Every recruiter should build awareness via LinkedIn.

It brings enquiries, opens doors, and can amplify your credibility.

Many try, and often they give up too soon because of the lack of immediate reward.

But LinkedIn plays by its own rules.

It has an ever-changing algorithm; it rewards what it likes and punishes what it does not like.

(Indeed, some of this may have already changed since the research was done!)

And that reward comes via extra reach and engagement, and that is what we crave – our content to be seen.

So, here are 22 tips freshly researched via examination of the behaviours of the LinkedIn algorithm.

Read carefully and act because you will get much more bang for your content creation buck if you do.

(Note that none of this research is mine. I have noticed much of it be true in my own work on LinkedIn, but this is the research of a smart gent by the name of Richard van der Blom, and I became aware of it through the work of Sam Browne, via the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter published by Hung Lee)

Full details on all that after the 22 tips.

Here they are!

1. Publishing a new post within 18 hours of a previous post will negatively impact the growth of both posts (-15%).

2. Publishing two new posts within 18 hours of the previous post, negatively impacts the growth of all three posts (-30%)

3. Reach in the first eight hours is based on engagement in the first 90 minutes after publishing. Growth over multiple days is based on engagement received between the first 90 minutes and eight hours

4. Post selfies (in personal posts) to deliver three times more engagement and up to 2.5 times more reach. (I hesitated to share this, because what we really need now is more selfies on social media – right?)

5. The ideal text post length is between 1200 and 1600 characters.

6. After publishing your post, make sure you engage with at least three posts from your network. ( + 20% reach)

7. Optimal posting times:

Monday 10 am – 1 pm

Tuesday: 8 am- 11 am

Wednesday: 9 am-11am

Thursday: 8 am – 11 am

Friday: 1 pm – 3pm

Saturday: 10am – 1pm

Sunday: 1 pm – 3pm

8. Do not edit your post in the first 10 minutes. This results in a 10% – 40% reach reduction.

9. Don’t comment on your own post first. This reduces reach by 20%.

10. The best post types for maximum reach include document posts, polls, carousel posts and text and multiple picture posts.

11. The worst-performing posts are video posts (A surprise for me, but apparently 0.5 to 0.8 of average reach), and posts with one or more external links. Essentially, including links in your post will damage your reach, so don’t do it.

12. Including a picture of yourself on one of the slides in a document post will increase your reach by 80 to 90%.

13. The best-performing polls have only two answer options, and polls with four answer options get up to 30% less reach.

14. The best duration for poll effectiveness is one week.

15. If you wish to share a link in the comments (which is a good idea because links in the body of the post are heavily punished reach-wise), it’s best to share that link one hour after posting, or you can edit your post and add a link to that post after one hour, but that will punish the posts reach by 10%.

16. Captioned videos outperform non-caption by 35% in reach and 25% on engagement.

17. Use native video, i.e. video uploaded to LinkedIn directly, and use the square format. Videos where you play the lead role, will get better results.

18. Use three hashtags, no more, no less.

19. Posting the first comment on your own post will slow down growth. However, if you reply to all comments in the first hour of publishing, you will get 20% more growth

20. Every comment you receive will increase the reach of your post by 4% in your own network and 3% in the network of the person that commented.

21. Adding multiple comments, ( 2 to 4) as an author, after 24 hours, will re-launch the post in the feed of all contributors, leading to 25% extra growth.

22. If you are a creator with a minimum of two posts a week, and you stop posting for more than a month, the first 4 -5 posts will receive about 30% less, reach than before.

• I first saw this research in the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter published by Hung Lee. You should sign up
• Richard van der Blom conducts the research and you should follow him on LinkedIn. His original work is here and can be downloaded here
• Sam Browne, (please follow him and check out what he does) cleverly and helpfully produced a short snapshot of the key findings, which I used here

Thank you to all three for their generosity and for sharing

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And if you are in the UK, please join me to hear my masterclass series to launch my new book ‘Recruit’

You can’t hide, because I am coming to you!

Bristol. Birmingham. Belfast. Glasgow. Manchester. London

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