LinkedIn is currently seeing ‘record levels’ or user engagement, but much of that is seemingly dominated by re-posts from other platforms, spam, vaguely topical polls, and various other low-interest posting actions, designed specifically to generate shallow engagement.

At least, that’s how it feels, but LinkedIn is working to improve this, and today, LinkedIn has kicked off a new initiative to provide more transparency into how it’s working to combat these elements, and improve your LinkedIn experience.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“Starting today and over the next several weeks, we’ll publish “Mythbusting the Feed”, a series of blog posts and on-platform content that will aim to provide greater insights into how our product works, and addressing common misconceptions and assumptions. Our ultimate goal is to be transparent with you on how we think about the feed, and how things work.”

The first two videos in the series are now active, with LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering Sabry Tozin explaining what types of content LinkedIn seeks to amplify in-stream:

As well as the alignment between professional and personal growth via LinkedIn content:

The latter is probably a key focus note, with many seemingly off-topic posts potentially falling into the more ‘personal’ category.

Should you be posting the same updates that you share on Facebook to LinkedIn as well, where your audience will be professionals and those in your peer network? In most cases, probably not, but as Tozin explains, there is some crossover that’s acceptable, and aligns with LinkedIn’s use case.

That’s interesting insight to have – but really, what LinkedIn users more likely want to know is what gets more traction on the platform, and what’s likely to be penalized by its algorithms.

LinkedIn hasn’t traditionally provided a heap of insight on this (hence this new initiative), but it has previously noted that:

• It factors ‘dwell time’ into content ranking, which means that LinkedIn calculates how long a user spends looking at an update or link as a measure of relative interest
• LinkedIn posts with double-spaced text, which are designed to lure clicks because the user has to tap on the post to see the full message, are now being penalized with less reach
• Posts which expressly ask or encourage users to engage via likes or reactions will see less reach
• It’s now taking active steps to limit the amount of polls that users see in-stream

So if you want to maximize your content performance on LinkedIn, you probably want to steer away from these elements, and focus on crafting relevant, engaging posts that align with your target audience.

That, of course, won’t stop some people from re-sharing viral posts from other apps as a means to lure cheap engagement.

But LinkedIn’s hoping to be able to provide more oversight into how it’s tackling such with this new initiative, which could help you build a more effective, engaging presence in the app.

The first two videos (above) are fairly general, but LinkedIn says that it has more info coming, including:

• Mythbusting the Feed: How the Algorithm Works and Personalizing the Feed
• Mythbusting the Feed: Content Distribution and How We Work to Address Bias

Hopefully these elements will have more specific, actionable tips to help improve your LinkedIn approach.