Last month, someone earned a Top Voice badge without having published a single post. Scroll through his activity and it is mostly “Congratulations” and “Well done” left under other people’s promotion announcements. That is his entire body of work. LinkedIn gave a Top Voice badge to someone with no voice.
The platform has also quietly become a dating app. The Straits Times ran a piece on it this month. People are posting dating resumes there, and a man has even created a pink “Open To Date” badge, a parody of the “Open To Work” one. One of my friends even received a matchmaking request from a dating agency in her inbox. None of this is news to anyone who has visited the LinkedInLunatics subreddit, where people have been collecting the platform’s most cringeworthy posts for years.
A former LinkedIn employee once told me that only salespeople use LinkedIn, and that everyone there is trying to sell you something. You have probably had a version of this yourself, a message out of the blue from someone you barely know that opens straight into a pitch.
I asked a friend who runs communications for a agency why they barely advertises here. He told me it was not bang for buck. The professionals on LinkedIn are a thin slice of the population, and the people many public schemes are meant to reach are mostly elsewhere.
Then there are the brand pages. A company publishes a post that collects a dozen likes, mostly from its own colleagues. The marketing lead looks at that and concludes LinkedIn does not pay.
Every one of these complaints boils down to the same thing. The platform is full of noise, so people decide it is worthless. I see the opposite. I have spent 18 months building a presence here, and I tell companies they should be here too, for three reasons.
1. It gets you in front of the right audience at the right time
My friend reads LinkedIn at her desk several times a day, between tasks. She says it is the one social media app she can open in the middle of the workday without looking like she is slacking. She reads it in a working frame of mind, willing to take in a few hundred words and decide whether she agrees with the point, instead of doom-scrolling.
That is the audience you are buying access to, and it is why my friend in government is only half right. He is correct that LinkedIn cannot reach the whole population. But you are not after the whole population. You are after the senior professionals who decide whether to buy the insurance, enrol in the Master’s, or send their teams on the course, and they are not just here, they are here in the right mood to consider it seriously.
LinkedIn is great for spreading awareness, but it doesn’t lead to immediate sales. I once wrote an article that pointed readers to a paid membership. It drew 200 likes and a stack of messages from people who said they had learned something. Not one of them signed up. If you measure a post by what it sells that week, you will conclude this does not work, and you will be measuring the wrong thing.
It is closer to thought leadership than advertising. Take Ferrari. It pours money into racing, but they do not see a spike in sales the day after a race. As the then-chairman Luca di Montezemolo put it, the Ferrari myth rests on competition. On a track you can win or lose, but you cannot only lose. You have to win often enough to keep feeding the myth that a Ferrari is an extraordinary car.
Your writing works the same way. A single post will not sell anything that week. Each one quietly adds to the reputation that makes you the name someone reaches for on the day they need what you do.
2. It gets you discovered beyond your existing clients
I wrote a piece recently about an NTUC scheme that helps mid-career PMEs who have been laid off retrain and find their way back into work. Nearly every message I got afterwards said the same thing, that they had no idea it existed.
This is a common problem. A company posts on its own page about its own products and milestones, and the only people who see it are the ones already in its circle. The engagement looks respectable, but the message never travels past that circle.
Done right, LinkedIn puts you in front of people who never knew you existed. An agency I follow put out a recruitment video last year. It was beautifully made, officers doing serious work and also off duty, one of them ballroom dancing, another drawing animation. It got about 80 likes and mostly reached people who already followed the page. I reposted it with a few lines of my own about what the video said about work and identity. My repost drew about three times the engagement of the original, on less than a tenth of the following, because the post carried to people who had never heard of the agency.
By one industry estimate, a lead from a LinkedIn ad costs around $300, while the same lead from a good piece of writing costs roughly half that. A useful post does not stop at your followers. Someone who finds it useful forwards it, and you reach people you never paid for. Your audience becomes your distribution, which an ad never manages, because nobody forwards an ad.
3. Right now you have almost no competition
Look at your own company’s LinkedIn page, and you will probably recognise a few of these. The videos made for Instagram, posted here a second time because the file already existed. The milestone post thanking everyone who attended the forum. The product post that is really an advertisement. The post that reaches for the chirpy, emoji-filled voice of a consumer app, “what’s the ONE skill that got you here, drop it below 👇.”
None of it is bad work. It is simply aimed at the wrong moment. The person reading is a senior professional who opened LinkedIn for a few minutes of mental floss between meetings, and none of these posts gives her that, so she keeps scrolling.
On every other channel you are competing with rivals in a crowded arena. Here the field is quiet, because almost nobody is publishing anything a busy person would stop to read. You would not be out-shouting four competitors. You would be the only voice in the room saying something useful, which is the cheapest place there is to be heard.
I can say the bar is reachable because I cleared it without being a remarkable writer. Eight months ago I started posting once a week. I now have 8,000 followers and average around 150 reactions and comments a post. If someone writing alone in her spare time can do that, an institution with a team and a real budget has every advantage I lack. The lane is open mostly because few have chosen to run in it yet.
And LinkedIn now wants to carry you. A year ago it showed your post mainly to people who already followed you, so a page starting small stayed invisible however good the writing. That changed. It now puts a post in front of whoever cares about the topic, whatever your follower count, so a post worth reading gets seen. The opening will not last, because once more companies work this out the room fills up, but for now good writing wins on merit and most have not noticed.
If your LinkedIn posts are not working
The platform is not the problem, and neither is the audience. They are here and reading. When a post sinks, it is almost always because it was not written to hold their attention. That is the good news, because you can improve on your writing.
Bonus section
I do not deny there is a lot of machine-written filler here. But there are excellent writers too. Here are three that I admire.
Edy Widjaja, a senior partner at Bain, writes about the lessons of his early career, told through visceral personal stories. The one that stuck with me opens with his partners telling him, “Just show up, Edy. You don’t need to read the PowerPoint,” before a client meeting he was only sitting in on while on leave. Five minutes in, the client stopped the room and turned to him. “What are the actual success factors for entering the Indonesian retail market?” The panic of that moment taught him never to walk into a meeting unprepared again.
Adrian Tan, a solopreneur, writes about careers and hiring with an honesty I rarely see now. On a batch of fresh-graduate CVs a friend had sent him, he wrote, “I could achieve the same outcome by sending out blank PDF sheets.” His point is that most applicants have the technical skills, so what sets you apart is the right advocate. He proves it with how he won his own jobs, including coaching a client into an unpaid internship to beat better-qualified rivals.
Katie McIntyre coaches interview candidates, so she is the only one of the three with something to sell, and she does it without sounding salesy. After sitting through more than 700 interviews, she noticed that the people landing $200k to $500k offers “only talk ~50% of the time.” The rest they spend asking questions like “What can I take off your plate in the next 90 days?” The interview stops being an interrogation and becomes two people working out whether to build something together.
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