A Chain of Links
A chain of links
I have already written that most of my LinkedIn posts belong to one topic or another. I try to link each post to the previous one, which in turn links to the one before that, so anyone interested in the topic can explore it in greater depth.
My hunch was that this idea did not work, since few people would follow those links without a particular reason to do so (judging by my own habits, of course). Yet, much to my surprise, over the past two or three weeks this approach has started producing results. Likes have begun appearing on posts published six months ago, ten months ago, even more than a year ago.
That made me wonder: how do LinkedIn’s algorithms respond in a situation like this? Say someone likes a year-old post today. It seems reasonable to assume that people find its content appealing. What happens next? Does LinkedIn start showing it again, or not? And if it does, how will people react when they see that the post is 1yr old? Does anyone pay attention to a post’s age if it is not tied to a particular moment or event?
I want to run an experiment to find out whether there is any point in linking my posts to earlier ones.
I picked three posts that I published quite a while ago. They are not tied to any particular news story and could appeal to a broad audience, but for some reason they did not get much attention at the time. I recorded the number of reactions (likes and comments) and impressions for each post.
If you have a LinkedIn account and would like to help with the experiment, follow the links below and be sure to leave some kind of reaction. If you are not going to react, it would be better not to open them, so as not to skew the impression statistics. After a while, I will analyse the relationship between the number of reactions and the increase in impressions for these posts, and share what I learn.
Here are the posts in the experiment:
- The international IGeLU-2017 conference, which I organised: https://lnkd.in/ddC5pgTB
- A project that sent four copies of a book to the International Space Station: https://lnkd.in/e_x9Qm6w
- The Vivaldi information system, created back in 2010 and still running like clockwork today, providing access to millions of digitised works: https://lnkd.in/eh95Cn5f
Thank you to everyone taking part in the experiment!
P.S. If you would like to read the same posts on my blog, here are the links:
- The international IGeLU-2017 conference;
- Books in space;
- The Vivaldi information system.
