Interview With LinkedIn: How to Reach Your Audience

Last week I interviewed LinkedIn’s Director of Editorial & Product Strategy, Katie Carroll. She’s spent 13 years at LinkedIn, working on what makes quality content and how the algorithm serves the right content to the right audiences.

Here’s everything we talked about:

Q: The question we all want to know the answer to: if we use AI, will that hurt our reach on LinkedIn?

A: AI is an amazing tool. It can be really valuable for helping you express your thoughts, clarify your thinking, fix your grammar — all that stuff. That’s totally fine.

We are really focusing on authentic content and allowing people to have meaningful professional conversations. So the point where AI becomes a detriment to that is really what we want to look at.

But AI is fine. It’s a great tool, and we are all using it in different ways now.

Q: You’ve introduced the “AI slop” button recently. What happens when somebody clicks that on a post?

A: We are using that to essentially learn what members are telling us they think is low-value, low-quality, AI-generated content.

Again, using AI is totally okay. That’s not the issue. But those reports are really telling us what members think crosses over that line into a slop category. That’s helping to inform our content quality work.

We also now give some of those signals to members — the creators who may have a particular post that has gotten a certain amount of feedback — privately in their analytics, to help encourage them to think about their content strategies.

Q: Is there a piece of advice you’re seeing on LinkedIn at the moment, over and over again, that you feel is wrong?

A: Oh, man. I would say my main feeling is: think about how to be yourself.

Over-indexing on how to hack the algorithm, or what this one tactic is going to do to be successful — you get tons of that advice.

Really, what it’s about is: how can you express yourself? How can you share your thinking? And how can you connect to the right people who might have opportunities for you or might help you achieve your career goals?

So I would overlook a lot of the tactical advice like that, and really just focus on how you can communicate as authentically as you can.

Q: I’m seeing lots of discussion about the LinkedIn algorithm changing. How much is actually changing with the algorithm right now?

A: We are always refining the feed and always thinking about how to best connect the right content to the right audiences. So that is happening behind the scenes, for sure.

But again, I think it really is about: what is your message? What are you trying to get across? And how can you showcase your unique voice, your unique insights?

Because ultimately, that’s what we’re trying to connect to the right people.

Q: What are two things everybody should be doing to ensure their content performs in the algorithm? Are there two key things everybody should be focused on to get reach?

A: I think one pitfall that I see sometimes is you have amazing experts on particular subjects who aren’t necessarily thinking about the fact that their content is going to be seen by people who know them and people who don’t.

The more you can think about how you set the right context for your post, how you think about it a bit as a shop window — because it might reach people who are excellent people for you to engage with, but who don’t know you right off the bat.

So I think how you think about that setup for your post is really important.

What can you do to foster conversation? Genuine, authentic conversation.

People want to engage in dialogue. People want to share their perspectives. I see incredible conversations happening in the comments.

So how can you think about enabling that with your post and your content?

Q: A hot take: have followers stopped mattering?

A: Followers have definitely not stopped mattering. Followers are a really important part of your overall audience.

But I will say it’s not a guaranteed distribution threshold.

In fact, over the summer, we released a metric in your analytics that basically shows, for posts: how many people from your network are seeing that post? How many people outside your network are seeing that post?

What it will show is that there are always people who don’t follow you yet, or aren’t connected to you yet, who are seeing your content. That’s an amazing opportunity to keep growing the audience that you have.

So followers are super important, really valuable, but it is one of many valuable signals and audiences that you might engage with.

Q: How does LinkedIn think about the split between your own audience and that new, out-of-network audience? How does LinkedIn determine whether content gets pushed more to your own audience or reaches that outside audience?

A: Really, the feed is about: how can we surface the most relevant content for that member at any given time?

So there isn’t one concrete, “This is the split, this is how it works.”

It’s always: what’s the right mix for each given member at any given time? And that’s going to vary.

There are a lot of signals that go into determining that.

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Always such a pleasure to be invited by LinkedIn to chat with their top executives.

See a video snippet of the interview I posted on LinkedIn.