Your LinkedIn company page is near enough invisible now

If you run your LinkedIn through a company page and you’ve watched the views fall off a cliff this year, you haven’t done anything wrong.

Even with the best possible content practices, organic reach is down.

Organic reach means how many people see a post without you paying to boost it. Through this year LinkedIn rebuilt how it decides who sees what, and the effect on business pages has been brutal. Company page posts now make up a tiny sliver of what people see in their feed, while posts from actual people get the lion’s share. Even the same words, posted from a person’s profile instead of the brand page, reach far more.

There is a reason for this.

LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, and it’s leaning hard into matching content to people based on what they genuinely know and care about (as the other platforms have done for a while now).

The thing is, a brand page has no job history, no real point of view, and nothing for the system to latch onto but a person does. So, the system trusts the person.

So now, rather than posting through your LinkedIn company page, you now need to go all in on your team members posting. This is where the reach is now.

And there are a lot of benefits to that – first off, you can choose who you connect with, which means you can literally select who you want to directly speak to. That’s completely different to other platforms.

So the move is to get one or two real people in your business posting from their own profiles, in their own words, about the stuff they know better than anyone.

A regulator is making Google show its working

This one’s a slower burn, but it could matter more than anything else on the list over the next year.

The Competition and Markets Authority is the UK’s competition watchdog, the body that steps in when one company has too much of a grip on a market. This week it told Google it has to be more open about how it ranks search results, and that it has to let people take their data and move it to rival search services if they want to.

For twenty-odd years, how Google decides who shows up has been a black box. You do the work based on supposed best practices, you hope, you watch your rankings move and you guess at why. Nobody outside Google really knows the rules besides what independent SEO specialists test against. And a regulator forcing even a bit of daylight onto that is new, and it’s happening here, to UK businesses first.

You don’t need to do anything this week. But keep an eye on this development because the ones in the know can implement this fast.

You can finally start to see what AI is doing to your traffic.

Search Console is Google’s free tool that shows how your site turns up in search, and it’s rolling out new reports that break out AI performance on its own.

It started in the UK and is now spreading. Once it reaches you, it’s the first proper look at how often you’re turning up inside AI answers rather than the normal blue links.

Log in now and again and check whether it’s appeared on your account, because you can’t fix what you can’t see.

There was a wobble in Google rankings on Friday.

Search positions bounced around through the week, and an update appeared to land on Friday the 19th that mostly hit sites using dodgy shortcuts. If you’ve been doing things properly you’ve likely seen nothing.

If your rankings jumped around, that’s why, and the fix is the same as ever, which is to leave it a fortnight before you panic or change anything.

LinkedIn pulled live streaming.

As of the 22nd, LinkedIn no longer lets you broadcast live. If live demos or trade-show coverage were part of your plan there, that door’s shut for now, so anything live needs filming and posting after the fact instead.

Personally, I do not think this is a good move.

Live streaming is one of the strongest formats for real-time engagement, especially on LinkedIn where people are often happy to join conversations, ask questions and interact with experts directly.

But then again, LinkedIn also removed the video feed and brought it back, so who knows where this one lands long term.

Sara-Mai ✌️

PS — if you’re publishing videos for your brand and want an easy way to increase views, I’ve broken down how we drove an extra 4,000 views to a client’s YouTube video from a single Facebook post. Here’s the video.