LinkedIn details new publishing platform improvements: feeds, notifications and Pulse emails

LinkedIn today outlined on its engineering blog a series of recent technical updates to improve distribution for new posts on its publishing platform. The three improvements include integration with the Feed-Mixer algorithm for ranking posts in LinkedIn’s member feeds, mobile notifications for first-degree connections and inclusion in daily or weekly Pulse news emails.

To be clear, these three features aren’t brand new, as LinkedIn has been gradually rolling them out to all users. This is, however, the first time that the company has shared the technical details on the new setup.

Interestingly, LinkedIn revealed that members that have published at least one article have an average of 1,049 first-degree connections and 42 followers. Feed-Mixer support helps publishers collect additional followers by virally spreading members’ content beyond their core connections.

If you’ve ever wondered why you get notifications for some LinkedIn posts but not others, the company explained that it has added three requirements to its notification process:

1. We want members to only receive notifications for high quality and relevant articles

2. Connections should be able to unsubscribe notifications from any authors if they choose to

3. Notifications from the same author will be aggregated to one update

LinkedIn also employs a “Unified Content Filtering” library to help it detect spam or low-quality posts and keep those out of your notification stream.

As for Pulse, a new “Published by your network” section included in the news service’s periodic emails adds another opportunity for your connections to see your most recent posts.

LinkedIn first opened up its long-form publishing platform to all users in February of this year and has been busy building the above features since then. Moving forward, LinkedIn will continue to focus on improving consumption, post-creation and its recommendation algorithms on its publishing platform.

See also: LinkedIn behind the scenes: Building a professional publishing platform for daily consumption and LinkedIn: The evolution of a publishing platform

Headline image via Ben Scholzen / Flickr