LinkedIn, a platform designed to foster professional connections and economic opportunities, faced a challenge in its mission to create vibrant communities. While the platform excelled at connecting professionals and facilitating job searches, it struggled to surface meaningful content created by Company Pages, and facilitate follower growth, especially for those with less than 500 followers.
Two teams, Pages and Profile, aimed to improve the "follow" ecosystem. I led research and and data analysis, including a 400-person survey to gain insights to address the challenges, finding the following root causes:
"I follow companies for inspiration, for mutual support, and visibility of my comments to prospective employers"
"I don't know when I last followed a company. But I follow what interests me, so if I haven't done it recently, it's because what I see is not interesting."
I organized a remote workshop with cross-functional teams, including People Profile, to align roadmaps and address shared pain points in the follow experience.
Due to their focus on Creator Profile, we agreed that I would lead initial follow explorations and involve them when needed. The diagram below shows topics for our joint roadmap Vs separate initiatives.
My team formulated a 4-step strategy to accelerate the follows ecosystem:
Enhance the UX of follow recommendations and related algorithms.
expand the surfaces where follow recommendations were displayed, ensuring they were prominently featured across the platform.
Create viral follow loops to help customers discover pages continuously.
Distribute content from Pages and people in feeds, notifications and new capabilities like subscriptions.
To execute strategic themes effectively, the team utilized a combination of advancements in AI, enhancements to the user interface, and the development of new features.
For design, I established a regular working rhythm with the people profile team and ad-hoc collaborations with teams responsible for areas where Pages aimed to make an impact. As projects evolved, I maintained a collection of experiments and initiatives in a visual roadmap, paired with a slack channel for questions and daily check-ins.
Hypothesis: If we show [social proof / social proof + content snippets / content first] in follow recommendations, customers will be more likely to be interested and follow Page creators.
Action: Ran 3 approaches through A/B tests to prove/disprove the hypothesis.
Impact: Variant C was the winner, with a 1.4% follower lift, and later implemented across all recommendations.
Hypothesis: When customers engage with a company or creator's post, it indicates interest in their content, making it appropriate for LinkedIn to suggest following them.
Action: When customers react to a company or creator's post, prompt them to follow.
Impact: 1% increase in Company pages follows, without negative impact to engagement.
Hypothesis: People feel compelled to follow companies that are connected with the people they know.
Action: Added social proof to all page types in the LinkedIn ecosystem, tailored to specific audiences, to enhance value and foster relationships. The interactions and structure of social proof were standardizd across pages and people creators.
Impact: Increased page follows and facilitated member connections with companies, enabling interactions, seeking expertise, and following leaders.
These were used to enhance the effectiveness of follows, with actions such as suggesting followed creators to a user's network and piggybacking on connection flows. They also improved content distribution by incorporating follow affinity scores.
How loops work:
Members A and B are connected. Member A follows a company, triggering a loop for members B, C, D… in their network - which in turn will trigger the loop back for member A.
Example:
Let's imagine two professionals at LinkedIn. Tia and Aarti, who are ex-coworkers, interested in growth marketing, with the same roles and a company in common. What Tia follows will trigger certain recommendations for Aarti, being the person in her circle with more affinities.
Tia and Aarti will continue their discovery journey organically, as they visit different parts of LinkedIn. The recommendations they see will be tailored to the topics they care about, and will include not only people, but also companies. Weekly notifications will keep them informed about relevant content from the pages they follow.
Impact: Visibility across different touch points increased follows in 4%
Problem: Members want to receive content from Pages they follow, but rely solely on browsing their feed.
Action: Enabled subscription to top posts, delivering notifications and email digests to subscribed members.
Impact: Average of 12,000 monthly subscriptions and increased content engagement.
I focused on driving growth for Pages by transitioning from outputs (features) to outcomes (growth and key performance indicators), which is a hard transition to make as a designer.
Instead of working on single, big wins, I focused on achieving multiple small wins through a series of experiments and experience improvements. By focusing on growing new followers, I was able to drive growth and improve KPIs for the Pages product.
