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Creator Science with Jay Clouse
#307: Richard van der Blom — The state of LinkedIn in 2026 (based on data from 1.3 million posts)
00:50:05
How the author of the celebrated LinkedIn Algorithm Insights report uses LinkedIn.
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Transcript78 lines
- [00:00]
Richard Vanderblaam
I Normally get around 20 to 30 comments in the first five minutes and 80% of them are AI written. 80% and obviously a lot of time from the same people.
- [00:23]
Jay Clouse
Hello my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. My guest today is Richard Vanderblaam. For years, Richard has published the most comprehensive annual research report on the LinkedIn algorithm that I have personally found. And this year, Richard and his team analyzed over 1.3 million posts from 50,000 creators to produce the 2026 LinkedIn Algorithm Insights report, and there have clearly been some big changes. Reach is down 60% for active creators over the last two years. AI generated comments are so prevalent that Richard says 80% of the comments he gets in the first minutes of a post are written by AI. Third party analytics tools are getting shut down. Shield, which many relied on for years for their analytics, just went dark this past week and LinkedIn has fundamentally shifted from a relationship graph to an interest based graph, which changes almost everything about how the platform distributes your content. As doomy and gloomy as that may sound, Richard isn't totally pessimistic about all of this. He's adapting and he's got the data to know exactly how you can too. And that's what we dig into here today. In this episode, you will learn why LinkedIn reach is down 60% for active creators and why Richard thinks that's actually part of the plan, what topic fingerprinting is and how to use it to reinstruct the algorithm about who you are, how commenting now shapes your interest graph, not just your human visibility. The free bookmark search trick that Richard uses to build curated feeds of the creators he wants to engage with, why LinkedIn newsletters are outperforming standalone posts on Reach, engagement and conversion, why the optimal posting frequency has dropped from five to six times per week to two to four times, and what formats to prioritize if you're being selective. There's a lot in this episode. This is Richard's second appearance on the show. Our first episode together remains a fan favorite, one of the most played in the catalog, so we were due for an update. If you want to read the full report for yourself, you'll find a link in the show Notes to do just that. We'll get to the episode with Richard right after this. This episode is brought to you by Circle. And if I'm being honest, much of the Creator Science business is brought to you by Circle. That's because Circle is the platform powering the Lab, our membership community for professional creators. The Lab is the beating heart of our business. Which means Circle is absolutely essential. So many of you listening to the show are already inside the lab and have experienced Circle firsthand. I was actually a beta user of circle back in 2020 and obviously I'm still using it today. I can't imagine hosting the lab anywhere else. And that's because it's truly a tool that continues to evolve and listen to its customers. Let me tell you why I love Circle. It's the most user friendly, admin friendly and fully featured community tool on the market. That's my very strong, very honest opinion. Even if someone has never been in a Circle community before, they have no problem quickly learning how to use it. And that is one of the most important aspects of any community tool. Encircle grows with you. It's dead simple to get up and running, but it's so robust that as you need more and more control and specificity, so Circle provides it. In particular, their built in automations just keep getting better and better. Learn more and start your own free trial of Circle at Circle. So that's Circle. So study and play come together on
- [03:37]
Richard Vanderblaam
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- [03:38]
Jay Clouse
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- [03:40]
Richard Vanderblaam
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- [03:44]
Jay Clouse
Get the unreal college deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass ultimate with the custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more@windows.com studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30th terms at aka mscollegepc. So at a high level, how would you just describe the state of LinkedIn as it is on 2026 and maybe as compared to 2025 or the recent past?
- [04:18]
Richard Vanderblaam
The first word that came to my mind was turbulent.
- [04:22]
Jay Clouse
Okay, say more.
- [04:23]
Richard Vanderblaam
Actually, there's a lot of things going on at the moment. We've had this fundamental restructure of the algorithm at the end of last year, which caused a lot of creators to get very annoyed, frustrated with their reach and their engagement and their results. By now we all know why and what has happened. But at the same time we see a huge increase in AI generated content, AI generated outreach. So one of the things we saw is that a pretty decent percentage is not using LinkedIn anymore at all. They literally turned away. They have their profile, but they don't log in anymore. So there is less activity from a big group.
- [05:15]
Jay Clouse
Interesting.
- [05:15]
Richard Vanderblaam
And this is the group that really gets sick of the spam and the automated messages and they don't recognize themselves anymore with the platform. And then in order to fight this new wave of AI generated communication, because that's what it is, LinkedIn is also shutting down third party tools that are not compliant with their terms and agreements. And some of them, it really doesn't matter to me because I dislike them because they bring chaos to the platform, because we're talking about spamming tools, automation tools. But just this week, one of the first tools that ever existed, Shield app that provided LinkedIn analytics. In a time where LinkedIn only gave you number impressions, number engagements, there was so little analytics. And SHIELD was the first app that just said, okay, connect your LinkedIn account and we'll give you all the data so you can analyze it, you can do better. And they have been shut down this week and it's not the first tool, it's also not the last. So there's a lot of dynamics going on, which obviously makes it interesting on one hand, but quite turbulent on the other hand.
- [06:30]
Jay Clouse
Super interesting. I didn't realize that shield got shut down. LinkedIn's always been an interesting and different platform because the dynamics of it being owned by Microsoft. It doesn't have the same priorities, I would assume, as other social media platforms, but at the same time it operates like a social media platform. So an algorithm is kind of a stand in for probably what the platform thinks its users want, but there's probably an aspect of it also that is fueling what the platform itself wants. So if you were to extrapolate based on this data, what would you say you think LinkedIn wants in terms of how people engage on the platform that they're trying to protect or encourage through the way the platform itself is designed?
- [07:20]
Richard Vanderblaam
No, I think you hit the head on the nail by saying it's a social media platform, but it never reacted like the other platforms do. And there's so many examples of that. They don't have the same collaborative attitude to creators that, for example, Instagram has or Twitter had, or where creators actually got supported by the platform. They don't value a lot of people who make people more successful, basically. I remember also that one and a half year ago they targeted hundreds of LinkedIn experts via their legal team, myself included, for having LinkedIn products or LinkedIn related services on the website and they said it's not allowed, blah, blah, blah. But on the same hand, all these LinkedIn experts, they train thousands of people every week to do better on LinkedIn, to make more use of the platform. And I think there is a complete mismatch between the intention of those LinkedIn experts and how LinkedIn values it. I do think that in its core, their mission, which is making people more productive and successful, is still what they are trying to look for. I do think that if people become successful, they also grow. But monetization of the data they have is one of the main goals. And that's, you know, for me, that's typically a Microsoft strategy. They have so many data, they have literally no competitors. And I've seen so many new features and developments in the last two years specifically, that also helps them to monetize the platform more than they have done before. So it's a bit of both worlds. And their promise with the whole restructuring of the algorithm was, I don't know if it was the head of product or even the CEO of LinkedIn said, we don't want people to go viral on the platform, but we want them to become more relevant and more impactful. And this completely aligns with what we are seeing. So you get less reach. Like on average we've lost 60% over the last two years. Since we last spoke, we've lost 60% of reach. But engagement has not dropped down with the same numbers. Engagement is down 20, 25%. So if you look at it, you get more engagement, you get more conversations with less reach. So basically LinkedIn keeps their promise to bring you more relevant reach shows from the numbers because if the engagement stays high but you get less views, it means that you get more engagements per views. That's the whole plan, that's the whole idea. And that's also why they shifted from, as we call it in a report from a relationship graph to an interest based graph. That's the biggest, biggest shift they have done in the last 10 years.
- [10:07]
Jay Clouse
That's pretty consistent with all social media platforms, right? Most social media platforms have moved to this for you dynamic where it's not about who you've chosen to follow. It's really based on your interests and your activity on the platform. We're going to connect you with content that we think is going to engage you. So that's them kind of following the social media trend. It sounds like what's interesting to me, we kind of ended our last conversation talking about this relevant reach point. Reach overall is down. Relevant reach is the goal they're moving towards. It sounds like that stayed consistent for a couple of years. But if my reach overall is down, where is that going? Especially if we're seeing people leaving the platform, as you say, is it elevating the floor of creators who are publishing who are getting almost no reach.
- [10:53]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, it does. That also shows from the numbers. So the creators that are not publishing X times a week, but more. The people that you know, whenever they feel like it, or whenever they have something to share, they are sharing stuff. They have seen an increase in reach, not in numbers of 60%, we're talking about 10 to 15%, but we're talking about still 60% of all the members are in that scale. So if 60% of all the members get 10 to 15%, it makes sense that the upper 10%, the people who always have been active on the platform, like me, I share six times a week, I share a post and that reach is taken from us. It's also taken and directed towards more ads, so more promotional messages. And very important one, 9% of our feed nowadays is suggested posts, which means LinkedIn is going to show a post to a specific audience where they think based on the previous engagement, this might be a really successful, valuable post for those people. And to be honest, the suggested post, I'm always saying to my clients, it's more like a free ad that they are giving you. If your post is suggested in the feed of your target audience, those who are not connected with you, those who are not following you, it's like a free ad. Like, then it's showing your post, but you need to earn it. You need to earn it based on the engagement and the interaction the post gets after you publish it. So there are a few elements, a few shifts in the feedback as a reason for taking away the 60% of reach for the most active creators.
- [12:37]
Jay Clouse
That's interesting. It reminds me of Facebook circa 2014, where they're trying to show publishers the reach they could do. And it was like a boon for these publishers, but then they took that away and basically said, if you want that reach now, you have to pay us as a page. Not saying that's what LinkedIn's doing, but it sounds like a pattern match at the beginning of that curve.
- [12:57]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, could be. Could be. Yeah, of course. Yep.
- [13:00]
Jay Clouse
So if I'm listening to this, I'm hearing, okay, so things have changed. Maybe somebody listening to this hasn't really taken LinkedIn super seriously yet and they haven't noticed negative impact to their reach. What do you think they should know about? Okay, if you are going to take LinkedIn more seriously, here is how I operate based on this report.
- [13:18]
Richard Vanderblaam
I think the most important reason whether you have never taken LinkedIn seriously or whether you got great results and you need to deal with seeing a drop in those results is you need to work on what we call topic fingerprinting. So basically LinkedIn needs to understand who you are for who you are. Interesting. And what kind of expertise do you have? LinkedIn gets that information first from your profile. Okay, so when I saw that data, the raw data, before actually writing the report, the first thing I did in February, and it was the first time in three years, I completely revamped my profile. I completely rewritten it because it had a lot of things that were still connected to my past, it still had a few of those resume things in it, and I just completely redesigned it, completely aimed at my ideal client profile, my target audience, but also deleting all this stuff from the past that was no longer relevant for who I am today. And within three weeks, I saw an uptick, I saw an uptick in profile visit, I saw an uptick in reach because I reinstructed LinkedIn who I am, who's my target audience, and what do I have to share with them? So that's your profile, then your posts. One of the exercises that I recently shared on LinkedIn is copy your last 20 posts into whatever AI tool you're using, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT, and ask Claude what are the two main topics of those last 20 posts. If you don't get the right answer. So you're thinking, I'm all about LinkedIn and I'm all about email marketing and Claude says something completely different, you're out of lane. If Claude says there is no two main topics, but I see four or five, you have too many topics. Okay, so now you need to stay in lane. So choose one main topic, maybe have two or three subtopics that are related and aim for 80% of your content around those topics. Okay, so that's also reinstructing LinkedIn. This is what I am about. And then your engagement. Okay, so I also change a bit my strategy on engagement. So I'm looking for on topic discussions where I can show my expertise. I'm looking for relevant discussions where I can, based on my authority, based on my knowledge, I can add value. And I'm going to comment on those. I still have my social based comments. Okay, so if you are celebrating the success of the podcast, I will leave a comment, say, hey Jay, great work, well done, well deserved. Because LinkedIn understands the difference between a social based comment and an interest cluster based comment. But just to give you an example, if I get a DM from a former client saying, hey, we just published a vacancy, could you leave a comment or could you, I'M not going to do that anymore because I'm leaving a comment on something that is out of my cluster and I'm going to confuse LinkedIn what I'm about. So I'm more in my niche also with my comments.
- [16:29]
Jay Clouse
That's interesting. If that's the behavior that the data is pointing you towards doing, it seems like they are effectively doing a crackdown on pods a little bit. And I saw this in your report as well, that they were like 97% accurate at detecting when somebody is in a pod. And this is why I've never participated in these, because it felt so weird to be like, okay, you're relatively my size, but what you're talking about has nothing to do with me. It just doesn't make sense. So it sounds like that change may effectively be at least curbing that behavior, if not preventing it.
- [17:02]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, and it also aligns with what they have communicated because they have communicated that they would pick up the war against bots, against automation, against any behavior that they find manipulative or not authentic. And this mechanism, obviously, if you were in a bot and you're going to leave comments on all different kind of posts, different kind of topics, you would complete completely dilute who LinkedIn thinks you are you confusing. And it will have a negative impact on everything you do yourself. And there are more mechanisms at the moment in play to detect bots, which for me is a good thing. I mean, it's about time.
- [17:39]
Jay Clouse
As a creator who wants to grow, like I see the appeal, totally get it. And it's like historically worked for a lot of people, totally get it. But as a citizen of the platforms, it's just so transparent and uninteresting. I want to talk a little bit more about comments because this is one of the takeaways I had from the report. One thing I struggle with is just capacity. So let's imagine for a second that I'm willing to allocate 30 minutes in the morning or 30 minutes per day commenting on LinkedIn. How would you advise me when I should be commenting on LinkedIn and how I divide my effort between engaging people who are engaging with me on my posts versus other people's posts?
- [18:22]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, that's an excellent question. And I think time is one of our most important assets for a lot of people. So we don't have two hours a day to comment. At least the majority of people don't have the two hours. And I also see now a trend where people learn from whomever saying you need to do 30 comments a day. And then the magic will happen in two weeks, which for me is a big myth, because if you comment on the wrong post, if you come in the wrong way, if you don't position yourself, it delivers crickets, it doesn't do anything. But I would say it's still important in the first hour that you recognize the engagement you get and that you respond. So I still publish in the morning. I do vary a little bit with the timing, but I still publish in the morning and I will not publish if I don't have directly offload publishing 10 to 15 minutes time to engage. So if I want to publish at 9, but I know I need to take the dog to the vet, for example, and I'm back at 10, I will publish at 10. Because then I have the first 15 minutes and that's where I start responding to the first engagement I'm getting. And maybe go to a list I have on LinkedIn and start engaging with five to 10 peers that speak about the same topic that I know I can leave some additional insights. And then I have a strategy where I have a list of clients, so I do check them every day where I say like, hey, if they have anything where I can help them, social based comments, I will do that. If they don't publish or if their content is not something that I feel I should comment, I will not. So I'm not commenting because of the numbers, I'm commenting because the added value. And then I have a few filters, so a few feeds basically on LinkedIn algorithm, LinkedIn sales lead generation that if I see interesting discussions, it's a feed for people in my second and third degree network. So it's not my connections. And there I leave 5 to 10 comments a day because then you position yourself in the network of somebody who is outside your bubble. And that does like a really great job in bringing people back to my profile, profile visits, new engagement, reciprocity, all those kind of things. So basically I have my morning 15 minutes after publishing. I do it most of the time around lunchtime. I just checked in 15 minutes. And then at the end of the day it's more that I look like, okay, how many comments? Where do I left, what kind of list didn't I had a look at today? And then I do that. I would say it'll take me around 25 to 30 minutes a day.
- [20:54]
Jay Clouse
And just to make it concrete, I know this is like a wild projection, but I just want to get your gut take, let's say that comments on my own posts to people who are engaging with me. Are internal comments other people's content external? How would you weight these against each other? Do you see it as a one to one or do you see one as more impactful than the other?
- [21:13]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, my first gut feeling would say they're equally important. But the internal comments, so the comment on your own content, if you don't do that, you don't nurture your post. 2026 is all about nurturing your post. It's not about publishing and then wait for the magic to happen. No, you really need to nurture, including responding to comments, including trying to get people from outside your bubble liking and commenting on your post. Because if you get likes, likes, even likes this year and comments from people second, third degree, it really is a strong signal to LinkedIn that you are very interesting for your interest cluster. Whereas external comments, like I said, you can do 20, but if you do them on the wrong type of content, on the wrong type of creators, or you don't position yourself, there is not much of an impact. So the external comments really requires to have a good strategy.
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Jay Clouse
How do you react to commenters who show up to your posts day after day and are clearly writing their comments with AI and just trying to get visibility on your posts?
- [22:18]
Richard Vanderblaam
It depends on. On my mood. On if it's Monday or Friday. No, it depends. You know, if they're obviously written with AI and you can see them, you know, they have the pattern and they ask with a ridiculous question. That is exactly the point of the whole post. You know, I recently had something about the four trends of LinkedIn posts and I got a comment, blah, blah, blah, blah, obviously written by AI. And the question was, what would you consider trends for LinkedIn posts? And I was like, hell, the whole post is about this. And then I call them out and I make a joke, I leave a comment and say, well, threat number one is never trust your commenting to an AI tool. Nobody responds, nobody responds, okay, I had some people who clearly commented and also tried to hijack posts by leaving links or by doing those kind of things where I will send them a one on one message and I say like, hey Jay, I saw you commenting a few times on my post. Where normally I value every kind of engagement, I see you have a different strategy that is not working for me or that feels for me as not very constructive. Please refrain from commenting. Please stop doing this. Like, stop. Some people respond, they say, oh, sorry, Some people actually, they were unaware of the impact, so they actually said like, ah, sorry, I didn't know it came across like this and they changed. Some people said, okay, I'll stop doing it. And also saying I was giving you extra reach. No, you are not. Because those type of comments don't do anything. Some people don't respond and I don't see them. The people who didn't respond keep doing it. I blocked them. I have never blocked so many people since last year.
- [24:02]
Jay Clouse
Yeah, I see this stuff and I hate it. It's so transparent, so obvious. And my MO historically has been like, if there is behavior that I don't approve of, I try to rob it of oxygen and I just don't respond to it. Because usually attention seeking behavior, when not given attention, ceases. But it's directly antithetical to what seems to be what the platforms want, which is engaging with the people who have engaged with you on your posts. So that tension is so frustrating to me because I post, I see AI posts happen immediately and I just want to flee. But that's not what works.
- [24:41]
Richard Vanderblaam
No, but they're easy to recognize. Like you said, often they're very fast because those AI tools, they come in literally the moment they get a notification, the moment you publish. So if you look at, for example, I Normally get around 20 to 30 comments in the first five minutes. And 80% of them are AI written. 80%. And obviously a lot of time from the same people. And I don't want to spend too much of my time engaging, writing DMs, blocking people, because it's all about, like you said, it's about negative energy. It's about things that. It's not about growing your business. But if it's too clear, if it's too ridiculous, I will like mention it. I will respond to it with a joke, Something that I hope makes them aware that this is not the right strategy.
- [25:32]
Jay Clouse
A couple more comments on comments here for a second because these were surprises to me. From what I saw in the research, I knew that commenting as a strategy was good for visibility, especially for commenting around people who are clearly in and around the space that you want to appear in. What I didn't realize was that LinkedIn is actually using that as part of their interest graph. I thought it was all about real human visibility. I didn't think about machine visibility in that way. I think that's an important takeaway from your research here. So I guess that's more of a comment than a question.
- [26:01]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, and I totally agree. So commenting now can give yourself more reach, it can give your network more reach. So it can really position you in a human way. It helps you to network with the right people, but it also now helps to restructure your interest graph. It gives direction to what you're about, what is interesting for you, and what should be interesting for your readers. So yeah, definitely.
- [26:29]
Jay Clouse
We'll hear more from Richard after a quick break for our sponsors. If you work with clients and you're tired of hearing that the only way to grow is to hire people or work with AI, you should check out Grow Without Hiring A podcast by my good friend Ken Yarmish. Ken bootstrapped his professional services business to $5 million per year as a solopreneur, and he did it by systematically making small changes, like pitching six figure deals instead of five figure deals, something he has an episode about. I've learned a lot from Ken, and he's worked with some big names. People like Matt Barker, Nasheen Chen, and Laura Acosta trust Ken to sharpen their offers and scale their businesses with systems, and this podcast is his playbook. Every episode is short and tactical, like my Voice Memo episodes where Ken breaks down how real solo operators engineer their businesses. The sales, the delivery, the offers, the systems all in a market that's splitting between big winners and everyone else, the show is easy to binge. You listen to one episode and find yourself sweeping through the whole catalog. I recommend starting with the episode titled Algorithm Proof Marketing, then hit follow so new ones land automatically. Search for Grow without hiring in your favorite podcast app, or go to GWH FM. That's GrowWithOutHiring GWH FM. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing.
- [28:01]
Richard Vanderblaam
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Richard Vanderblaam
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Jay Clouse
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Richard Vanderblaam
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Jay Clouse
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Richard Vanderblaam
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- [28:47]
Jay Clouse
And now back to my conversation with Richard Vanderblae. When I asked you about Your commenting behavior. You talked about lists and feeds, and a lot of people listening to this are probably like, what are you talking about? I have one feed in my LinkedIn. So explain how you actually construct and utilize different lists and or feeds and in the way that you use the platform.
- [29:08]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, so the most safe way to do it is to create what most people refer to, including myself, as bookmark search. So in LinkedIn, you go to your search bar, you hit enter, you go for posts, and then you get different filters. And then if you go to the tab members, you, for example, put in the 12 names of people. You never want to miss a single post. You put a frequency on weekly or daily, and LinkedIn will give you an overview of what these 12 people have been posting in the last week or the last day, depending on which filter you have. Once you bookmark that in your browser, and for example, every Friday you open that, it will always give you the last from those 12 creators, all the post of the last week. So if you understand how this works, you can create list. I have a list that I call top creators. Okay? It's actually two lists because I think you can have 20 names per bookmark or per search, and then it stops. But I have around 30 creators that I say, like, hey, if those people publish something, it's always interesting. I want to know what it is. I want to make sure that I can engage. Then I have two lists from clients. My main contact person and my clients. I want to know what they're up to. I want to know what they're posting simply to help them. I have the same for prospects, and I have a list for competitors, because I want to know what my competitors are doing. But in order to keep up with, hey, what are they publishing? Have they discovered something that I don't know yet? And that's the safest way? Okay, Bookmark search. You're not violating anything. You're making use of LinkedIn search, saving that as a bookmark. And then every now and then, you hit the bookmark and you see what happens. You could do the same, for example, in a notion sheet, where you save the activity tab of all those people. So each profile has an activity tab where it literally brings you to the page where all their content is in chronological order. So if you have a list of 20, 30 people to follow, you can put them in a notion or in a spreadsheet and then click on them manually and go to their profile and see directly the last two, three posts. For me, it's a bit more that
- [31:23]
Jay Clouse
seems way less efficient, though. Like this bookmark search seems wonderful.
- [31:27]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does, it does. The only thing is that sometimes it's buggy and I don't know if it is because LinkedIn doesn't want us to use it in this way because obviously they have Sales Navigator, which one of the unique selling points is that you save people as a lead and LinkedIn is going to inform you what those leads are sharing. So this is basically the paid version of what we can create in the free version. And sometimes it doesn't work or it gives you the wrong data. It has been working over the past two years with every now and then a bug. If people message me and say, hey, it's not working anymore, I say, okay, try next week, because probably next week it's back again.
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Jay Clouse
Yeah, it's a surprisingly functional filtering tool in search for a product where I find is lacking in a lot of areas, but this is surprisingly functional. And I can imagine myself spending an afternoon creating a folder on my bookmarks bar.
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Richard Vanderblaam
Exactly.
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Jay Clouse
Making these search queries, saving those individually with names. That sounds like a wonderful way to use the product. That is, as you said, not breaking any rules and wonderfully efficient with your time.
- [32:29]
Richard Vanderblaam
And even if you're working in a company, for example, and you have seven or eight colleagues that you know they're publishing, doing their best on LinkedIn, just create a bookmark with colleague content and just help them by, you know, whenever you see a post, instead of doing the WhatsApp or the emails, which is always a mess. This is the most efficient way I was using until last year, I was using a tool that was called Use Aware from Alex Boyd. And basically the whole tool was around this curated feed. You could enter a keyword like, I want to know all the LinkedIn posts that are about the LinkedIn algorithm. And I would literally get all chronological, all the posts also from people outside. And I could start commenting from within the tool. Mind you, not AI commenting, not automated comments. I needed to manual comment. But the feed was wonderful. Same for creating a feed on names you could literally Input like a CSV file with those are the 50 names I want to follow. And it would create your own feed. And just like we started the conversation, they were shut down last year in November already by LinkedIn because they were not compliant. There are a few AI startup tools that have reached out to me that do the same and want me to try it. Whenever I ask them, okay, in how far is it compliant and are users at risk? They always go silent or they say, well, if you stay below 5 comments or 10 comments a day, that shouldn't be a problem. So I can't afford to lose my profile or be banned again. So I refrain from those tools. Now, I think personally it should be one of the premium features that LinkedIn should build themselves. I mean, there are so many tools that offer this and LinkedIn has not done it yet. And I understand that they shut down a tool like Aware, who again, they weren't harming the platform. They were actually making people more successful. But come with an alternative because the data is there, it's not difficult to build and it would be an amazing feature that I would pay just for that. I would pay $50 a month just to have my feeds from the people I see on the topics. I see. I do know the answer, Jay, because if they build that, we probably wouldn't check our regular feed anymore, which would mean that their advertisement and everything gets devaluated because less views in the feed, less views for ads because people wouldn't go there anymore. So probably that's the reason.
- [34:55]
Jay Clouse
Yeah, and it's probably a relatively small segment of their users that would want that. Like it's a prosumer who is operating at a certain level that I agree, most people wouldn't. So it might even just be a prioritization and resources thing.
- [35:07]
Richard Vanderblaam
Probably.
- [35:08]
Jay Clouse
But if that was the case, being hostile towards third parties, depending on the risk those third parties represent, that's questionable. I want to talk about articles. I've heard from folks in the lab, my community, They've started using LinkedIn newsletters more frequently, which to my understanding, the back end of that is essentially an article. Same functionality, but it seems like from your report, articles are back.
- [35:32]
Richard Vanderblaam
No, newsletters are back, articles are down.
- [35:34]
Jay Clouse
Okay. Okay.
- [35:35]
Richard Vanderblaam
And just to avoid confusing. So an article. If we write about articles in a report, we are referring to standalone long form content. So you don't have a newsletter. You click on write an article and you're going to create long form content. Okay. Those do not perform very well. I think they're like 0.4 times your normal reach. Okay, okay. However, if you create a newsletter first and then you're going to write a long form article that is part of the newsletter, so it becomes an edition of the newsletter. All those numbers are way up. Okay, but way up. Reach, engagement and even the most important one, conversion. I've seen the most conversion to paying customers coming from my newsletters. I do a newsletter every Sunday now, since I have been doing that since January, every Sunday newsletter and I see so much conversion, whether people are buying the repo, whether people are buying a one on one consultancy, whether people are joining my community. 80% of the conversion, if you're talking about LinkedIn related content comes from my newsletters compared to my post. And imagine, one newsletter a week and five posts a week still newsletters crazy. It's also very important nowadays because of the geo, the indexation by AI tools. So I think LinkedIn has become, in very short time LinkedIn has become source number two to be quoted in AI. And especially long form articles, especially newsletters are being indexed very well for SEO and geo. So I've already seen if you look in Claude or if you go to ChatGPT and you ask now anything about the most recent developments LinkedIn algorithm, I literally see pieces of my newsletter content being suggested by Claude or ChatGPT or perplexity.
- [37:33]
Jay Clouse
And I noticed that recently they added some new analytics to the newsletter backend, namely Opens. And I was a beta user of newsletters and it was great at the beginning and I was getting so many subscribers and there were no analytics and I had no way of knowing is this working? Is anybody using this? And now it seems like they at least have Opens. So to your knowledge, I think one way people would get discouraged from using a newsletter product is if they use it and they're not getting engagement on the platform. But this is sending to people's literal inboxes. And I wonder what percentage of readership and engagement the newsletter is getting purely in the inbox versus on platform and whether people are underestimating the impact of this feature.
- [38:19]
Richard Vanderblaam
I don't have data on the relation between how many people are reading your newsletter on platform versus in email, but I completely agree with you. When I started, I was also at the beta test. I was one of the first Dutch guys that actually got access to the newsletter. I don't even remember when. And it went crazy in the beginning because very few people had it, it was new. And then came this stage where you want to professionalize your newsletter but you don't have any data, so you don't know are people reading this? What are people reading? You also now get a complete overview of all the clicks. So if you have different links you can literally see.
- [38:57]
Jay Clouse
Oh really?
- [38:57]
Richard Vanderblaam
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So If I have six to seven CTAs in my LinkedIn email newsletter, I now get to see how many clicks on each link. That's new.
- [39:06]
Jay Clouse
Yeah, huge.
- [39:07]
Richard Vanderblaam
So in that case they are now becoming a bit more Equipped like a regular newsletter where I think people also reading it on platform is the big advantage over email newsletter where you send an email and you just hope that it doesn't land in their junk spam or whether they open it. I still love the fact that LinkedIn is actually actively helping you to get more subscribers by if somebody follows you, they get directly a message in the inbox, hey, Richard has a newsletter. Do you want to follow that as well? Check which on my account we haven't checked that for more account, but on my account has a 60% conversion. So if 10 people follow me, six will directly sign up for my newsletter. Which is great because, you know, I now have a newsletter for 130,000 subs. It's huge.
- [39:53]
Jay Clouse
This is like one of those things that every time I think about, I'm like, why am I not just doing this? And there's the question that everyone's going to ask listening to this, which is like, should I just send the same thing that I'm already sending? And I think you could, but my strategy would be to send a past issue, like maybe lag it behind a week or two. So it's not literally the same thing in people's inboxes the same day or even the same week. What do you think about that?
- [40:17]
Richard Vanderblaam
This is something that has been on my mind like the end of last year because I have an email newsletter, 20,000 subs. I have the LinkedIn I post daily on LinkedIn, so there's a lot of content. And just like you, I wanted to avoid that. Everything becomes a repetition and people go like, I don't sign up for that because it's the same as what he's sharing. So I started to think like, okay, how does this work? Because on LinkedIn it's more like, I wouldn't say silos, but I have different topics. So what I do now, for example, is that my LinkedIn newsletter, which I publish on Sunday, has always the same structure. So it's the post of the week, what not to miss, and one tactic on how to improve everything you do on LinkedIn. The only thing I need to do throughout the week is look for the post not to miss because I want to find something interesting that's on topic. I take the insights from the algorithm report. So every week I have one specific algorithm inside. And then I have how to improve, which is a very tactical tip. What I do in my newsletter email, I go much deeper. I go in depth, I go into strategy and execution. So I take this one insight and Say, okay, this is the insight and this is exactly the way how you implement it and improve your results. What I do on my LinkedIn newsletter is that I try to convert people to also sign up to email if you like this.
- [41:49]
Jay Clouse
Totally.
- [41:50]
Richard Vanderblaam
If you like this, please sign up for my email newsletter because this goes deeper and brings you more operational or more pragmatic insights. It's not going with the numbers that I was hoping for. I get like 100 people migrating each week from LinkedIn or migrating. No. They also follow me on email and I thought maybe that could be like a few hundreds a week, but it works. I get people who give me compliments on the LinkedIn newsletter towards. I get people who compliment me for the email newsletter. So it works. I don't think you should copy content or have the same content in both channels. I do think you need to have a different strategical approach to that.
- [42:30]
Jay Clouse
I think that Big Unlock is having some sort of just lead magnet in your newsletter. I mean, I think you can say, if you like this, go over here, but you could also say, this lead magnet crushes because it's very clear utility to somebody. And I'm just gonna put that at the bottom of every one of these. By the way, if you want a calculator to do this thing, or by the way, if you want the prompt I use to do this thing, prompts are a big lead magnet. Now, that would crush. I have just a few more minutes of your time here, Richard, so I wanted to highlight just a couple more things from the report and ask your question about it. You showed, and you kind of alluded to this earlier, that the number of posts per week that you think is optimal has declined from 5 to 6 to about 2 to 4. Is that correct? If that is true, I've also seen you say recently that the post format, the variability between the efficacy of those isn't as variable as it used to be. But how do you think about your post format? If you're only posting two to four times per week? Which formats are you leaning into the most?
- [43:28]
Richard Vanderblaam
What we are discussing now is the gap between what the report tells us, which is based on 1.3 million posts, over 50,000 creators, and what could work as an individual, because the individual doesn't necessarily need to follow what the average people are doing. Because literally I got the question. You say, like, I deal with three posts, but you're publishing six times, what am I missing? And I go, like, I have content to publish six times a day without harming the quality of the Insights. Every post is filled with insights. But a lot of people don't have that. So they went into publishing memes quotes to get to a frequency of daily. And that is not very good. So we see that for the average creator, if you want to be impactful and also benefiting from the whole reason, structuring two to three posts a week would be enough. And there are some big creators, like Jasmin Elitch for example, who sticks to three posts a week and he crushes it every time he publishes. If I would go back to three posts a week, I would do a text plus image post, a carousel post. And then I had one post that I would probably also do texted image. So I would not do polls, I would not do video, I would not do text only. Definitely not. The only thing I'm lacking then is a newsletter, which I think should be maybe not once a week, but at least once a month. You should have a newsletter edition.
- [44:56]
Jay Clouse
Okay. Yeah, helpful, very concise. When you say definitely wouldn't do text only, is that because analytically there's a major difference or because you're kind of deferring the opportunity to have a visual hook on top of what you've written?
- [45:09]
Richard Vanderblaam
It's probably both. So if you see the numbers for text only post are up on reach, they're performing better. But if you take away the top 5% creators that use text only, all numbers are down. So my conclusion, my personal conclusion is you need to be hell of a copywriter to own this type of post. And I don't mean AI generated AI copyright. You need to understand how not only to get the attention in the first two lines, but also how to maintain that attention throughout your writing. And I think that is a big, big challenge for 99% of all the people, including myself. I need a visual, I need an image. I need other things than just copied to express myself and to share my knowledge. But I know some people. Darren McGee has been very successful with text only. I know Jasmine has done text only. And there are a few creators that are very successful with text only. But you need to be aware that the only thing to not only hook, but also keep the interest is your copy. And that is not as easy as go to AI and say, like, write this pose in a way that people cannot ignore it because it doesn't work. For me, it feels very vulnerable. It's a very vulnerable. I'm putting out there my copy. That's it. Please, please, please like my copy.
- [46:28]
Jay Clouse
Nowhere to hide.
- [46:29]
Richard Vanderblaam
It's the same with video to be honest, you know, a lot of people said, like, video is declining. Are you still doing video? Should we do video? I always say video is such a vulnerable format, because if you don't like video, if you don't like to speak in front of people, it shows and it will actually harm your reputation and your authority. So only do video if you like it, if you want to improve, if you want to learn it, but don't do it because somebody from marketing said you need to do a video because it's not working.
- [46:57]
Jay Clouse
What do people not understand about the creators they see on LinkedIn who are just absolutely crushing it? Like, do these people operate in a different way or know something different that we are just not in on?
- [47:11]
Richard Vanderblaam
No. I think a lot of people don't understand or don't realize, or maybe too late, that the whole dynamic of those creators, the target audience, but even more important, the products, services they sell, is not comparable to any B2B service. It's not. So if you are a salesperson and you go to the top three or four creators and you go like, hey, I see this guy is publishing five, six times a week. He's crushing it. He grows numbers. But I want to do that by copying the same. It's not because you have a different audience, you have a different product. I mean, I see those numbers. I don't share a lot of my numbers about my revenue or my income, because frankly, it's not the way how I want to position myself. But I know people who do this, and also in a very good way. You know, Jacob Bach, for example, he shares his stripe notifications as like, I made €60,000 doing this. And then people go crazy. They say, I want to have those €60,000. But what they don't understand, or maybe too late, is that what Jakob is doing. His advice to make people better on LinkedIn or to make people better in online marketing cannot be compared to if you're selling SaaS solutions or if you're selling legal advice. It's not as simple. So we need to understand that you can watch and learn from the dynamics, but you need to translate all those things into your own business environment. That's it. So I think most of the creators, including myself, we live in a bubble. We live in a bubble. Our audience is on LinkedIn. I mean, every single person on LinkedIn who want to improve is our audience. If I'm selling SaaS software, 99.99% on LinkedIn is not my audience. They're not looking to buy SaaS software, so it doesn't work with the same strategy.
- [49:01]
Jay Clouse
Okay, last question then and I appreciate your time. Richard, Based on the data you've seen and your lived experience on the platform, what is a prediction you would make or a belief you have about where things are heading that is impacting the way you're operating, but you don't necessarily have the data to support yet?
- [49:19]
Richard Vanderblaam
I think this year will be very exciting for all of us because LinkedIn obviously now is stepping up their policy against third party tools, they're stepping up the policy against automation, they are sending out more restrictions and bans than ever before. So if they manage to keep LinkedIn a place where we trust that if we get a message from someone, it's literally from the person, not from a robot. Or when I send out a message that somebody's actually responding because also the other side, it still gives credibility to the platform, then I think with all the good things that we can learn from AI and LinkedIn, it's still an amazing place. And if you have the right strategy, you can really grow your business via LinkedIn and I mean non related LinkedIn business. So everyone who sells products or services can really benefit from LinkedIn. We have six more months of people's inbox being flooded by spam automation, AI comments. The 4% that has already decided not to use LinkedIn anymore will grow and grow. And if the huge population of potential clients are leaving the platform, it becomes a difficult place because then we have a challenge. I mean if the audience goes to who am I speaking as a creator? And that's, I think we are at a cross point at this moment.
- [50:49]
Jay Clouse
If you want to learn more about Richard, you'll find links to his LinkedIn profile, his website as well as the 2026 LinkedIn Algorithm Insights report in the show Notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and letting me know, please. Comments on Spotify are my lifeblood. Reviews on Apple Podcasts give me hope. Those reviews go a long way to helping us grow the show. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next week. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much.
- [51:29]
Richard Vanderblaam
Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop with Mint.
- [51:32]
Jay Clouse
You can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments.
- [51:37]
Richard Vanderblaam
But that's weird. Okay, one judgment anyway, give it a
- [51:42]
Jay Clouse
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