Last month, I came across someone who had earned a Top Voice badge without publishing a single post. His activity was mostly “Congratulations” and “Well done” under other people’s promotion announcements. That was his entire body of work. LinkedIn had given a Top Voice badge to someone with no voice.
The platform has also quietly become a dating app. The Straits Times ran a piece about it that month. People are posting dating resumes, and a man has even created a pink “Open To Date” badge, a parody of the “Open To Work” one. One of my friends received a matchmaking request from a dating agency in her inbox.
None of this will surprise anyone who has visited the LinkedInLunatics subreddit, where people have collected 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 your own version of this: 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 an agency why they barely advertise there. He told me it was not bang for buck. 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 gets 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 starts with a real problem: there is plenty of noise on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn remains useful when the people you want to reach are there for work. A clear post can introduce an idea, make expertise visible and stay in a reader’s memory long before a decision is made. I have spent 18 months building a presence there. From what I have seen, it is worth taking seriously—not as a quick route to sales, but as a place where a clear idea can be easier to find later.
That matters when someone is choosing an insurer, a Master’s programme or a course for their team. They may not act after one post. But they may remember who gave them a useful idea.
Is LinkedIn useful for reaching professionals?
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 as if she is slacking.
She is in a working frame of mind: willing to read a few hundred words and decide whether she agrees, rather than just scroll.
That is why my friend in government is only half right. LinkedIn cannot reach the whole population. But you may not need the whole population. You may need the senior professionals who decide whether to buy the insurance, enrol in the Master’s, or send their teams on the course. They are there, and they are ready to think about work.
For me, that is where LinkedIn content for executives can be useful. It gives a CEO, dean or senior expert a place to share a useful observation, a hard-won lesson or a piece of evidence with people who may need that judgment later.
LinkedIn can spread awareness, but it does not necessarily 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 I had measured that piece only by what it sold that week, I would have concluded that it did not work. That would have been the wrong measure.
It is closer to thought leadership than advertising. Take Ferrari. It pours money into racing, but it does 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.
Writing works in a similar way. A single post will not sell anything that week. Over time, useful work can add to the reputation that makes you the name someone remembers when they need what you do.
Good LinkedIn writing can reach people outside your existing circle
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: they had no idea it existed.
This is a common problem. A company posts about its products and milestones on its own page, and the people who see it are often already in its circle. The engagement looks respectable, but the message does not travel much further.
Done well, a LinkedIn post can reach people who did not know 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 it reached 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. I would not treat any one estimate as a promise. The simpler point is that a useful post need not stop at your followers. Someone who finds it useful may forward it, and the writing can reach people you did not pay to reach. Your audience can help it travel in a way an ad rarely does, because nobody forwards an ad.
Senior people still read LinkedIn posts that give them a real idea
Look at your own company’s LinkedIn page and you will probably recognise a few of these: the video 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. None of these posts gives her that, so she keeps scrolling.
The opportunity is quieter than the usual talk about beating the algorithm. On LinkedIn, there is still room for a leader or a brand to say something genuinely useful. You are not trying to out-shout four competitors. You may be the only voice in the room offering a considered view, a clear example or a question worth sitting with.
I know 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. Those are my own results, not a promise for anyone else.
But they are a reminder that an institution with a team, real expertise and a budget has advantages I lack. The space is open mostly because few have chosen to use it well yet.
LinkedIn also appears to show posts to people who care about the topic, not only to existing followers. A year ago, I felt it showed your post mainly to people who already followed you, so a page starting small stayed invisible however good the writing. That has changed in my experience. A post worth reading can now find people beyond your follower count. It will not last forever if more companies work this out, but for now good writing has room to travel.
When LinkedIn posts fall flat, I check the writing first
The platform is not always the problem, and neither is the audience. The people you want to reach may be there and reading. When a post sinks, I first ask whether it was written to hold their attention: does it offer a real observation, a story, a useful distinction or a view that a busy person can take away?
That is the good news. You can improve the writing. For leaders with substance but limited time, this is the work I care about: drawing out the experience and beliefs that are already there, then shaping them into something clear, credible and useful. Not more noise.
These three LinkedIn writers show what a human post can do
I do not deny there is a lot of machine-written filler there. But there are excellent writers too. Here are three I admire.
Edy Widjaja, a senior partner at Bain, writes about the lessons of his early career 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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