Is there such a thing as guerrilla editing? For practice and entertainment (and to demonstrate my editing skills), I like to edit or even rewrite snippets of published text. I usually focus on signage, but this time I turned my attention to a social media post.
Improving the UX of a LinkedIn post
As the Nielsen Norman Group explains in Less is More, it usually doesn’t help the user when a UI includes several different ways to complete a task. The social media post below offers two options that both (eventually) lead the user to the same place, but there’s no way for the user to know that. By shortening the text, we can eliminate that ambiguity and reduce the number of choices.
This LinkedIn post from Google offers viewers two options: “see more” or a link out to the Google blog. 
The text is longer than the available space. Do I want to click “see more”, or do I want to click the image to go to the blog? 
The payoff for clicking “see more” isn’t substantial, which could make a reader less inclined to continue to the blog. The post would be more effective if the key content appeared before LinkedIn’s truncation point. 
Now, the texts fit in the available space. Viewers who scan without clicking will see the whole post. 
The revised post presents users with only one place to click for more, eliminating ambiguity.
Is it worth the time to edit a LinkedIn post this carefully?
I have no way of knowing how many people viewed the post or how many viewers followed the link. But as of this writing, Google has more than 25 million followers on LinkedIn and the original post has more than 8,500 reactions, comments, and shares. Fewer choices can lead to increased conversions, according to research on choice overload. If the edit increases conversions by even a few percent, that could increase the number of visitors to the blog by thousands.
How much time would you be willing to spend to increase your numbers that much?