How to improve Engagement on Linkedin

Since the goal is to improve engagement. The engagement formula will include average time spent on the application, average number of posts made, average number of messages sent, average number of interactions with posts (like, comment, share). We will analyse these data points for certain period (weekly and monthly).

Based on the type of activities and purpose I have categorised users into following categories :

1. Businesses/Organisations : These are businesses and organisations that use Linkdin pages to create a community around their business, post jobs, engage with employees and customers, post recent updates about their organisation in the from of posts and articles.
2. Job Seekers: These users are using the platform for searching and applying for jobs, engaging primarily with hiring related posts and connecting with Recruiters and other essential professionals to get the job.
3. Casual Users: These users use the platform to keep themselves updated. They scroll through feed, read articles and news on the platform, updates from their connections and the industry they are interested in.
4. Networking Users: These users are not looking for job but want to build a strong professional network. They are comparatively more active than casual users in post engagements and messaging etc.

For improving engagement I would be selecting casual users because, they are comparatively larger audience and their motivation of using the platform in less compared to other user groups mentioned above.

Use cases and Pain Points:

Some of their use cases and pain points when engagement is considered, are as follows :

1. They might not be seeing relevant feeds.
2. They might be uncomfortable to create a post visible by everyone.
3. They might not know what to post.
4. They might not feel the need to message connections.

I will prioritise the pain points as 3,2,1,4

We are moving forward with “they might not know what to post”

Below are the few solutions that can be used to provide users more ideas on posting and eventually provoking them to post.

1. Introduce new posting format where user should be able to share activities to the connections or a specific group about the activities they are currently involved into like “Learning…….”, “attending……..”, “Looking for…..” , “Thinking about……”, “reading…..” etc.
2. I will create collateral highlighting benefits of creating a post like “show your connections that you are passionate about……”
3. I will use data to predict users who are most likely to make a post, some evaluating parameters can be age, designation, no. of connections, engagement with connections etc. and send them periodic notifications and email describing benefits of creating a post and a call to action.

Linkedin Activities will allow users to express and share their activities that they are currently involved into, with their connections. The user will be able to see an activity dropdown tab just beside the post text box. User simply need to select the activity and complete the activity by writing the description in the post text box. Examples below:

• Learning___JAVA__
• Reading___Lean Products___
• Attending____Webinar on World Climate Change___

We can use data to figure out what are the activities that users might most likely post about.

But to implement this feature it will require to go through lot of background research, AB tests, Surveys etc.

Since this form of content has higher affinity with user’s day to day activities, with the introduction of this feature, we might observe a rapid increase in posts per users and post frequencies per day.

This will allow more real and natural engagements with the connections.

Measuring Performance of Solutions:

Some of the important Metric that we need to consider for measuring performance of solution are:

1. %age of people making activity post out of all the people making posts. (adoption)
2. %age increase in post engagement Like, share, comments) (Engagement goal)
3. %age of interactions with activity post type out of all the interactions on posts.
4. Retention among users posting activity ( users posted an activity are posting more activities)

Summary:

So to summarise, we discussed Linkedin and various user segments using the platform and their engagement with the platform. To increase engagement we are focusing on increasing the posts per user. So we focused on users who use the platform casually, scroll through feeds and make less posts. We then discussed about some of the pain points faced by that user group and identified what to post as a priority pain point. Finally we discussed some of the solutions which could initiate them to post more frequently.