What Are LinkedIn Engagement Pods?

Do you know how to boost that engagement on LinkedIn with LinkedIn Pods?

Publishing on social networks has become a necessity. To promote your brand, highlight your expertise, share your news, generate leads… So how to make your publications shine? ✨

Preconceived notions against LinkedIn engagement pods are going around due to the misuse of many users. In this article, we wanted to show you that a well-used pod can really boost your community management and your R.O.I! 😁

In recent years, different platforms have reduced the “organic reach” of publications, that is, the reach that a publication has without sponsorship. And this is in order to encourage you to sponsor it, and therefore pay, obviously. 💰

Now, creating a content distribution strategy can be extremely time consuming, and the reach can be very low. That’s where pods, or engagement groups, come in.

But before we get to that, we need to understand how a social network‘s algorithm works, in this case LinkedIn’s, which is one of the most basic.

Getting more views on sponsored posts

The business model of social networks is very simple: Sell your attention in the form of advertising space. Because once they find customers to sponsor posts, they have to find space for those posts. Their revenue is therefore directly correlated to the time users spend on their news feed.

Millions of people post to LinkedIn every day. That’s why advertising on social networks works in the form of auctions. 👩⚖️

For posts, it’s kind of the same thing

No, there are no humans reading all the posts to determine the most interesting ones, as you might expect. 😆 So it’s a LinkedIn algorithm that will define which content is most likely to keep your attention, in order to display it more widely.

Since an algorithm can’t capture subjective notions (not yet at least), it’s going to measure objective levers. And what better way to determine the quality of a post than to look at how many people like or comment on the content? This is called the engagement rate.

How the LinkedIn algorithm works

Here’s how the life of a post on LinkedIn works:

• When you post your content, it is displayed to a small portion of your network, which acts as a sample. The size of the sample varies depending on the optimization of your post ( hashtags but not too many, no external links, i.e. links that take you to a site other than LinkedIn), the views on your latest posts and the size of your network, although the influence of these different parameters is quite difficult to measure. 📏
• The algorithm observes what the engagement rate is on this sample, i.e. the rate of people who like and comment. Comments have a much higher weight: I would say between 5 and 10 or even 20 times a like. This initial rate is crucial because it largely influences the final reach of the post. It is said to be measured between the first and the first three hours of life of the content. ⏰
• Based on this initial engagement rate, the algorithm expands the audience by prioritizing people in your network, but especially people in the network of those who have engaged on your post, considered “similar profiles”, which could therefore also be interested in your content.
• If the engagement rate continues to be similar, the post continues to grow in views. This is what makes a content with high engagement rate.

Virality will have no more secrets for you!😱

But then, what are LinkedIn Pods?

There are two types of LinkedIn Pods, those that are manual, and those that are automatic.

Zoom in on their differences. 👀

Manual LinkedIn Engagement Pod

Engagement Pods originally came about as “manual.” It involves joining a group of people (via WhatsApp or Slack for example) on which each member shares links to their posts and commits to liking and commenting on other members’ content to boost their social media presence. By engaging in this way in the early life of the content, the LinkedIn algorithm is “fooled” and considers this content as “interesting”. As a result, it will significantly increase its reach.

Benefits of Manual Pods:

• 🟢 High comment quality
• 🟢 “Credible” engagement in the eyes of the algorithm.

Disadvantages of Manual Pods:

• 🔴 Very time consuming to comment on posts from 50-100 people per day.
• 🔴 Volume of comments often insufficient

Automated LinkedIn Pods

Faced with the success of manual pods on B2b Media and because of their drawbacks, automated pods have appeared. Today there is mainly one tool on the market: Lempod (and a few other tools a little less known)

See the comparison

These tools are Chrome extensions that work on the same principle as manual pods: I join a group of people who will engage on my posts and vice versa.

The difference is that engagement is automatic: I add the link of my post, I choose the comments I want to receive. The accounts of other members automatically “like” and comment on my posts.

 

Benefits of Automated Pods:

• 🟢 Significant time savings.
• 🟢 Ability to join many pods and thus get dozens of comments, thus tens of thousands of views.

Disadvantages of automated Pods:

• 🔴 Low quality comment proposal = therefore requires time to create own real comments.
• 🔴 Quality of profiles that engage quite random so low qualified audience.
• 🔴 It’s always the same people who engage so the LinkedIn algorithm realizes this and devalues the “weight” of their engagement over time.

 

An alternative to Lempod and Alcapod

There is an alternative to Alcapod:

😱 Only one.

🟢 One that keeps all the benefits.

🔴 And removes all the negatives.

 

The advantages of manual and automated pods, without the disadvantages : Podawaa

At Waalaxy, we don’t like the downsides. We really don’t. So we asked ourselves, “How do we create a tool that incorporates the benefits of both manual and automated pods?”

And quite naturally, Podawaa was born. Podawaa is an automated pod tool that:

• ✅ Offers you relevant comments thanks to an intelligent algorithm that learns from previous similar posts, in YOUR language.
• ✅ You can choose how you want to engage: manual or automated

• ✅ Allows you to target a specific audience by choosing specific profiles that will engage on your posts. I can ask for example “CEO in Paris in the software industry” or/and add keywords

• ✅ Varies the order and who engages on your content, all by simulating human behavior, to fool the LinkedIn algorithm.
• ✅ Gives you best practices to get views on your content.
• ✅ Offers you a “manual pod” option, allowing you to save time on comment writing while keeping control of their content.
• ✅ Offers you a statistical dashboard to manage your content strategy performance.

So you get quality engagement and thousands of views on your posts, all in a credible and timely manner.