Pages is a product that helps companies have a presence and build an audience on LinkedIn. My team implemented a strategy to help users stay informed by following Pages they are interested in. The main focus of the strategy was on making follow recommendations more relevant, increasing the visibility of recommendations on key pages, and enhancing the follow ecosystem.
Through research and facilitating working sessions, I helped the team identify two main problems: That members were struggling to find interesting companies to follow and page administrators were struggling to build an audience on LinkedIn.
To address these issues, in collaboration with my PM and marketing partners, I conducted a survey to understand the motivations for following and an audit to identify gaps in the follow experience.
We found that topical match was the most important follow criteria and that social proof and content alongside follow recommendations made companies more relatable. Members also reported not seeing content from pages they followed on their feed, indicating a need to improve the follow ecosystem.
We worked to improve the follow experience from Page discovery to engagement, creating follow moments and recommendations anchored to topics people care about, recommending small pages via email and notification experiments to create equity in the Page ecosystem, and finally, adding subscriptions to Page posts in order to improve engagement and help companies build an audience.
We broke up our vision into smaller experiments, using methods from usability tests to AB tests to surveys to validate our way to our vision.
Hypothesis: Member actions over the content presented by a company are strong interest indicators. If we nudge members to follow a Page after they took an action (comment or react to a post, apply to a job from the company) they will be more likely to follow.
Action: Present posts of companies that are relevant to the member’s industry of work, or that talk about topics they care about, and leverage member explicit follow actions to recommend more companies to follow.
Impact: Increase in presence and 4x follows for Pages via main feed.
Problem: Members follow pages because they want to get content in their feed about such page. The only way they can do it is browsing on their feed.
Action: We brought Pages' content to members via subscription to top posts. Subscribed members receive notifications and email digests when there's new content from their favorite pages. To continue the discovery loop, a recommendations drawer appears after following.
Impact: A constant stream of subscriptions per month and increase on content engagement.
Hypothesis: Members want more opportunities to discover Pages to follow in a single place.
Action: We ran an experiment that lands a notification into a landing page that recommends a high-affinity page recommendation, and groups of Pages recommended by topics of interest. Our test rotated a variety of topics for these recommendation groups to understand what motivated members to follow.
Impact: Increased page follows, especially for small business and pages with a smaller audience. We learned that the recommendations that resonated more were those directly related to the viewer's industry.
I focused on driving growth for Pages by transitioning from outputs (features) to outcomes (growth and key performance indicators), which is a hard transition to make as a designer.
Instead of working on single, big wins, I focused on achieving multiple small wins through a series of experiments and experience improvements. By focusing on growing new followers, I was able to drive growth and improve KPIs for the Pages product.
