How LinkedIn is focused on surfacing the right content to the world’s professionals

As we grow in our careers, it's not just about the skills we acquire but how we help others learn and grow as well. Our members possess an incredible 10 billion years of professional experience, however unlocking that information has long required connections to certain members. We're looking to change that by opening knowledge for all members to create the right opportunities for them at the right moments. Broadly speaking, we want our content to focus on relevancy – reaching the right people with the most relevant knowledge and advice – rather than virality. 

When professionals come to LinkedIn, they do so to better understand the world of work - whether learning a new skill or understanding a new idea. We want to match people to the best content for them and what they need at that moment. This means we're trying to be targeted in how we help professionals, rather than amplifying content and pushing reach.

One way we're doing this is through testing suggested posts – content served to a member that is personalized based on their professional identity, actions, and goals on the platform. The benefit of this is that professionals who come to LinkedIn will see content that is fresh, insightful, and richly contextualized. 

The world of work is changing rapidly, and our members are looking for fresh perspectives from professionals experiencing the change firsthand. Suggested posts are going to pull from a wide spectrum of knowledge that lives on LinkedIn, from today’s professional news, to industry insights and best practices, to evergreen contributions on collaborative articles from LinkedIn experts – all providing you a holistic view of what you need to know to be successful as a professional. The content may not be from someone you are directly connected with, but it will be surfaced based on relevance to you as an individual and ideally at the time that’s right for you.

As you discover new experts to learn from beyond your network, it becomes increasingly important you can trust the voices and perspectives you’ll be using to make informed decisions. This is why we encourage our members to take part in our verification process. Verification badges on profiles can be signals of trust to help people make more informed decisions about connecting with other professionals on LinkedIn.

So – how are we building all this? Underpinning all this work is our use of AI, which helps us to share content at scale, rather than simply trying to boost reach. With rigorous A/B testing and data-driven evaluations of the content, we train and refine our AI with the guidance and partnership of our global editorial team to understand what content is most relevant to our members. 

Our engineers are also employing the latest technologies, like embeddings generated by sophisticated large language models (LLMs) and other deep learning models - numerical representations of real-world objects that machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems use to understand complex knowledge - to improve the relevance of the content we're surfacing in the feed. By leveraging our editorial team's expertise and AI augmentation, we're committed to amplifying authentic, original, and knowledge-focused conversations on LinkedIn.  

All of this work ties back to our mission, which is to connect the world’s workforce to economic opportunity. Daniel Roth and I recently sat down with Entrepreneur Media's EIC Jason Feifer to talk through how we're evolving to help professionals do just that by discovering knowledge and insights with a broader community – read the full conversation here.