Social Media Personalization on LinkedIn

This is the third post in a blog series that uncovers how the major social media platforms are personalized to their end users. I believe all marketers need to be aware of social media personalization to ensure that their messages appear for their target audience.

When I first started researching how social media sites personalize to their end users, I was horribly naive. I knew Facebook was creepy (you could guess that based on all of the demographic information you input into your profile) but I thought LinkedIn didn’t personalize to me at all.

I was horribly, horribly wrong.

LinkedIn has a fascinating level of personalization which includes:

1. My LinkedIn search activity (when I use the LinkedIn search box) is personalized.

The results are displayed based on:

• The query I used
• The keywords used in my profile AND the profiles of those being displayed.
• How prior searchers have reacted to those profiles
• My LinkedIn usage and interaction
• The skills feature and how those profiles have been verified for other users for those skills.

2. My LinkedIn start screen is personalized.

If  I have synched my LinkedIn profile with Gmail account, my start screen in LinkedIn will become highly personalized. LinkedIn will:

• Recommend companies and people to connect with based on my Google contacts and Google+ activity
• Recommend companies to follow based on my Google search activity.
• Re-adjusted the content based on visiting outside sites that have a LinkedIn follow button installed.

3. My Gmail and Google calendar could be influenced by LinkedIn.

This last personalization was something that I saw in real time.  Once I synched my accounts (Google and LinkedIn) I started to get a daily email from LinkedIn with my calendar for the day – pulled from Google Calendar – and a reminder of birthdays or notices about people in my network who have changed jobs.)

4. Outside search activity influences LinkedIn content.

I saw this in real time. Here’s the scenario:

I had LinkedIn open in one tab and I opened another tab in my browser to search for video promotion tips from reelseo.com. When I went back to my LinkedIn tab, I noticed that LinkedIn was recommending that I follow ReelSEO’s company page on LinkedIn.

Who is behind all of this the machine learning and personalization at LinkedIn?

There’s a whole team,  and below are 2 individuals  on their Data Science team that I found particularly interesting. Their bios are very telling about how sophisticated the platform is. They are:

Vitaly Gordon, a senior data scientist 

Prior to LinkedIn, Vitaly founded the data science team at LivePerson and worked in the elite 8200 unit (the Israeli equivalent of the NSA), leading a team of researchers in developing algorithms to fight terrorism.

 

 

 

 

Patrick Philips,  a Technical Program Manager 

He works with data scientists, software engineers and product managers to solve problems with crowdsourcing (human evaluation at massive scale).

Previously, he was an early employee at CrowdFlower, a market leader in enterprise crowdsourcing, where he developed scalable crowdsourcing practices for relevance evaluation of search algorithms.

 

 

“Curiouser and Curiouser”,  thought Alice….

LinkedIn also hosts tech talks about machine learning

I found one which Ron Bekkerman and LinkedIn gave as part of their LinkedIn Tech talks:

Here’s Ron’s overview of machine learning:

And other hosted talk about Scaling up Machine Learning:

Hopefully at this point you’ve readjusted your thinking (as I did) about how sophisticated LinkedIn is related to personalizing to its users.

As a marketer, what do you do with this information?

If you’re looking to raise the visibility of your corporate profile, I would recommend the following: