LinkedIn’s dying reach is about to reset the platform to its pre-Microsoft levels. ⬇️
(And here’s what organic reach elsewhere delivers instead).
Microsoft spent $26.2 billion on the acquisition in 2016 back when LinkedIn was mainly a recruitment platform with free CVs to poach.
The feed was a dead end at best – and creator opportunities started to bubble up in 2018-2019, with the launch of native video, then live streaming, later documents, newsletters, and other formats. 📈
So creators hopped on the B2B platform, making it a lively community with regular readers, active subscribers, and a true platform different from a ghost town.
👻 Over the past 12 months however, reach has been going down consistently. I wrote a lengthy article here in January discussing the reach issues and how hard I’m working on testing new categories, topics, updating bio sections and skills, disconnecting people in my network – anything to “fix the bug”.
Richard van der Blom reported last week that organic reach is down 60% on average since November.
Speaking daily with other creators, I have personally lost about 90% of the reach over the past 12 months here, after posting consistently for 7 years. 🤦♂️
One of Chris Walker‘s podcasts earlier this year mentioned weekend posts making 1 million impressions with limited effort two years back and now barely getting a fraction of that even with a larger audience, a strong team, and tons of experience.
Top Voices, the core audience of LinkedIn, have been complaining about lack of visibility and leads, too. The ones on top are not safe from the algorithm, either.
Tim Soulo posted on Mon that LinkedIn performs better than X for him. Andrea Bosoni backed this up.
And while both platforms have performed equally for me over the past 3 years until mid-2023, while I was getting over 100 thousand views for some posts in 2021-2022, my top performer in 365 days is just shy of 25,000 impressions.
And my third best post has 18,435 impressions. 💀
Two years ago, every single Document I uploaded got AT LEAST 10k views, usually 20k plus. I posted decks every single week, sometimes twice. Now getting the timing of the day wrong or missing a viral image, I may end up with 200-300 views easily.
🖼️ Here’s a viral post I dropped on X yesterday. Working with my circle of professional writers, we built a professional thread about Ryan Reynolds and his business career outside of movies – acquisitions, exits, investments, advertisements.
Not cat memes or TikTok videos, but a business post based on a beloved celebrity.
😵💫 In 24 hours, we crossed 12.8 MILLION VIEWS on a SINGLE POST.
➡️ I got 720,874 impressions on LinkedIn TOTAL in the past 365 days after making 3-5M annually two years back.
So a single piece of content on X can reach almost 20X of my annual effort spent on LinkedIn today, hundreds of hours of research, work, content production, design, and engagement – not including my team here.
