How will you improve engagement on LinkedIn?

Clarification:

1. Linkedin is a professional networking platform which allows users to expand and grow their professional network. There are 3 types of users on Linkedin. First, a professional worker who primarily engages with their professional network on linkedin by creating posts or engaging with posts. They try to expand their network by sending and accepting connection requests and they also do job search on linkedin. Second, enterprise sales teams/ entrepreneurs/founders etc who try to generate and find leads for their products or services on linkedin. Lastly, recruiters/recruiting firms who use linkedin for their talent acquisition needs.

2.  Is there any segment among these we want to target for improving engagement? 

I would like to choose working professionals as my target segment because, not only are they the biggest user base, but, improving engagement for this segment will be beneficial for the other two segments as if more working professionals are engaged on linkedin then there will be more sales leads as well as larger recruiting pool.

3. Let’s understand what engagement means for Working professionals. For me a working professional is better engaged on the basis of the time spent on linkedin be it consuming or creating content, looking for new opportunities or interacting with others for better networking. So, to improve engagement I would like to focus on improving the “time spent per working professional per day on linkedin”

Structure:

1. I will further segment “working professionals” because, its a very broad one.

2. I would narrow down my focus on a particular segment and will discuss about their needs and pain points 

3. I will then narrow down to maybe 1 or 2 needs addressing which would help us improve their engagement

4. I will then recommend solutions to address those needs and wrap up by giving my final recommendation out of the available options.

Approach:

1. Segmentation - axes

   1. Content - creator vs consumer

   2. Motivation - job hunter vs networker vs knowledge seeker

Creator vs consumer lens only focuses on the content aspect so here, motivation makes more sense to segment working professionals. Of these 3, I would like to focus on job hunter because a lot of users use linkedin for job hunting and given there are a bunch of competitors in that space, it would be crucial to engage and retain job hunters on linkedin well.

2. Needs and Pain points of Job hunter

   1. Wants to know which jobs are they a good fit for

   2. Wants to prepare right for roles

   3. Wants to improve/tailor their resume for specific roles

   4. Wants to reach out to relevant folks from the company/industry for referral and understand about the company

   5. Want to know how does their profile compare against other applicants

   6. Want to be informed about relevant roles from company and industry of their choice

To improve engagement I would like to focus on solving 

 Option ‘b’ - because, it has the potential to bring users to linkedin as a platform of choice for interview preparation which can easily add up to time spent on linkedin and it will be a great differentiator from competitors as well. This is also a very big problem among job seekers where they lack direction in terms of preparation for different companies' roles.

Option ‘d’ - because, referral and networking are great ways to discover jobs and are also very hard to do for users. It is also a time taking process. Helping users to network well with others and discover jobs that are beyond the job board is what most of the users struggle with. So I believe both in terms of reach and impact, this is a very big problem to solve.

Lastly, solving for both of these problems aligns well with linkedin’s mission of making professionals successful and productive.

3. Solutions

4. Solution recommendation

   1. To solve the problem of preparation, I would like to implement “recent joinees’ or existing employees’ interview experience” because this will keep evolving and give users the most recent take on the interview process of the company.
      User journey : Job hunter will click on a role -> click apply -> see “applied successfully” message -> be asked to check interview experience -> go through a list of interview experience sorted in order of date and time recency -> interview experience will contain - list of questions asked and interview difficulty level , structure of process (no. of rounds, duration etc).

Risks:

• Success of the feature will depend upon creators who would need to be nudged in the right direction to share their experiences

• Failing to maintain the recency of experiences will be a bad experience for users

2. To solve the problem of networking, I would like to start with “networking tracker” as a lot of users who network on linkedin fail to network effectively for the role they want because they don’t keep track of the number of people reached out to or interacted with. This also leads to duplicacy of efforts which could be better focused on expanding the breadth of roles and companies and the people that they reach out to rather than reaching out to more folks from limited companies. 

User journey: Users would be able to mark their conversations as “referral asks” which could be easily filtered -> each referral ask marked conversation will further show labels like “referred/ pending” ->  based on last sent/received message users would be prompted to ask for further information/ reply back -> in the chat users will be prompted to ask or reply using Gen AI assistance ->  post successful referral users can mark the conversation as “referred”

Risks:

• Accuracy of ML models for analyzing conversations and recommending actions has to be higher 

• Need for manual tagging  of conversations by user can be a challenge for adoption

Goal: 
Increase the group engagement and make LinkedIn groups more vibrant

Persona:
Akash-The job seeker
He is always looking for an employment opportunity

Aman-The hiring manager
He is a head hunter for his organization

Rohan-The network guy
He aggressively networks with people 

Ajay-The sales guy
He is always on the look for a potential lead for his business

Kishor-The content creator
He reads the feed and also makes content and post it on LinkedIn. 

Ram-The consumer
He reads the whole feed and looks at what people have posted. 

*In order to focus on engagement, I would focus on creating value for The consumer

Detailed persona:
The consumer
Behavior-
1. Follows his role model on LinkedIn
2. Comments on the post he finds interesting
3. Is part of many LinkedIn groups
4. Likes to scroll through LinkedIn most of the time in his day
5. Visits the LinkedIn group very rarely

Feature 1
Pain points-
There is not enough motivation to like or comment on a post

User story-
As a LinkedIn consumer, I would like to get motivated to read useful posts so that I can read them and increase my knowledge 

Feature-
Providing variable reward
Provide group members with variable rewards like points and when he has enough points he will be rewarded with an ebook or a useful resource

Metrics-
Increase in engagement (Likes and Comments) on the group post
No. of groups taking advantage of this feature

Feature 2
Pain points-
There is not enough motivation to like or comment on a post

User story-
As a LinkedIn consumer, I would like to know if any interesting post is posted in the group so that I don't waste time by going through all the posts 

Feature-
Adding tags in the profile
These tags will segregate those posts and give notification to the users

Metrics-
Increase in engagement (Likes and Comments) on the group post 
No. of users who provided the tags they find interesting 

I would like to connect the problem statement to overall Linkedin mission and Vision. 

Linkedin Vision is to create economic opportunity for every memeber of global workforce and Linkedin mission is to connect the world professional to make them more productive and successful.

I would like to ask clarifying questions:

My understanding of increasing engagement is as follows: It means users are already on Linkedin and we are measuring usage acitivity related to Linkedin product goals. At high Level, Linkedin have 3 major solutions:

Linkedin Talent solutions which i assume is the largest driver of revenue, followed by Linkedin Sales nvigator and Linkedin marketing solutions. To answer the question I would like to focus on Linkedin Talent solutions today as it is largest growth driver for Linkedin.

My Approach and structure would be as follows:

1) Explain Linkedin talent solutions and problem it is solving

2) provide User personas examples

3) Then, Pick one persona and what their goals or motivations are when using Linkedin Talent solutions

4) Next I will identify pain points (user needs) and suggest new features / solutions to increase customer satisfaction leading to better customer engagement 

5) Finally , I will prioritize new features based on cost vs benefit and recommend it.

Linkedin talent Solutions provides a hiring platform to quickly find, connect with, and manage candidates by providing acess to world's largest professional network and insights. 

Users of Linkedin talent solutions:

1) Recruiters

2) Company Talent acquisitions staff

Since both the users are finding candidates, i'll consider both of them under Recruiter/talent acquisition. 

Job of Recruiter/talent acuisitions staff is to fill the vacancy by connecting to the pool of candidates who have matching skill-set and connect/respnd to them and is open to work with them and take on new challenge.

Recruiters/Talent Acquisitions journey and pain points:

1) posting the job which is accessible to candidates and comes in top of their search

2) Finding a pipeline of candidates and sort them to match as per the skill-set and job-function

3) getting the response from Candidate through in-mail (some dont even respond)

4) Willing to rotate/relocate based on given budget

5) market the candidate profile to hiring team

6) Hire and close the position

Based on above, I will think about pain points and impact to user.

Based on above pain points, i would like to prioritize (2) and (3) of user journey and recommend solutions in order to increase engagement

Finding a pipeline of candidates and sort them to match as per the skill-set and job-function

1) Linkedin can put together an ATS tool which parse not only the resume but also the Linkedin profile and  and also take input on jobs candidate has applied to gather more intelligence on Job function consistency and provide a pipeline of candidates with matching % to skill-set

Getting the response from Candidate through in-mail (some dont even respond)

2) Linkedin provide a tool where recruiter add the skill-set, relocation, minimum years of experience etc as input to get top 25 candidates where linkedin profile matches to skill-set and also provide an option to sort based on how active they are on Linkedin so recruiter can take a call on sending in-mail.

So both the solution above is low/medium to build and will help drive engagement on Linkedin talent solutions 

below will be my success-metrics:

1) Avg. number of days to close the position per job-function

2) Avg. number of in-mail respond/connect from user back to recruiter.

Counter - Metrics:

1) Avg. number of days to close the position is same even after the improvement in feature

2) Avg. number of in-mail respond/connect from user back to recruiter is same as before.

Describe product

Linkedin is a professional networking platform. It is primarily used to create a professional profile of you, find jobs, new business contacts, sales leads, know about companies. It is also serves as a professional social platform where in people can keep themselves updated about various professional practices and knowledge which can help you improve your skill set too

Goal - Increasing engagement 

User Segments

1. Job Seekers

2. Business Growth Seekers 

3. Influencers

4. Hiring Partners

5. Companies

6. FOMO users - User who just open the app once in a while, have just come to the app because some-one told.

I would like to concentrate on business growth seekers because these contribute a major part of the users and a lot can be done for them which can increase their engagement

Pain Points

1. Connecting with the right client at the right moment

Most of the times the sales people reach out to the right people and also some times to the right people but not at the right time. For Ex. For a person who is selling a customer service solution will never know whether there are people looking for customer services solutions around me or in my business area

2. Ability to discover the right active contact [Professional Email Discovery]

Many a times people have their personal contact on linkedin which sometimes may not be the right active contact to reach out to 

3. Not able to manage leads (Don’t know at what stage a certain lead is)

I would like to select the 1st one as major pain point for further discussion because it is something which is already solved for job seekers and is a major gap for business seekers

List of Solutions

1. People entering professional email ids which every job update

2. Create a job posting like flow for posting requirements

3. Create a apply job like flow for sending demos or details about the product

Prioritise (Impact, Effort)

1. Low, Low

2. High, Med (Considering we already have the jobs flow built in)

3. High, High (Because we will have developed around file handling and structures for different kind of products)

MVP Features

1. Exact replica of job posting flow. [ A business seeking certain service can post their requirements with details]

2. Discover business seeking posts in a section [ The section will display company name , right person contact, the exact requirement]

3. Post requirement matching algorithm to companies who may look for leads

4. Highlight the same in sales navigator

5. Message capability to professional configured mail in the post 

6. Close the requirement flow

Metrics

1. Number of posts

2. Number of connects

3. Number of requirements closed

4. Increase in app engagement time for business seekers

Problem statement: How to improve engagement on Linkedin?

Narrowing the problem scope: 

Let's first reiterate  - Linkedin's mission is that they want to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. So anything we do should drive this mission forward. 

Now let's define what we mean by engagement and if there are any  specific targets we have in mind. There are multiple ways to measure engagement (a) # of sessions, (b) time spent/user and (c) or more detailed engagement activity such as posts, likes, shares on the platform. Unless we have any other information, # of sessions is one of a very direct measure of engagement - so we'll focus increasing # of sessions. 

And let's assume we want double the engagement in a target period - let's say 12 months. 

Now, we know that we want to solve for doubling the # of sessions in the next 12 months. 

Let's try and understand different user segments for Linkedin. Primarily, there are three types of users - 

(a) Professionals; 

(b) Recruiters. 

and (c) Marketers

And the behavior of one segment affects the others like a flywheel - so we will focus on just one of these segments. I believe the more professionals engage on Linkedin the more reasons for recruiters and marketers to be here, and we may get outsized returns by focusing on professionals - so let's focus on them as a segment for the purposes of this interview. 

Let's now understand what professionals do on the platform and find out opportunities to reduce their pain points to improve engagement with the platform. So professionals come to Linkedin for different reasons - 

(a) Users who are actively looking for a job - they are very focused on the task at hand.

(b) Users who wants to acquire a new skill - they are either finding out about new courses of interest or are enrolled and pursuing them.

(c) Users who wants to be inspired - they see what their friends, colleagues and other people are upto

(d) Creators or Influencers these are users who post content on linkedin such as job updates, any articles they find userful etc.

There could be many others, but we will keep it at these three unless you feel I am missing something very obvious.  

Amongst these 4 categories, I believe (c) is the biggest category  so we will focus on increasing their engagement on the platform. 

Let's try to understand the pain points of this user group and brainstorm some solutions - 

(a) Difficulty finding pioneers of their industry that they can follow

(b) Improve the content quantity and quality that they are exposed to

(c) Miss out on updates from their network, and people that insipire them

While all three would contribute to increase in the number of sessions, let's focus on (c) for the purposes of this interview. 

To ensure, users don't miss out on important updates, we can do the following - 

(a) Send an email digest to users summarizing what they missed (similar to linked job alert emails), with a CTA to return to Linkedin to check out for more.

(b) Send push notifications for crucial updates from key connections (some people may not like it)

(c) Enrich their feed by adding widgets such as "updates we think you may like" even outside of thier network but based on their other interests.

Out of these 3, I think (a) will have the most immediate affect and (c) will have a medium term affect. 

After implementing we will measure success by incremental # of sessions/user in our chosen segment.

Summarizing - 

We will start sending update digest emails to Linkedin customers summarising all updates that they have missed to bring them back on the platform, and expect to increase # of sessions/user as a way to improve engagement with Linkedin.

Clarification

• What do we want to increase engagement?  —> Want to people find content more compelling an engaging, want them to meet their professional goals.
• By increasing engagement I am guessing we want to work on the Newsfeed and not any vertical product such as Recuriter, Navigator and so on —> Yes
• Which type of users are we going to go after - Professionals, Recruiters, Sales people, Learners? —> To be decided
• Is this a regional or a global change? —> Focus on the US for now

Goal

• Increase engagement on the Newsfeed
• We are going to focus on the US
• Goal is to deliver members value from the product

Users

Before getting into the newsfeed engagement, lets identify the users that we will be going after

1. Professionals —> Regular folks who log on to Linkedin to find connections, search for jobs, view updates
2. Job Seekers —> People on LinkedIn for find jobs and connect with opportunities
3. Recruiters —> Searching and connecting to top talent on LinkedIn
4. Sales People —> Using LinkedIn for find and connect with leads

From the above user segments, I would decide to choose Professionals. They are arguably the largest segment of members  I.e. the passive folks who are on LinkedIn and we would benefit from getting them more engaged on the platform as it would increase overall value of LInkedIn to others. The other segments such as Recruiters and Sales people typical have specific tools (Linked Recruiter and Sales Navigator) to meet their goals. Job Seekers to have a more specific set of tools to go on their job hunt through LinkedIn Premium. 

User Needs

Listing down user needs for the Professional segment 

• Updates: View updates on my professional network, groups
• Learn: Improve my skill toolkit and domain expertise on specific domains / problem spaces that I am interested in
• Interact: Interact / respond to other members posts via comments, reactions, shares
• Discover Opportunities: View new job options or networking options 

From the above needs I am going to apply the following framework to rank them. 

• Reach —> How many people will it impact
• Impact —> What is the benefit of this on the team
• Cost —> Complexity of building the feature.

From the above use cases, I Updates is something we can eliminate as it is built into the existing product. We can probably invest in better ranking and relevancy algorithms to improve the content in the algorithmic newsfeed to drive up engagement but that falls more under an optimization problem rather than a new product design problem. The other need I would reprioritize is Interact as that too is served by the current functionality. Discover and Learn seem to be to compelling opportunities and I would focus on Learn as that is directly aligned with LinkedIn’s mission and also 

To that end, I would choose the Learning needs and focus on that. 

Solutions

Learning is a pretty broad topic but one of the hooks to get back into the platform and engage is the newsfeed is that is they are getting something new from LinkedIn to keep improving as professionals. This could be based on whatever topic they are interested. Lets look at the potential options we can do for this

1. Interest Sections: Create a library of topics that users are interested in. This could be functional skills in the space or knowledge in terms of learning. Allow the users to subscribe to this and have topics related to this section show up in their newsfeed.
2. Articles: Get content creators on add their content on LinkedIn either as organic content or content that take them to their website. Encourage them to write articles and create content for their specific domains. These articles will bring in users into the section. 
3. Events - Used LinkedIn events to insert events for a specific domain into the users feed based on geographic proximity (physical) or timezone (virtual). 
4. Polls: Adds polling for common questions — Users can choose to ask questions and then they can feedback from others
5. Newsletters: Launch a newsletter service for LinkedIn. Allow people to create and publish newsletters to build their brand on LinekdiN. This would not only encourage people to push content on LinKedIn but also increase user engagement for people wanting to consume that content. 

From the above I would choose Interest sections as it would be easy to catalog existing content based on these topics and surface them to the user. 

Tradeoffs

• Getting the right library of contend and tagging it correctly might be complex endeavor
• Getting content onto LInkedIn would require us to compete with other platforms

Metrics

Key Metrics

• Product stickiness - WAUs/MAUs 
• Engagement with posts - Clicks, Shares, Comments, Saves

Counter metric

• Time spent on LinkedIn: Users could be sent to another sites or spent time engaging with a single piece of content rather than view different types of content

Summary

To summarize, to increase engagement on Linkedin, I would choose to solve the learning need for majority of the LinkedIn users. To that end, I would build a feature which allows user to follow topics they would like to learn about for professional development

Linkedin is a social media platform for professional networking. 

How do you measure engagement?

• DAU/MAU

• Time spent on the website 

• No of people posting 

• Engagement on the posts

• Companies building their brands  

Before we go any further I would like to identify User Personas 

• Posting content on the website 

• Only Consuming content 

• Job Seekers & Company HRs
   

Let’s understand the needs of the customers 

• As a person who posts thoughts and analysis I want to save a draft of my content that I want to post

• As a reader, I want to consume content which is as per my choice & preference & also receive a notification of the latest podcast/webinar which interests me.

• As a job seeker I want to find the right job & track the status of my application

• As an HR i want to connect to candidates and being able to filter candidates quickly
   

Basis the needs I have a few features/solutions in mind to improve engagement 

• Create a Linkedin Editor for ppl who post 

• Create a Calendar of podcasts/webinars which the user has shown interest in 

• Create a dashboard for the job seeker to check the status of his application

• In- Built tool for HR for keyword match in resume to filter resume at first level

How will you improve engagement on LinkedIn?

Step 1: I would ask the following clarifying questions:

--> Is the goal to increase the engagement for mobile or web or both? Both

--> Is the goal to increase the engagement for paid premium users or normal users? Both

--> Is there any specific region or target group in mind? No

--> Are we seeing any drop in the current engagement metrics? No

--> Do we have any new direct or indirect competitors in the market trying to divert the network from LinkedIn to thier platforms? No

Step 2: LinkedIn is a platform which:

--> helps employers / organizations to brand / position themselves in the market and attract new talent

--> helps employees / professionals / students to showcase their profile and search for new jobs

Step 3: Finding the different user personas:

--> Big organizations

--> Start ups

--> Students

--> Working professionals

--> NGOs

--> Freelancers

Step 4: Selecting the user persona: 

For our discussion, lets take students as our user group.

Step 5: Goal:

Based on the user group selected, our goal now is to increase students engagement with Linkedin.

Step 6: Pain Points / Expectations / Needs of Students:

--> Students have difficulty in finding interview questions and answers.

--> Difficulty in finding reviews and feedback about the companies [Reviews provided by current and past employees].

--> Unable to take notes within LinkedIn while preparing for the interviews and capturing data about companies

Step 7: Features or Solutions to the above points mentioned in step 6

--> Introduce new section called "Interviews": Anyone can post questions asked in the interviews and others can answer the questions. This would help the students to understand the kind of questions companies would ask in the interviews. They would start spenging more time in LinkedIn instead of some other portals. This would also avoid students using other interview prep portals. 

--> Introduce "Feedback system": Users can see the ratings and feedback provided by the current and past employees. In the companies page, linkedin can  allow users to provide the feedback and ratings that would be visible to everyone. This would help students to understand the culture and true face of the company before joining or taking up the interview process. 

--> Introduce "Notes" feature: Students can take notes while preparing for the interview and that can be saved within LinkedIn.  On visiting any user profile, we can add a feature like "Mark this profile" and it would automatically be stored in Notes. This would also avoid students using other notes applications like Google Keep or Evernote. 

Step 8: Featute Priortization:

I would priortize the features to increase the students engagement in LinkedIn based on the cost-impact analysis.

Feature 1: Interview section --> High Impact [as students tend to spend more time going through the content and it is highly useful for them] --> Medium cost

Feature 2: Feedback and Rating --> Medium Impact --> Medium cost

Feature 3: Notes --> High impact --> Low cost

Features that goes into the product backlog would be Feature 1 and Feature 3 based on the above analysis and to meet the goal that we have defined at the beginning.

Step 9: Metrics to measure for the priortized features.

Interview section feature:

No. of questions posted in a day or week per user

No. of questions answered in a day or week per user

No. of question and answers viewed per day or week

Avg time spent by the user in Interview section

Notes feature:

No. of items saved per user per day or month

Avg. time spent by the user in Notes section per day per user

Step 10: Summary:

To conclude, I would suggest Linkedin to build the interview section and notes feature to increase the student engagement. Also, Customer Lifetime Value would be more in case of students, the reason being, they start engaging with LinkedIn even before they start thier career and they are more likely to use LinkedIn even after they become professionals.

Once the feature goes live, it can be measured using the engagement metrics mentioned above.

1) I would start by describing what is LinkedIn does: "it's a social network that focuses on connecting professionals and helps them become more successful".

2) Ask clarifying questions: 

- Are there any specific reasons that we are trying to improve engagement?

- By improving engagement, are we referring to an individual's profile ( learning, applying for jobs)or to a business profile engagement rate?

- Do we have any budget limitations? 

- Are we focusing on the mobile app or desktop website?

3) Guide the interviewer through my thought process:  Assuming the interviewer told me that there are no budget limitations, we are focusing on the desktop website, and focus on in the US. 

I am going to start by understanding the different user personas that have a profile on LinkedIn, pick one user persona, and focus on their goals, expectations by focusing on certain metrics they are looking for when using LinkedIn. I will then identify the pain points the business profile curators encounter and suggest solutions to increase their engagement rate, and I will finally prioritize the features based on the importance of the impact versus the cost and summarize my analysis. Engagement rate = (active time spent on LinkedIn + number of comments, likes, shares) / certain period of time. Our goal is to increase the engagement rate of Business profiles.

4) Users: - Professionals that share articles that they find interesting, 

                 - Professionals learning new skills to find new jobs or adapt to skills required in a new job

                 - Professionals looking for new jobs

                 - Businesses sharing the latest achievements or product launch to engage with business professionals

                 - Businesses posting jobs

5) I am going to pick business profiles that often share achievements and creative content to increase their awareness and make them more appealing to potential job seekers. Businesses need to post different types of content: they need to create videos, animations with music, edit pictures, and graphics to keep their followers engaged and interested. Content creation is time-consuming, businesses cannot predict the success of their post, and the tools to create the content are outside LinkedIn's platform. 

6) List of features that can help Linkedin Business owners increase their engagement rate:

1) LinkedIn Training that teaches new ideas to the Business Social Media Manager to engaging content. This could be easily done through LinkedIn learning.

2) Offer discounts for LinkedIn ads to incentivize businesses to use them and help them increase their engagement rate

3) Create a feature for business profiles that provides insights about what are the most trending hashtags, keywords, and content shared. That is able to have a better vision on how to be engaging with their followers

7) Now I will prioritize the solution across the business profile goal and complexity of development

From the table, the two features that provide the lowest effort are the LinkedIn insights platform and the LinkedIn ads. My recommendation would be to start with these two solutions, and brainstorm on the third recommendation.