What New Features Does LinkedIn Plan for 2025?

1️⃣ Algorithm. There is MORE than one.

I already showed this as a detailed breakdown at the 2021 I Love Marketing conference. In short, it’s about the fact that decisions about our publications and content or contact recommendations aren’t made by one algorithm, but by a set of many smaller ones. Separate ones analyze and qualify content, separate ones are for fighting fraud and spam or analyzing what we write in messages. This year’s changes have been enigmatically described as focused on fighting fake accounts, bots and “engagement pods” which are popular support groups among us, where everyone likes everyone’s posts.

2️⃣ What content will be promoted. Educational

LinkedIn wants to distinguish itself from other Social Media with substantive education and such content will be promoted. There’s no information about formats, but I assume it will be video, newsletters as article promotion and slide documents, i.e., educational carousels.

3️⃣ Company challenges. Lack of basics

Apparently there was some research on company needs and challenges with their LinkedIn presence. I haven’t read it, but from conversations with other people at the meeting, it was repeated like a mantra that companies expect magical ways but don’t have the basics covered like employee profiles or ideas for engaging them.

4️⃣ Reach drops on publications.

What are the most popular posts about recently? About falling reach. This question was on the agenda, the official answer is that the drops result from two factors:

1. Focus on educational content at the expense of others, whatever that means
2. Sudden increase in users, so our content competes with more others on the feed.

I don’t buy this and my theory is as I said at I Love Marketing talking about Bonnie Barrilleaux’s presentation, who manages the algorithm:

LinkedIn is constantly “turning the knobs” of indicators trying to find a golden mean between promoting small creators and their content and an increasing number of ads and corporate content.

5️⃣ Sales Navigator. More AI-based features

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a fan of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and have it well figured out to the point where I have my own reporting or custom automations.

Last year the most important 2 features for me were Buyer Intent and Account IQ, which showed what the company makes money on, what problems it has and the competitive environment.

This year such features are supposed to be Lead IQ, which is already being implemented on accounts and the announced AI assistant for writing sales messages in inMail.

I’m happy about the emphasis on developing this tool and I believe it will be a good year for LinkedIn, which has moved up to one of the more important sources of income for Microsoft, which was also mentioned.

Well, posts should end with some CTA like: what LinkedIn features are you waiting for or what would you change❓