Written by For those of you who market your private practices through LinkedIn, you might have notices some changes to your marketing efforts as of late.
You may have noticed that LinkedIn is not responding as well to third party scheduling of links and posts.
It’s possible that you’re seeing your engagement ratings starting to dwindle.
Or, perhaps you’re seeing that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get into LinkedIn’s main newsfeed.
Sound familiar? There’s a reason for these changes. LinkedIn has adjusted their algorithms.
Why is LinkedIn Changing?
The changes you’re seeing are not without merit. LinkedIn wants to differentiate themselves from the other social media platforms in the marketplace.
Their business model is targeted to working professionals. As such, they want to cater their content to this demographic.
What is LinkedIn’s new process?
They want to limit the amount of cute cat videos or puppy memes out there that have nothing to do with the needs of their working professional demographic.
To accomplish this goal, LinkedIn has stipulated a new process determine what gets seen in the news feed.
- When posts come in to LinkedIn, they are organized by type. i.e. text, graphic, link or video.
- In an effort to ensure that the post’s content is relevant to a group of working professionals, it is released to a sample size audience for testing.
- Based upon the sample audience reaction, (liking, commenting or sharing) it is then moved to a larger audience or news feed.
As of now, LinkedIn concedes that this is largely a bit of a manual process but they intend to keep to the concept of filtering to ensure that posts remain relevant to working professionals.
How can I work with LinkedIn’s algorithms?
Ensuring that your posts are seen by large audiences in the main news feed are simple. Once you begin to commit these steps to your marketing efforts on LinkedIn, I think you’ll begin to see your engagement numbers improve in no time!
- Make an effort to comment or share the posts of people you follow and they will reciprocate. It also shows increased activity for LinkedIn algorithms. Simply liking posts is not enough anymore. Remember, social media is about building relationships.
- Call out your target market on your posts. For example, you’ll see many of my posts call out Private Practice Owners. Examples can include, small business owners, lawyers, health care professionals, teachers, parents, administrators, etc.
- When publishing a blog, copy and paste it into LinkedIn Pulse (https://linkedin.com/pulse) or select the option that says “article” when creating a post) and ensure that the blog has a link to your website. If not, create a paragraph at the end that has one.
- Publish your posts directly through LinkedIn rather than a 3rd party scheduling app whenever possible. I do this especially when I am publishing a blog post to ensure traffic back to my website. Continue to focus on Search Engine Optimization.
- Keep your profile up to date and ensure that it is targeted directly to your target market. Call out your target market in your profile.
- Be active on LinkedIn. Participate in groups, give and receive recommendations, promote your profile on your website, etc. The more active LinkedIn views you, the more likely your posts are to make it through this threshold and be seen by larger audiences.
- Post during business hours, not in the middle of the night. You want your content to be fresh in real time where possible.
- Don’t OVER post. Too much content will drive your audience away and they will stop paying attention to you. Keep your posts to once or twice a day and ensure that they offer value and not just a sales pitch.
When you think about the changes that LinkedIn is making to their algorithms,we can see that they really come from a place of integrity. They are merely ensuring that they are addressing their target consumer…working professionals.
If we follow accordingly, we’ll quickly begin to see the fruits of our labor in private practice.
I’d love to hear more about the kinds of posts that you’re using on LinkedIn to attract your target market. How are you calling them out and offering them content that they can use, and identifies you as an industry expert in the process? Please comment below.