Since LinkedIn introduced the “Your post has been trending” feature some months back it has caused a lot of confusion with users not really understanding what it means and whether it’s a good thing or should they even care. So, here’s a blog about it.

Just after LinkedIn introduced hashtags, they decided that they wanted to rebalance the visibility of posts and content within LinkedIn from the famous “influencers” to normal people like us.

Part of this strategy has been to expose posts which include hashtags in front for those people that follow that particular hashtag on LinkedIn.

You may have seen something like this in your notifications on LinkedIn:

And I wanted to explain what has happened and its potential impact to you.

As an example, the above notification that I received was for a post that I wrote which included the hashtag #LinkedIn. My post was flagged as so interesting by other people that LinkedIn then flagged it to all the people that follow the #LinkedIn hashtag as part of their interests within LinkedIn (if you’re not sure what you follow you can find out clicking here).

If you were to trend for, stumble across or search for the #LinkedIn hashtag and then click it LinkedIn would show you all those posts using that hashtag in order and hence you would see:

In this example, you can see the two posts I have highlighted include the #LinkedIn hashtag in blue.

OK … so what?

The implication of any post trending within a hashtag is that it will be additionally exposed to those hashtag followers, so in this instance, 118,189 additional users of LinkedIn will have been given my post if they follow the hashtag that I posted against, in this case simply #LinkedIn.

So, how do you get your post trending in such a way? Just be interesting and appealing to others. Way too many people get hung up on thinking algorithms matter, but in fact it is more about how you write, empathy, resonance and (dare I say) humanizing what you write as the interaction and visibility of that post will always trump any input from algorithms.

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