Late last year LinkedIn changed its algorithm, signaling a pivot in its business strategy and taking a dramatic shift. The question is, why?
Has LinkedIn come to the realization that other social platforms are increasingly coming after business (especially small business) or is it their advertising model they covet?
The truth is, LinkedIn needs growth. Revenue growth has slowed to 9% in 2023 and 2024, driven mostly by premium subscription and talent solutions.
And new growth looks like advertising, and lots of it. The old free “networking” platform is quickly transitioning to becoming an ad platform.
The Change
Many users of the platform will tell you they saw a dramatic decrease in their engagement metrics at the end of last year. According to Richard van der Blom and Just Connecting’s Algorithm Insights Report 2025, overall organic reach has declined 50% over the last year in hope of connecting content with the right audience…quality over quantity.
LinkedIn’s AI-driven ranking systems now resemble those of platforms like Instagram and TikTok, meaning you are more likely to see content coming from less creators, and more from creators you engage and/or connect with. Compared to the past which was more balanced towards professional relevance and interest.
Just as the other platforms mentioned have created content “rabbit holes” to dive into, those same content holes are being created in a quest to drive deeper engagement. Where it was once believed that LinkedIn favored organic content creators, it’s now fully on the side of the content consumers. For businesses, this change (unless you have a broad following) means that little of the content that you are sharing on your corporate page will make it through to your audiences organically. In fact, according to a report, organic corporate page content showing in a LI feed has now fallen to 2% in 2024.
The Big Push for Video
What is increasing is video. Lots of it. The use of video increased by 69% in the past year according to the Algorithm report and Daniel Shapero, LinkedIn’s COO who stated that viewer time has increased by 36% year-over-year.
To continue the push to video, LinkedIn has now built a staple of 50+ B2B influencers to promote it. They’ve signed business partnerships with well-known content creators, like Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO), Guy Raz (How I Built This), and Allie K. Miller (AI Business), to make more video content for the platform. Anyone want to guess why?
If you guessed ‘to sell more advertising’, you’re correct. Mr. Shapero also stated that advertising revenues saw significant growth in the quarter, and they see video as a great way to extend business reach.
What Does it Mean for Business and Paid Social?
The first question…is LinkedIn an important media channel for your business? If so, then the second question is, what is the goal? What is your expectation – do you see it as an awareness or demand generation channel?
If it is the latter, you may find the new direction frustrating. LinkedIn pushes video mostly for reach and impressions. And, as I mentioned in my last post, LinkedIn posts and promotions are very difficult to connect to business impact metrics. You may be better off investing in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.
If the goal is awareness, then you are in luck! Here’s what you need to do in order to align with the new direction.
Ramp up video – Identify thought leaders who are camera ready to use for short form videos. Candidates should be subject matter leaders and not salespeople.
Videos should be vertical in format and under 1 min in run time.
Shift budget from promoting posts on your LinkedIn corporate page to higher performing thought leadership ads sponsoring videos.
Posting video should be done by the person featured and reshared by the corporate page…and hopefully, employees within your organization.
Focus on storytelling. Personal stories perform best. Go easy on the selling.
Link your metrics to track performance from impressions to form fill or website visit.
Will it Work?
LinkedIn says that the changes have been made in an effort to bring more of the content consumers want by mining engagement data. By doing this, it is restricting the organic reach of content creators. And that organic reach drove results, according to The Social Shepherd, 77% of B2B marketers said that organic content and engagement produced the best results.
Now those creators will be ones who will be buying the ads. The question is, can they create the quality and style of content that will fit the new advertising vehicles, like Thought Leadership ads.
Will LinkedIn influencers be effective? If you don’t have the inhouse talent to build a following you may consider “renting” one. But, a business audience is very different from a consumer audience. Will LinkedIn influencers be creditable enough to move an audience to take action?
All good questions that we’ll watch play out over time. In the short-term ad revenue will grow, but in the long run, will it adversely impact user experience? One thing is certain, you will see more sponsored content, especially from LinkedIn, on your feed.
I don’t knock LinkedIn for making the pivot. TikTok owns small business retail and Instagram is coming for corporations. Business buyers are consumers and have been programmed to prefer video on social feeds.
Users of “free” platforms also get that is a price to pay for usage, but will this pivot drive users to spend less time on it. Currently, 16% of users check in daily for an average of 1 minute and 17 seconds, according to The Social Shepherd.
Let’s also keep in mind that the platform was built and grew by catering to recruiters and job seekers. Can it balance the need for revenue growth while staying true to its original charter?
It’s a big bet and only time will tell. TikTok goes the clock…
By Naheed Somji
Carbon Design Social Media Strategist
Estimated read time: 5 Minutes
A lawyer friend of mine listened to the “marketing guy” drone on and on about how it’s each partners’ responsibility to drum up new business for the firm. He mentioned tactics like attending events, networking, and posting on LinkedIn.
My lawyer friend was not convinced. I believe her exact quote was, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”
And she is right. When your main focus is settling cases, meeting billable targets, and helping clients, marketing is the last thing on your mind. “I went to law school, not business school!” she exclaimed. Fair enough.
Except… that marketing guy was kind of right.
At Carbon Design, we worked with a top global law firm to help answer a question about LinkedIn usage amongst employees. We analyzed the LinkedIn activity of over 600 partners, specifically measuring post engagement and number of followers (connections) against a list of top performers in the organization.
The results were eye-opening.
We wrote a proprietary formula to calculate a Social Media Score to indicate who has the greatest social media value, aka who is providing the most value by posting about the firm. We found a direct correlation between the most active LinkedIn users and the top billers.
Does posting on LinkedIn all day make you a better lawyer? Of course not. But those who were active on LinkedIn were establishing themselves as thought leaders, and gaining recognition for it. Thus creating the feedback loop. A partner would share their/the firm’s successes on LinkedIn, get cheered on by friends and colleagues, and get noticed by other companies. Over time, a network is built and leads are turned into clients and cases are won so the partner has more successes to share on LinkedIn.
There are two variables needed to make the feedback loop work: content and conversation. The firm provided the content — expertly written articles, blogs, videos — and the partner focused on engaging with their network. If one of these pieces aren’t in place, the marketing effort fails.
If you’re a lawyer reading this, work with your marketing and business development teams to create a content plan for you. This plan should be a checklist of what is required to write an article or record a video. You have two responsibilities: fill out the form that provides the context to the marketing team, and commit to the process and to sharing and engaging with the content when it’s published.
If you’re a marketer or communicator reading this, your job is to create a template where the subject matter expert can give you the information you need in 10 questions or less. You can take their input, the images, and video files, and craft a story that’s relevant for your audience. Keep your SME in the loop on the timeline — remember, endless reviews are where content goes to die, so be clear about the needs and commitment.
If you need help with any of the above, find us on LinkedIn (with the rest of the top performers).
Where does the signal to pull your hand away from heat originate? If your answer is the brain, you’ve already been burned. Instinctively, we pull our hand back without conscious thought, because the response to the stimulus takes a short cut and originates in the spinal cord because of the need for quick action.
According to venture capitalist Peter Levine the need for this same type of short cut may be happening soon with computing. Mr. Levine said that he saw a shift in computing coming from the cloud (centralized) to the return of edge computing (decentralized) because the wave of innovations from IoT, and AI, are driving the need to have decisions made in milliseconds.
As Mr. Levine points out, a connected car is basically a data center on wheels “it has 200 plus central processing units…doing all of its computations at the endpoint and only pass back to the cloud.” Just like you hand doesn’t have time to send a signal to the brain, autonomous vehicles need to react instantaneously to the situation.
Data, insight, and now action, will be moving to the point of engagement in this future view. Now think about the potential challenges that present marketers in staying on brand, and controlling the message with thousands, or even millions, of touchpoints acting independently. Today, the best messaging and value proposition work can (and usually does) go off the track the moment it makes its way to sales and service reps.
Marketers live with the daily issue of cross channel attribution, add cross channel communication to the mix and we better have really good tracking tools! Sure, we can pre-set the messages, designed algorithms to present them at the right moment in the buying cycle, but controlling and tracking the delivery of each message in the context of an overall brand story will be the challenge.
And keep in mind, machines aren’t the only things that learn. As research has shown, the buying process is a highly emotional roller coaster. With machines entering the process we risk driving efficiency at the expense of dehumanizing the experience. As machines learn, we also begin to sense whether we are dealing with a human or a machine.
For example, do you really get the “warm fuzzies” from all those “HBD” messages on Facebook, or the “Congrats on the New Job” on LinkedIn? Machines have been great at helping us be more informed, but they have also have made it easy to turn highly personalized interactions into transactional tasks, void of any emotional connection.
The first wave of machine learning has been about improved efficiencies, productivity, and predictability. As Jeff Bezos stated in his brilliant letter to shareholders, “Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deal recommendations…much of the impact of learning will be of this type – quietly, but meaningfully, improving core operation.”
As the next wave approaches, we should be cautious on how it is applied to the buying process. The focus should be on making humans more human, becoming more instinctive, so potential customers don’t get burned.
It’s the time of the year to look back over the last 12 months and create a “best of” list. This year I’ve pulled the most popular posts from five different sites; Adage, Business2Community, Forbes, Fortune and LinkedIn. In addition, I’ve thrown in a few other noteworthy nuggets from the year at the end of the post.
Adage – Why Apple Pay Could be Huge, And It’s Not What You Think explored the potential upside of Apple Pay as an advertising platform. It sparked the most conversation, and debate, on Twitter. Time will tell if they this strategy will come to fruition.
Business2Community – 5 Key Tips and Data Points to Defend You 2015 Marketing Budget. The last post of the year required the most man hours, and it was the most reposted story of the year. It offers marketers help with their 2015 planning activities in the form of free research and benchmark data.
Forbes -the most popular and shared post of the year, Could Falling Test Scores Be a Good Thing for the US? explores the link between test scores and success in business. It also highlights the risk associated with over emphasizing left brain analytic skill development, outlined by Sir Ken Robinson in his Ted Talk video Do Schools Kill Creativity? The endorsement of Marc Andreessen certainly played a big role in the popularity of the post.
Fortune – Are Marketers Measuring the Right Things was the first post I wrote for our new partnership with Fortune. It profiles the efforts of Ciena, a networking company, to elevate marketings role, and importance, within the organization. The post highlights an unique survey tool used to gather feedback from the sales organization on the performance of marketing (see the dashboard below).
LInkedIn – 2014 marked my first year publishing on LinkedIn. Based on my experience so far, I’m not convince it will viable platform for content unless it becomes better policed. Too much promotional material seems is making its way on to it. At this point, I’m not sure I’ll continue to post.
That said, the most popular post on LinkedIn was also one of the most popular on Adage. The Keys to Differentiating Your Company From Others provides tips on how marketers can humanize their corporate brand to better resonate with audiences. It also identifies one of the common flaws of B2B communication – thinking that what you sell…is who you are. Hopefully, it also helped generated a new client for a follower.
Bonus Stuff
A couple of other noteworthy happenings from the year.
Linkedin’s stock opened at $45 a year and a half ago, it now sits at $120. Unlike Facebook, one of the primary reasons it has done so well is that it found its’ “killer app”early on, and built a business model around it.
For recruiters, Linkedin is the largest (now 200 million members) and most current database of business professionals in the world. For job seekers, it’s a portal into new opportunities, connections and references.
To learn more about its capabilities as a recruiting tool, we posted an open account supervisor position for our DC office on Linkedin. The resumes have been sent directly to me for the past month. Unfiltered by a recruiter or HR person, I got a direct shot of the power of Linkedin. As the hiring manager, I learned a good deal about using the tool, and how job candidates can better marketing themselves for posted positions.
Because of the volume generated by Linkedin, hiring managers have the luxury of trying to find exactly what they are looking for without having to dig too hard to find it. We quickly scan the email summary and the attachments. As a result candidates need to:
Read the job description – hiring and HR managers spend a great deal of time defining the role. Take the time to adapt your resume to highlight those areas that best match what we are looking for don’t make us connect the dots because we won’t…we’re already on to the next candidate.
Customize your cover letter – tell us why you’re the right candidate for the position in the cover letter, especially if you can’t link it on your resume. Make a compelling case as to why we should spend additional time looking at your resume and background. A generic cover letter is a waste of time and a sure way to take yourself out of the race.
Know that we will check you out – if we find someone we like, we’ll spend time checking your Linkedin profile (beyond the email summary below) our current and former employers, as well as your social profile. For example, a person that caught my attention was eliminated from the process because I couldn’t find their last two employers on the web. The learning – companies go out of business or are acquired all the time, make sure your resume reflects or notes that change. We will “Google” you.
Brands count – recruiting firms use key word searches to pull resumes. As for me, I scanned resumes also looking for those “key words.” Again, because of the need for speed certain words “pop.” Brand name companies caught my attention (whether the candidate worked for them or had them as a client). Schools you attended, the types of skills you have, and your accomplishments, especially if they were award winning. I also took notice of the number of Linkedin connections and references…it does matter, I’m looking for a good marketer.
Using a connection/s works – leverage your Linkedin connections to find a common link to the hiring manager or job poster for an introduction. I trust the recommendations of people that I’ve worked with in the past. As a result, do your homework. The closer the connection to the hiring manager or recruiter the better chance it will get you noticed.
What does not work – I found the executive education programs to be confusing. It took too much of my time to figure out if you graduated or only took a class. Consider moving the later under skills or experience rather than putting in education. I also found resumes that were more than 2 pages too long to read. A summary is a good to have upfront, but don’t go beyond more than a third of the page. Get into your experience quickly.
Talent is the lifeblood of an agency…for that matter most companies. What you think, say and produce grows our business. We need you, and we have jobs. Help make it easier for us to find you, link your experience and expertise to our needs. Hurry, I need someone…like yesterday.
It’s not unusual to find companies referring to their relationship with clients as “partnerships.” It’s common to find client logos on vendor websites. But how often do you see an agency or consulting firm’s logo on client websites? If you visit www.evepark.ca – that’s exactly what you’ll see.
Carbon Design, represented side by side with, a global architecture powerhouse, a world-class designer, and the project principal: the innovative green-tech engineering firm, S2E Technologies Inc. Under S2E’s leadership, these firms are inventing a new consumer category – one that integrates bold new ideas about housing and transportation – and radically resets the carbon footprint of both at the same time.
CASE STUDY
Did you know, that until recently restaurant owners only cared about the cleanliness of the food prep area? Most customers, and owners, assumed that if someone got sick after dining out it was because of food poisoning. That was until Carbon Design and Challenger Inc. helped “challenge” the norm by showing owners that half of the outbreaks in a restaurant were caused by people to people transmissions.
Now owners know where the “hotspots” are, and as a result, restaurant are cleaner than ever. Grab your face mask and enjoy a safe night out, but you may want to avoid the raw oysters 😉.
CASE STUDY
How do you do it? By giving clients and users what they want. Using the remaining budget that was to be used to update the site with the new branding we designed and built an entirely new site on a new platform. But audience needs are constantly evolving so the work never stops. Our team continues to audit performance and make improvements.
As a result, the two-year journey has paid off with the site being named #1 in the industry. Even more importantly, their key priority areas (site search, attorney profiles, etc.) were ranked in the outstanding category. Proving that excellence is a journey not just a destination.
ta Points to Defend You 2015 Marketing Budget
