LinkedIn Is Testing a For You Tab. Your Follower Count Just Got Less Important.

LinkedIn is testing a feed with two tabs at the top: Network and For You. Israel Hayom reported the test on October 12, and LinkedIn's chief product officer, Hari Srinivasan, confirmed it. Network shows posts from people you're connected to or follow. For You shows professional content LinkedIn thinks you'll care about, including posts from people outside your network.

It's a limited test. LinkedIn hasn't said how many people have it, when it might expand, or which tab gets more engagement. So nobody, me included, can tell you what this does to your reach yet. What I can do is say what the split rewards if it sticks, and why I think it's worth adjusting how you write now rather than waiting.

What actually changed

LinkedIn was already showing people posts from outside their network. According to the same report, the company said in March that it had upgraded its feed ranking to better understand what individual posts are about and how members' professional interests change over time. It looks at signals like your industry, skills and experience, plus what you read, engage with or scroll past.

The new part is the split. Until now, posts from your network and recommended posts were mixed together in one stream. With two tabs, a reader can see the difference between "people I chose" and "people LinkedIn picked for me."

A second change landed around the same time. LinkedIn is rolling out Collaborative Posts, which let up to five members and Business Pages co-author one public post. Collaborators show up in the post header instead of just being tagged, and each person has to accept the invite before the post appears in their feed. Only the creator can edit it or manage collaborators.

Put those two together and the direction is fairly clear. LinkedIn wants to judge a post by what it's about and who it's useful to, not just by how many people already follow the author.

Why follower count matters less here

Picture two people posting the same morning. One has 30,000 followers and posts a polished "5 lessons from my journey" carousel. The other has 600 followers and writes four paragraphs on exactly why their team stopped running weekly status meetings, what replaced them, and what went wrong in the first month.

In the old single feed, the first person mostly wins on distribution. In a For You tab built around relevance, the second post has a real shot at reaching an operations lead at a company the author has never heard of, because it's obviously about something.

That's the argument the people quoted in the article make. Shay Thieberg of MAIA Digital put it this way: "Building a large network still has value, but follower count alone can no longer be treated as a reliable indicator of future reach." I'd add that this isn't a new idea at LinkedIn. The tabs just make it visible.

There's a related number in the same piece worth knowing. In September, LinkedIn reported a 40% decline in views of content it classified as "AI slop," and said more than 1 million members had used its "Seems like AI slop" reporting option since it rolled out in August. LinkedIn has also said using AI to edit isn't a problem in itself. The issue is posts that look polished but have no point of view.

If you've been publishing on a schedule with generic AI drafts, that combination should worry you more than the tab test does.

What to change in how you post

I don't think there's a trick for getting into For You, and anyone selling one is guessing. The article says as much: there's no proven formula and no guarantee good content gets wider distribution. But there are a few habits that line up with what LinkedIn says it's ranking on.

Make the topic obvious in the first two lines. If a system is trying to work out what your post is about, don't make it guess. "We cut our onboarding call from 60 minutes to 20, here's what we dropped" tells both the algorithm and a stranger what they're getting. "Big lessons this week 🙏" tells them nothing.

Write from something you actually did. A decision you made, a mistake, a process, a number from your own work. Generic advice is exactly what the "AI slop" filters are aimed at. A specific account of what happened is hard to fake and easy to classify.

Fix your profile, because it's context now. Eli Igra Serfaty, also of MAIA Digital, makes the point that your profile isn't just a business card people visit after a post. It's part of how LinkedIn works out who you are and who might care. If your headline says "Helping people grow 🚀," that's not much to go on. Say what you do and for whom.

Use Collaborative Posts for real joint work, not tag spam. A post co-authored with the client you ran a project with, or the colleague who built the thing, shows up in front of both audiences, and the header makes the relationship clear. It's a much better option than tagging eight people in the hope that someone reposts. Keep it to people who actually contributed, since they have to accept anyway.

Ask the colleague test before you post. Serfaty's suggestion is the best single filter I've seen: would someone in your industry share this with a colleague because they learned something from it? If not, ten more posts a month won't fix it.

Where LinkAssist fits

We built LinkAssist around voice, not volume. The point is to help you turn things you actually know and did into posts that sound like you, rather than produce more of the same template content everyone else is posting. A relevance-ranked For You tab makes that approach more valuable, not less. A tool that helps you post daily generic content is working against where LinkedIn is heading.

So if you use AI to draft, use it to get your own material into shape faster. Feed it the real story, the real decision, the real numbers from your work. Then cut anything that sounds like it could have come from anyone.

My take

The two-tab test could be dropped next month. LinkedIn tests a lot of things. But the ideas behind it aren't going anywhere: ranking by topic, reporting AI slop, co-authored posts. All three point the same way. Reach is moving from "how big is your audience" toward "how clearly do you know something useful."

That's good news if you've got real expertise and a small following. It's bad news if your strategy is to post more often and hope. I'd rather be in the first group, and the work to get there is mostly just writing more honestly about what you do.