I was talking to a friend last night about how LinkedIn goes through phases.
And how a lot of those phases are dictated by which of the latest ‘LinkedIn experts’ is flavour of the month.
You can almost always tell when an expert has launched a new LinkedIn course and what page/day of the course people are on, by the content seen on there.
🌟 Expert #1 on Day 2 tells everyone to ‘be authentic’ and ‘be honest’ = a slew of posts about mental health, business struggles and vulnerability.
🌟 Expert #2 on Day 4 says “a selfie helps to draw attention to your content” = everyone on the course starts adding selfies to their posts, whether relevant or not.
🌟 Expert #3 on Day 6 advises “post every day, even if you have nothing to say, or the algorithm will forget about you” = a whole load of people posting the minutiae of their day or, even worse, copying content from others and using it as their own.
Then you usually have 3 main types of response from the community.
1) People start moaning about the copycat content they’re seeing.
2) People not on the courses start copying the content they’re seeing (because everyone is doing it so it must be good, right?), thus exacerbating the rage of everyone in category 1.
3) People who have seen it all cycle through the process many times before just get on with posting what they usually do and ignore the ‘trends’.
If you’re sick of seeing the same old content, the simple answer is – IGNORE IT.
Don’t like it, comment on it or respond to it in any way. The more you engage, the more similar content you will see.
If it really bothers you, use the 3 dots on the top right of a post and choose the “I don’t want to see this” option.
You have the chance to say why you don’t want to see it in your feed:
– I’m not interested in the author
– I’m not interested in this topic
– I’ve seen too many posts on this topic
– I’ve seen this post before
– This post is old
– It’s something else
In most cases ‘I’ve seen too many posts on this topic’ will suffice to help cleanse your feed a little.
The more you tell LinkedIn what you want, the more it will give you what interests you.
So before you start a new post on “I’m sick of seeing xxxxx on LinkedIn’, in the hope that you can override the gurus’ teachings, help yourself a little.
And, of course, follow me on LinkedIn!
