that way. So recently, I called LinkedIn's senior director of communications and I said, Hey, can we do a follow-up? I would love to know what LinkedIn is thinking and whether you're hearing the same complaints that I am. And they said, sure, because a lot has happened and LinkedIn is actively rolling out a lot of new tools to help people grow on the platform. And also on this question about whether people's reach is down on the platform,

well, LinkedIn sees this issue very differently than professional creators do. And I think you'll find that really interesting. So we set up the conversation that you are about to hear now. All right, who are we talking to today? First, there is a familiar name for anyone who pays close attention to LinkedIn. I'm Dan Roth, I'm LinkedIn's editor-in-chief. So I oversee a team of editors and community managers and producers whose job it is to help build the voice of the professional

world from new ideas in community. And we were also joined by the guy whose voice you heard a moment ago, the man among many others who is behind the algorithm, although as he would say, it's really algorithms because there is no singular algorithm. Anyway, his name is Tim Yurka. Hey, I'm Tim, and I'm a senior director of engineering at LinkedIn. I lead the AI and data science teams that build LinkedIn's consumer products. In this conversation, we are talking about a bunch of stuff.

We'll start out by talking about the impact of the algorithms changes and then get into stuff like why LinkedIn is moving away from the term creator. Why LinkedIn says you shouldn't trust reports on how to optimize your posts, interesting new tools to help LinkedIn users grow. And honestly, the real news out of this conversation comes at the end when we start talking about a super interesting new product called Suggested Hosts, which could boost the visibility of your best

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circles design is a trademark of MasterCard International Incorporated. Some restrictions may apply. All right, we're back talking with Dan and Tim of LinkedIn about all sorts of things and we're going to start with the algorithm changes, the algorithms changes. And I started the conversation this way. I said, look, I've been talking to a lot of very, very active LinkedIn creators. It's

my network and they have feelings. They have feelings on these changes. And before I tell you what they are, I'd like to know what people at LinkedIn are hearing or how LinkedIn feels about the outcome of the changes that have happened so far. And Dan went first. I think maybe if you don't mind, I'll just explain like what our philosophy is here because I think that it's important to know when you start talking about algorithm changes and what's different on the platform. All of this

and this has always been true, everything that we do ladders up to what our mission is. We are trying to connect the world's professionals to economic opportunity. So when Tim and I are in meetings that we're talking about what we're rolling out or what we want to roll out or what are long term plans or everything goes back to that question of how are we helping people connect

to economic opportunity. And when the case of content and the case of like posting, the desire is, and this has always been a bit of LinkedIn for almost 13 years now, and it's always been the same, which is that we believe that the sum of the world's professional knowledge is locked, is in the heads of professionals everywhere, and that our job is to get it out and to get it flowing. And we've

always been in the mission of trying to do that. So we can talk about algorithm changes. We're talking about how things are, you know, what's happening around the margins, what we're introducing. But what I always encourage people to remember is what the true north is for LinkedIn, because trying to keep up with the algorithm changes is a losing game. There's a million, there is no one algorithm. And Tim is the expert here on this, but there are always a lot of different experiments

going up. You cannot keep up as a user or even someone as an employee with the number of experiments and with what the machines are learning. The way that you succeed on LinkedIn is by thinking about, am I getting new knowledge out into the world and my connection to people? Is it helpful to them? Are they gaming something? Are they sharing what they know uniquely back into the world and is a conversation that being formed out of it? So that is super simply like everything that we do

goes back to that. Are we achieving that mission? I'm curious if when you, we're just saying if you try to keep up with the algorithm changes is a fruitless battle. Is that in some way a response to the copious amount of guides that people post on LinkedIn about how to succeed on LinkedIn? I see a ton of data where people do studies about how posting it this time during the day leads to this engagement level. And if you don't put a link in for the first hour and then you put a link in

after the first hour after you post something, it will do better. Are you saying that those things are either not useful or maybe they are pinpointing something that is real but that by the time I'm reading it's changed because the algorithm is so often being updated? Two things I would say. What is I think what people are doing often is that they're trying to look at what they've done on their posts and trying to back out a kind of understanding of how

LinkedIn works from that. But often that understanding is incorrect. There's a lot of causality but it's not really understanding exactly how things work. So an example of this is from years ago. We had a, we had an issue at one point where people were writing really long posts. When they decided that LinkedIn loves really long posts that were broken up by lines. I remember that. That was why I remember this whole thing about Broetry. So you started having all of these people

writing LinkedIn love Broetry. This style of writing works really well. What was going on behind the scenes is that we had coded the button. There was a button that said, read more. And when people clicked read more, well, this is a sign that people are getting knowledge out of this and they want to see they want to learn about this. All we were doing was looking at that read more button. As soon as we realized that that was a people were using that we had incorrectly attributed the

read more button as a signal that people wanted to were getting some value out of it. We just took it. We stopped using that as a signal. But it was never Broetry. It never had to do it to line spaces. So we see that all we're in these guys is people trying to guess they're trying to understand what's going on behind the scenes. This is why I would say think about what we're trying to achieve. And if you can just share knowledge into the world, I guarantee you things are going to

work out. They won't always work out for every single post. But over the length of your posting, it is going to work out for you. Tim, I'll put it to you. The original question to take it wherever you want was what are you hearing since this latest round, let's say of specific algorithm shifts. So I think we're hearing everything across the spectrum. And it reflects what Dan was alluding to, which is when we are making changes to how we distribute content, it's highly personalized. And

there are so many factors that will go into this. Dan was alluding to maybe some of the signals we use. But if you've even taken example of let's say you're talking about the latest breakthrough in sustainable agriculture and you're in sustainable agriculture as like an industry, there could be maybe not the size of the audience that you're expecting on LinkedIn. And then

you're making inferences about when I put a comment in this post, it got better reach. But what you're not realizing is there's other factors, maybe the audience size is different than like a different industry. Maybe there's something about the specific field of sustainable agriculture, like some sort of niche in sustainable agriculture that you're talking about that resonates with a smaller audience. If you then try to extrapolate out how to hack the algorithm, that's not going to

matter for people in pediatric nursing or forestry management, right? It's deeply personalized to connect to an audience that's looking for that knowledge. It could be like Dan said, a signal that we're using, it could be the supply and demand for a particular topic on LinkedIn. There are just so many different factors that go into it. And like Dan said, we're continuously iterating on

this day and day out, even probably during the course of this interview. My team is shipping like new changes that try to tweak things like, hey, can we increase maybe the freshness of content and the feed because we're noticing feedback that maybe we see posts that are one day two day old and we want to increase the freshness a little bit. Like all these tweaks are happening continuously. And so pinning it down when it's so personalized is a challenge and very hard to generalize. So that's

why when we run these tests, we actually run AB tests. We look at very diverse sets of metrics to understand what's happening more broadly in the ecosystem and guided by our vision, which is we want to create an opportunity for people. We're saying, did this change actually lead to the outcomes that we're expecting when we look at these broader sets of metrics? Right. And I know that you're also very interested in positive user experience, which is what drove a lot of the changes that we'd

been talking about. Let me tell you and I'll just mix in my own personal experience with others and and I'll acknowledge we're using the word algorithm and people use the word algorithm and maybe Tim, you certainly know what it means because you're building them. Most people don't. And but what they're really saying is whatever the magic thing is that I don't see that determines whether or not something I post is seen by lots of people. That's ultimately what people care about.

And what I think is really interesting about the way that people on LinkedIn think about this is that unlike on other platforms where reach might be something of a vanity metric on LinkedIn. And as you guys know, your mission is to connect people with economic opportunity and there is direct economic opportunity tied to the performance of individual posts. I'll give you

an example for myself, which is I post every single day on LinkedIn. And when a post of mine does well when it traffics highly when it gets, let's say, more than 100,000 impressions, subscriptions to my newsletter go up. There was a one-to-one correlation to that. And that's because I put a CTA for my newsletter in almost every post to find. So when I see a post do well, I see my newsletter do well from my newsletter. Of course, all sorts of other things happen.

Now I have book sales. Now I have people signing up from my premium community. And therefore, I feel very incentivized as do many people to figure out how to engage on LinkedIn in a way that's going to reach the maximum number of people. And that's why people care about this. And what I experienced personally, it was really interesting. Dan, when I spoke with you and your colleague, Alice, in June, I hadn't felt like anything had changed for my own experience on LinkedIn.

But in the following months, something definitely changed. And what changed was that posts that typically would have maybe gotten in the hundreds of thousands of impressions suddenly got in the tens of thousands of impressions. It felt harder in some way to crack like 10,000 impressions. And I know as I say this, part of what is going through your guys' heads is why are you thinking that way? It should be about sharing information. But the practical reality is, of course, like I just

said, that every post is an economic opportunity. And so I want to maximize that economic opportunity. And what I'm hearing from lots of other creators, people I know very well, who also post every single day on LinkedIn, is the same thing. And a real concern that growth on LinkedIn is harder, they're reaching people on LinkedIn has become harder. And I wonder what you make of that? If that concerns you at all, if you're surprised by that.

Tim and I have been working on this for together for what is it a decade now, Tim? Tim and I can't think of a time when someone didn't say that their reach was getting harder to be able to get reach on LinkedIn. So let me just say this is a problem that I think people feel, when you feel it, you really feel it. And I don't want to diminish that at all. But it is always like, you have a good post and then you're like, oh my god, I'm not getting the reach that I used to

get. It is constant feeling. There's a couple things that are going on here. I think one is that you're a different kind of creator, and maybe through your hearing from or different kinds of creators. People who are out to get as much reach as possible is a, is a particular subset of users. Yeah, it is a subset of users. So I'll give you like an example. This is one that I just got, it was we keep like a running room going on. People are like celebrating success on the team.

And this one I just saw this one yesterday was a nurse who started as a bedside of nursing. He started posting his insights on LinkedIn, and then it was recruited by his own employer to take on a corporate role to help improve nursing at this hospital. That was economic success for this person. The only people that he needed to reach with this post were people who worked in this hospital.

If you are running a small business or if you're running a, if you are someone who just wants to reach chief information security officers, you should think about getting a million people to reach your hundreds of thousands of people to see your posts. It's not super useful. You want the

exact right 100 people or a thousand people. That's I think the solution that Tim and I are trying or our teams are always thinking about is how do we get this person the audience that he or she needs or for an occasion, the case of a company that they need to be able to meet their economic opportunities. And so with create the creator like people who are just like I need I want massive distribution. Totally different problem. It is and I don't think it's one that's really representative

of entrepreneurs or people in the working world in general. And I think that we have been trained to think that we should think that way. I think that over time we've come to believe that the key is absolutely spamming as many people as possible with our posts because it's better if the more the bigger the the ocean, the better chance that our net pick up something that'll be useful to us. Our belief is that we can do it better and not need for you to be able to drop something in the

ocean that we can actually get you exactly where you where you want to go. And we hear the success stories of people all the time where they are getting through their posts through sharing knowledge that they are reaching to write people that is having that economic benefit on them. Even if their numbers aren't going up, it's the right numbers that we think about. Tim, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's on and at the heart of it, I think comes down to what LinkedIn started with,

which is it's your identity, right? It's starting with understanding that I am this professional. I'm not a creator. I'm a professional who creation is a tool I will use to achieve some sort of outcome in my career. And what LinkedIn is like what we're putting our entire effort behind is then saying, okay, we understand who you are as a professional. You've put your public professional persona on LinkedIn. We want to help match to the right audience when you're trying to use that tool.

Again, if you're if you are somebody who's in forestry management, we want you to get the latest trends with, I don't know, AI applications in forestry management. We want you to connect to that community because either you're going to learn new skills. If you're creating, you may actually establish yourself as a thought expert in in the area. And that is where your thought leadership is really going to resonate as opposed to just maximizing impressions and hope there's a conversion

down funnel to something. And so I think we're trying to be much more targeted here with how we support professionals on our platform who use creation as a tool. This is a really interesting way of approaching it. And quite different, I would note from what people are trained to expect on other platforms trained, it was a word that you just used in because when you look at where is Twitter slash X tilting or what has TikTok rewarded, the answer is creators. The answer

is people who are creating something for mass reach. And to hear you think about the user in a totally different way is very interesting and weirdly counterintuitive in the text base. It reminds me for whatever it's worth slight tangent, but related is that I give similar advice when small businesses pitch entrepreneur for coverage because a classic example I love to go back to is a guy with a food truck business in DC who wanted coverage in entrepreneur magazine.

And I told him I just met him at a conference and he was trying to pitch me and I said, look, you don't actually want coverage in entrepreneur magazine because it's going to reach 99.5% of your audience who can't go buy a hot dog in DC. And that's actually the point of press coverage for you. And so you should really only be spending your time trying to get inside of publications. They're going to reach your core audience, which is a smaller audience than the international audience

that you find in entrepreneur. So I totally appreciate that. And in just a moment we'll pivot to what new tools and opportunities are being rolled out on LinkedIn. But let me just spend one more moment on this interesting shift in thinking. Tim, you just said it. I think your exact language was people don't think of themselves as a creator. They think of themselves as a professional. LinkedIn has, for the last couple of years, been using the word creator. There were programs to help

creators become better creators. I was a part of one. Dan, you had a newsletter that used the word creator in the title called creator, creator weekly. Thank you. And I've noticed a shift away from that language. Creator weekly was sunsetted in its places now. A new newsletter called the insider. And I wonder, aside from the point that you've just made there, which I think is well taken that the vast majority of the user base don't identify with the word creator.

And so when you speak in terms of creator, you may not reach them or make them feel like it's a place for them. I understand the shift that you're making. But what of people who do see LinkedIn as a place to create in some way, which is a reasonably sized audience of people who see

being good as a content creator of some kind as a driver of economic value. And LinkedIn as the primary place to do that, if you want to reach professionals, if you're in the business of reaching professionals, what's the message to people who do relate with that framing? Yeah. First of all, you're exactly right. This is, let me just say that like, we, the reason why we shifted away from using the term creator was because our members told us that it was not

so they identified with. So this is on me. I had a team that was focused on we were using the word creator. We were approaching people. And the feedback we kept getting is, I'm a lawyer. Why do you keep using this word creator? I'm a lawyer and I'm posting and or I've run this business, but I'm not a creator. It was it almost it put them off. On the other hand, there are people who are creators. This is the way they identify as professions. We want to support people who were creators

on LinkedIn. But when we support creators, so the what they tend to do, what talk about a LinkedIn is the business of creating. How do they think about setting up what equipment are they using to be able to do their creation? What have they learned about social media marketing? How do they gain a bigger audience? What's working for them? What's not? And that is the key, the sort of behind the scenes business of being a creator is doing really well in LinkedIn. That reaches other people

who identify as professionals as being creators. And that's doing really well. Now, I will say to your question, if you want to reach people in a big way, you can definitely reach people in large ways on LinkedIn. If you think about how to do that, there's a lot of topics that cut across any role or industry. So topics like leadership, management, big ideas, marketing, time management.

Exactly. Let's say that always works on LinkedIn is talking about how to deal with questions about whether you are adequate in a job, or should you apply anything that's to do it, getting ahead in your job or applying to jobs like all that stuff does really well. So you can write about that and you reach a pretty large audience with it. But the things that would say is number one, it's really crowded. There's a lot of people that is something where the barrier to entry for that kind of

content is almost zero. Everyone has an experience applying for a job, getting ahead of the job, managing people, thinking about leadership. So you're entering a really crowded field to do it. You can do, I'm not, we wouldn't tell anyone not to do that. It's a big part of what we think about as professionals. You should be posting that on LinkedIn. It's a core part of the LinkedIn content experience. But that's how you reach big audiences because it applies to everyone. But it's also the

hardest way to post on LinkedIn. That's fair. All right. Let's move on to what's new. I'm going to start with something that's small, but has been visible. And then I'd like you to drive where else people should be looking for interesting new changes that as you say drive economic opportunities. So the first one I'm going to bring up is the custom button, which I think some people

are seeing now. What I'm describing here is that you'll be seeing underneath some people's headshot and bio is a clickable link that says visit my website or some small number of other items. Mine is visit my website because that was the closest thing to subscribe to my newsletter, which wasn't an option. I'm seeing more of that. And I know that kind of thing is going to be growing. What can you tell me about it? The custom button is a very first of all, it's new. This

thing is going to continue to increase. This is something that you have access to as a premium subscriber. So Jason, nice and you are a premium user. That's what I am. Yes, option. It's like a personalized call to action that you can use to send people to. Well, it's really useful if you have say you're a photographer, you have a portfolio or you that you want to steer people to. If you're a small business owner and you have a store, it's really phenomenal. If you're a consultant,

you can ask people to sign up for a demo or get time with you. So it's really useful in these parts of the professional world where you were trying to get people to get closer to you. And it shows up wherever you post or come in on LinkedIn. I highly recommend people if you have premium use it. I actually use it. I send people it doesn't you write it doesn't say go to my newsletter. I think we are talking to the team about that. I'm hoping we can get that in place soon because

that's exactly the call to action. I would like to see also. Yeah, it's great. And this is it. And Jason, if I could like point to another way of thinking about what is value for LinkedIn. A way to think about these custom buttons. This is another way as people think about how do I gain LinkedIn or understanding how LinkedIn operates? For a lot of places, a lot of sites want to keep you on their site as long as possible. LinkedIn, if since we are about creating economic opportunity

for people, we don't really care how long you spend on LinkedIn. That is not something we are measuring. We want to know that you've come to LinkedIn today. You had a great experience. This helped you be better at what you do or what you want to do. And you come back tomorrow for more. And so if you go, if in the feed, I see your post and I see this go check out my website and it

takes me somewhere else, that's totally fine with us. Completely fine. Doesn't make any difference to us if you're doing it because you should be as long as members feel like they get value out of LinkedIn that is then and the next best action they can do is go visit your website or go to your store, go schedule time with you. That's a win for us. We have now created that economic opportunity

for one of our members and then we'll get someone back to go find more. I just want to highlight that what you just said there is counter to a lot of the how to hack LinkedIn advice where some of the conventional wisdom there is Joe put a hyperlink in a post because that drives people away from LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't want that, which is the reason why posts with hyperlinks get less,

get less spread. But when I talked to one of your colleagues and I said, I noticed that when I post something that just has just it just drives to a link to something it does get less engagement. And he said, yeah, that's not because of some algorithmic thing. That's because people are clicking on it and then they're going and reading it, but they're not coming back and engaging inside of LinkedIn. So LinkedIn isn't recognizing it as a thing that people want to engage with.

This is exactly what Tim looks at all the time. I was like, how do we understand what someone likes or gets out of something if they then go off site to go read an article somewhere? Yeah, and it's challenging as soon as you leave LinkedIn's boundaries, we don't know what the value was to you. And we're looking for proxies that you saw value that you engaged in a conversation that maybe you spent some time, like meaningful time reading the content. And we just, if we don't

know it, we're like, okay, this got to click. And if you look in the industry, a click with no nothing else is okay. First and bounced. That's what that point. And so we don't, if we don't have that downstream signal to really say, okay, this was valuable. It's very hard for us to approximate. And that's why you may see some of this. It's just, it's, we can't attribute it back. Right. That's really interesting. What other things should people be looking for? I'll name one other

that I'm aware of. Then I want you to take me into other directions, which is the verification badge. Tell me about that. This verification badge is great. This is a way to be able to say that you are, you have worked at a company that you are saying that you've worked at or that you've gone to a school that you have worked at close to 30 million professionals have already

verified on LinkedIn. It is a free system where it is making it super easy for you to say that you are who you are in this world that we are in today being able to have assurance that you are talking to someone who is, who here she says they are, is essential. We are just going to become more important. We want to make sure that we're doing it. It is just going back to the mission.

We are doing the opposite of connecting you to the economic opportunity. If you find yourself talking to a bot or someone who is pretending to be something else, you've now wasted your day. Maybe you've lost time. You've lost money. Who knows what could go wrong? The more we can make you feel comfortable that you're actually dealing with someone who is exactly the person they're representing themselves as. That's better for everyone that removes friction from the

system makes it easier for us to learn from each other. You're going to hate me for asking, but I know that someone listening is asking, so I'm going to ask it, which is does it help in any way with reach awareness or is it just a trust builder for people who are looking at your profile? It's the verified. If the trust builder for people who have viewed your profile, this is something that follows you around on LinkedIn and builds confidence in any place that you

interact with other members on LinkedIn. If your content shows up as suggested on LinkedIn, people will know, this is coming from a verified individual. This is not some genie-generated like mass-produced stuff. There's actually a real person behind this with credentials, and I know who that is. It's really about giving that extra sense of confidence in who you're hearing the message from. Yeah, now the question is, does it? There is nothing where we are saying, if you

are verified, you're going to get extra distribution on LinkedIn. Yeah, that's one of my questions. Yeah, but if you do it and if people are trusting in your content and they're engaging with you because they see that you're verified, that helps you on LinkedIn that helps our algorithms understand that this is a person who has some expertise or has trusted in this area. So there are downstream implications of getting verified, but it is not something that is being used by us to be able to

decide what gets extra juice and doesn't. Sure. What else do people be looking for thinking about what's new or coming? I'll give you three from my list and I don't know, what if Tim has other ones here? Three, I would point out, one is fall leadership ads. I think this is really cool. It's a way for companies to be able to take what someone is posting and put some dollars behind it and

make sure that they're boosting someone else's voice that helps them. And so if you are a big company or small company and you want to someone said something great, you can now start boosting that and having it, having someone be able to use someone's voice to be able to magnify your own brand. So that's really cool. That's new for us. Is that something that an individual user can do or it has to be like a corporate account boosting? It's from a company page. So if you have a company,

you can do it. And there's still and there's still no way for an individual to to pay to boost themselves. Right? Yeah. Not yet. I always say not yet. It's not like that. That doesn't mean it's not. That doesn't mean that we have some secret fangirling. It just means you're not. Everything is one of the great, one of the things I love about working here is that every answer is not yet. You never know what inventor builder prioritized. Yeah. There is collaborative articles

or I think really cool. These are articles that intend these are very focused on the idea of getting niche knowledge out to the world. So the way collaborative articles work is they are a AI written article that talks about particular and very niche subjects. It could be like something about how to pull off one particular part of something within your marketing tech stack. The AI written article though is just we use the AI written article as a way to get people talking.

One of the things that we know is that it is much easier for people to respond to things that it is for them to create from scratch. So that's probably not that's definitely not true for you Jason. It might not be true for a lot of people to listen to this. But for the majority of the professional world, they prefer to react rather than create that facing the blank pages

terrifying. So this AI written article, which is they're okay. They're pretty good. But they are not that as we consider those to just be the start and like the almost like the way to just generate this kind of flywheel to get real movement going. So then you as a professional you start and you can start adding your own voice. Actually, this is there's one I waited on recently about how to prepare for a speech or how to run a panel. And that's why I gave my tips on how to run a panel.

That all of those member comments on how they do that particular skill, how they pull off that particular skill, what they've learned that fence becomes the hero and the AI article starts disappearing. And so these are great. We got five million expert over five million people already contributing their expert advice. It's now in French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and English.

And then you get a badge if you do enough of these. If you do these in your particular area and you're upvoted on how well you are, how useful this information is, you can get a badge that's scheduled in that particular area. And the last one I'll say is newsletters. Love newsletters. These newsletters doing incredibly well. We got 550 million professionals who have subscribed to 156,000 newsletters already. The amazing thing about newsletters on LinkedIn, first of all,

professionally focused, which is great. This is how everything, all content works on LinkedIn. But the distribution of newsletters, we take all the work of distributing and generating new subscribers for you. So every time you post a newsletter, it gets sent out as an email. It goes out as a notification and it shows up in your subscribers feeds. Every time someone, if you have an active newsletter, when you follow somebody, so let's say Tim has an active newsletter.

If I follow Tim, I will be subscribed to his newsletter also. So we do, we make it easy for you to gain this big readership for your newsletter. And the great part of a newsletter is you don't have to worry about the algorithm is just, these whole question about algorithms gets put on the back burner a little bit because you're reaching your subscribers every time you post. And so you can get benefits from the algorithm that might say I'm going to introduce this to more people. But you'll

always reach the people who've said they want to be able to get your newsletter. Now will they always open it? That's up to them. And it's up to the headlines you use or the topics you're weighing in on. Will we guarantee distribution to every single person who's subscribing? So what I love about is it just makes everything so much easier. All you have to think about is the knowledge you're sharing.

So those are all really helpful and I've engaged in somewhere or another with all of them. I'd love to ask you a couple quick questions about some of those products. Let's start with newsletters. I use the newsletter tool a while ago and you'll have to update me because possibly my experience is outdated at this point. But there wasn't a lot of data available. I couldn't see my open rates. I couldn't actually see the subscriber list. And I couldn't download the subscriber list and port

that over to somewhere else. I felt like I was really stuck between as a user. I'll just give you some feedback. I felt like I was stuck between two really hard decisions where I could go to a convert kit, for example, which is going to give me a lot more data and flexibility. And also I could have more ownership over my base. But it's harder to grow than having that direct access to the LinkedIn user base that you're just describing. I'm curious why that kind of robust data and

functionality hasn't been built into the newsletter product. And if that's the direction that it's going so that ultimately your vision is that it does become as functional and as data rich as a B-hiver a convert kit. Yeah, I can just say quickly. This is exactly the direction that we want to go in. There is a lot of work being done here too. Solve the exact problem that you're facing.

You are not the only person who's saying this more analytics, deeper understanding of who my audience is easier way for me to be able to talk to them or help them help convert them into some other areas of economic opportunity for me, all things that we are actively working on right now. So I would just say stay tuned. Okay. On the collaborative articles, I spent a whole bunch of time posting in collaborative articles because I was curious what was going to happen as a result.

I love the idea and I love the problem that you're trying to solve with it. It's really interesting to hear how that solution almost gets reverse engineered from you have a large user base who creates more by reacting than by starting with the blank slate. But what are you seeing in terms of does just be mercenary about it direct benefit for the people who are participating in it? Are they is do they get a lot more visibility? Do people go to their profile pages more when they find it?

When I posted, I saw a lot of people liking the thing that I posted, but I couldn't tell if anybody was discovering me as a result, for example. Yeah. So this is really a place where we're trying to start identifying people who are true experts on our platform and are getting responses from the community that the kinds of things that they're providing are insightful, like insightful tidbits for a specific area. And this actually starts opening up new channels for discovery for these experts.

First, their contributions are distributed via feed and notifications via targeting to the right audiences. And we can talk a little bit more. We haven't even touched on this, but we've been investing a ton in matching on topical interest of a person is really interested in this particular space. Let's get insights about that space to that individual from creators that are actually sharing those insights. So I'd love to hear more about that. So that's one place we're

investing to really get that matching through like phenifications. This also opens up channels where people might be searching for these questions during their work day, like meeting them in their moment. Hey, I am about to enter a panel discussion like how do I prep for this? They might search this on being or Google and they see this article, collaborative article that says, hey, like I am about

prep for a panel discussion. What do I do? And they click into it and they discover these experts that have provided their perspectives. They have gotten the insightful reactions of community around them. And it's like a new discovery entry point from meeting people in their moment to discover these experts and discover this entire community. So that's like where we're going with collaborative

articles right now. But it also is somewhat of a segue and a stepping stone into this entire broader strategy around really rich topical matching of content to people and then what they're interested in as professionals. Can you make a down for me? What does that mean? Dan was asking you from my top top three list. I probably only have a top one list of things I'm excited about because I spend 75% of my time working on this right now at LinkedIn. And you may see it today

in your LinkedIn feed as something that shows up as a suggested post. Maybe this starts tying together the whole conversation we've been having today. Sure. We've been talking about how you can reach your connections. You can reach your followers, your subscribers. But the insight that you might need for opportunity could very well live beyond the confines of a network of your followership. It could be anywhere amongst LinkedIn's billion professionals. And we're trying to

take all the information that we have that you put your public profile on LinkedIn. We understand who you are as a professional. We understand the kinds of content you're interested in. And we really tried to match creators or professionals who are creating in that space and matching that content to you when that insight would be super valuable to you in that moment. And this is becoming, it's going to be something that really transcends the boundaries of just follower subscribe to meet

me in my moment where I need this particular insight. And you start seeing everything we've been talking about today really converge here, right? You start seeing trusted identity and the verified badge. And like when I see a suggested post from a verified author, I know this is coming from somebody who is authentic and I know their credentials. That creator can put a custom CTA on their profile. That shows up when their post is suggested. If it's providing rich insightful

knowledge to an audience, they're going to see that particular suggested post in their feed. They're going to see the custom CTA. And they have an opportunity now to directly engage with koo they're trying to engage with while also providing value to that person who is seeking an expert to provide that that tidbit that would have made their work day better or their particular moment in this career like the next job they're trying to find. They just got that insight that unlocked something

for them. And so that's really where I personally am spending a lot of time linked to the spending a lot of time to really start building this out. And it's very early days, but what Dan and I are are particularly spending a lot of time in this area. That's super interesting. Can I just say it back to you in totally different words from a user perspective to see if I understand what you're saying. I'll probably get it wrong. And then you correct me, which is let's just say that I am

trying to understand newsletter growth. And that is something that linked in has identified this something that I'm interested in based on either the content that I'm posting or the things that I'm reading and engaging on linked in is going to proactively identify the strongest advice

that someone has posted on this subject and then surface it to me, which would be different than what's happening now, which is that the stuff that I see is what LinkedIn is deciding in the moment based on the last whatever the window is amount of time that someone has posted where I'm more likely to see that post. And then it's making some value judgment about how

many people engaged with it and what the quality of that post is. Whatever it is that I'm describing that is the reason that I'm seeing stuff that's posted right now, but it's not necessarily because it is hyper specifically identifying my needs in that moment and surfacing a specifically chosen

post to show me. You're saying that in time and there's no way to game this, it sounds like this is going to frustrate anybody who wants the hacks, but over time your aspiration is to be able to have the system identify the most useful posts and then be surfacing those posts no matter when they happen to originally be posted to people when they are looking for and they're not even telling you that they're looking for it, but based on their actions, they're looking for that kind

of information. Do I have that right? That's spot on and there's so many benefits back to the folks who are actually surfacing these insights, right? Historically the way you build an audience is you'd be recommended in a fall recommendations module where there's five faces and I don't even know Jason, okay, he's editor in chief entrepreneur magazine. I don't even know what he posts about.

Now people see your content in the feed with the follow CTA if they're not following you and it's richly contextualized and it's meeting them in that moment because they wanted that particular insight about how to build their newsletter following whether it be on or off link and Jason has a custom CTA that now lets folks tap in even deeper to the kind of space that Jason has established himself as a thought leader. It becomes a very kind of powerful ecosystem when you put together all

these different capabilities on a roadmap. But so interesting about that I'm thinking about what is the version of that kind of delivery and user behavior that you're harnessing and replicating it in a new way and the closest thing that I can come to is that the reason why somebody is incentivized to post on entrepreneur.com or on their own blog a detailed instructive article

designed for specific uses. So for example, how to build a quality newsletter or something but not just like some dashed off lazy version of it the real true let's get into a hyper valuable piece of content. The reason why they do that is is right now largely SEO because what they're hoping for is that when people search for that exact thing there's intent driven search that people will find that article and if you can do that really well then you can capture people at

their moment of need. You're taking exactly that and I think I'm going to say it to you just to see react to it. I think that what you're talking about here is number one creating an incentive structure for people to be posting that kind of useful content on LinkedIn because if there is the potential that it can be surfaced over and over again at the moment when people need it over a long period

of time that's a pretty strong incentive to be created in that kind of content. But then number two is you're actually trying to go a step beyond intent based search where instead of somebody having to actively search for something on Google you know they want it because of their behavior and therefore you're able to deliver it to them without them even having to do the search. Am I right

about that? It's yeah spot on. We are trying to unleash the exactly as Dan said some total of professional knowledge on our platform and make sure it surfaces whenever you need it in particular we're trying to identify whether it's ephemeral or evergreen whether it's in your interest area

right whether this is relevant to your industry whether it's moment at this moment your career or if it's going to provide an insight for you three years in the future and right now I think a lot of newsfeed products and content products content lives and dies very quickly but when you're when you

have so many professionals sharing what they know and their insights on a platform like LinkedIn that stuff is useful for everyone and at many points in time it could be useful for a new student that just left undergrad and is looking to enter a sector yeah maybe this is old news for us but

maybe it's the key unlock for somebody who's starting off in a field and so the goal is really to meet them in that moment and surface this content when they need it if it's ephemeral it's in the right moment when it's breaking news if it's best practices that are evergreen for an industry

surfacing it when somebody needs to learn those best practices and what should people be expecting to see on this you said that you're testing it out now but is this early days it's early days you're going to start seeing suggested content show up in your LinkedIn feed if there's something

that is particularly we think is particularly relevant to you in the moment we might notify you on that but it's still a small scale test that we want to see how we really nail this because you really need to maintain that high bar for insight authenticity knowledge sharing and you need

to use a lot of tools in your toolkit to make that happen it's our global editorial team that Dan leads it's our algorithms working together to make sure that the right tone is set and folks are really participating in this community in in a way that provides value and insights and that's

that's going to be the journey that we embark over the next several years. Don't you say one thing I please just to take this back to really where we started this conversation which is if you listen to how Tim has explained this massive investment that we're making by the way what he's talking about

it's exactly what Alice and I were hinting at the last time we had talked Tim is just giving you the full deep we were then we were just starting this now we're further along but this is exactly what to talk about but the way that we started this conversation with the question of how do you

who hack the system and get the tips and tricks to be able to get better right right now what's working what's not working on LinkedIn this is LinkedIn like with anything in business is an investment what Tim is talking about is matching up expertise in the moment or over time with the

right person who needs that expertise but if you're going to trust someone or trust some piece of content that gets built over time you start building up your your knowledge you build up who you are to the world if you're speaking if you're let's take this back to the real world for the in-person

world if you're in a meeting just speaking once in a meeting doesn't suddenly get you promoted it is you building up your reputation over time and so my encouragement would be for anyone posting on LinkedIn is first of all everyone should be posting on LinkedIn but that when you do it with the

long do it with a long term focus in mind do it for what you need rather than with the hope that you're going to get 10,000 views on something and it feeling like you failed because you didn't do it you should post what matters to you that knowledge you think needs to be out in the world think

would be useful to someone and that piece might not hit right now it might not hit ever or it might actually catch fire in a week might catch fire a year from now or might catch fire right in the moment but the way that you should think about this over time have I built my voice have I

increased my following or am I reaching if I increase my following even better among the people that I want to be reaching that's the key to success on LinkedIn it's really the key to success in business in general and all LinkedIn is a reflection of the professional world we are just in

a digital version of what you should be experiencing in the workplace whether that workplaces your hot dog vendor in is truck or whether someone working at a multinational company that's what we're trying to bring about in the world Dan to just emphasize your point the number one comment people make to me if they're emailing me or if I meet them at a conference is I love your stuff on LinkedIn people good this is very interesting and it's that kind of feedback loop that encourages me to engage

so heavily on LinkedIn and to want to understand it better and therefore to have one half conversations like these so Dan Tim I really appreciate you taking the time that you have to walk me through it and that's our episode I would love to hear what you think and maybe even about a problem that you

solved you can find me at my website Jason Fyfer.com J-A-S-O-N-F-E-I-F-E-R.com also I have some more useful stuff for you I write a newsletter about how to future proof yourself and become more adaptable and optimistic I would love for you to sign up it is at Jason Fyfer.Bulletin.com

also check out my other podcast it's called Build for Tomorrow in each episode I take on some belief that we have that holds us back from progress and show you why it is not as bad as you think problem solvers is a production of entrepreneur media and comes out every Monday morning so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss an episode thanks to Deepa Shaw for production my name is Jason Fyfer see you next week