LinkedIn Pages - by language or by topic?

LinkedIn is a professional social network that for many years was built on mutual connections. It is excellent to build your contact list, but this mode requires you to approve each one of your connections.

At one point LinkedIn started to allow people to follow other people, (like in Twitter) allowing one-directional connections.

A few years ago they also added a feature called "LinkedIn Pages" that can represent a company or a brand.

I write content in two languages - English and Hebrew - and while I think LinkedIn can recognize the language more-or-less and show you content only in languages that you know, this isn't perfect. In addition I thought using these pages could be an interesting idea to explore.

So three months ago (around April 5, 2020) I started to experiment with these pages and created 4 pages:

  • English for the general public with generic content. (375)
  • Hebrew primarily for events in Hebrew and/or in Israel. (308)
  • Spanish - I have been learning Spanish for a year and a half, I know it is pretentious that I would blog in this language. So I should do it. (26)
  • Hungarian - it is my mother tongue so I thought I might experiment with it. (7)

Each row shows the current number of followers. As you can see there are bit more that 300 followers on the two main pages. (I hardly put any time and content in the other too.)

These are clearly not huge successes, but I would not consider them failures either. Let's say they were interesting experiments.

In a video I saw a few weeks ago someone pointed a common mistake LinkedIn Page owners do that I have committed as well. Most of the posts I shared were a few words with a link to some content outside of LinkedIn. As one of the goals of LinkedIn (as any other social network) is to keep people on the platform, their algorithm probably penalizes such posts and this relatively few people will see them.

Since then I experimented with longer content that I posted on my personal account, and even with some videos I uploaded directly to LinkedIn.

Both generated a lot more engagement. (Of course, the experiment was not scientific, maybe the reason for the increased engagement was that the topics were more interesting. I don't know.)

In addition my son pointed at Kevin Markham who has 43,382 followers. The main thing Kevin does is that he shares code snippets related to Data Science in Python.

So I wanted to further experiment with LinkedIn and implement something similar to what Kevin does, but with the content I have.

The problem, and this might be a bigger issue with the way I do things, is that my content covers a much wider range of topics that "Data Science in Python". I write a lot about Python, Golang, various technologies under the "DevOps" umbrella, and occasionally I still post about Perl as well.

I think mixing these contents on my LinkedIn page would just cause confusion. People who are interested in Python would be confused by posts about Go and would run away if they heard the word "Perl".

I came up with the idea of creating separate pages for each major topic.

Today I created two new pages and started to invite people to them: (24 hours later I added a 3rd, about Golang, and after 24 more hours I created a 4th page for Perl.)

Time will tell if this was a brilliant or totally stupid idea.

For now, you would encourage me if you followed my pages.