“Help! My LinkedIn reach has tanked!”

“I don’t see your content enough on my feed anymore” or variants of it is a fairly common refrain I hear recently.

Not just people telling this to me directly, but also in my corporate workshops on personal branding. Someone raises the point of having lost her earlier LinkedIn ‘reach’. When I ask them to explain, they say, that the Likes and comments they see now pales in front of what they had some 12 odd months ago!

As someone who has,
a. Never used any LinkedIn ‘hack’ to post content and
b. Seen dwindling reach in the last few months
… here’s how I see it, and how I recommend dealing with it.

Consider your falling/fallen reach through six perspectives.

1. Influencer or personal branding?

Do you consider yourself to be an ‘influencer’ on LinkedIn? If yes, then please stop reading this post any further. This is not for you.

But if you do not consider yourself an ‘influencer’ on LinkedIn, think of why you are even active on the platform. Is it to build professional credibility for yourself? That’s what I call (professional) personal branding, on LinkedIn.

Now, does your credibility depend on how many people see your posts? Not really. It depends on the kind of people who see your post. Quality, not quantity.

But you may argue: “Doesn’t more people mean more quality people in that too?”. Good question. See the next point.

2. Reach and engagement you cannot see

What does LinkedIn show you in the name of ‘reach’ and ‘engagement’? There are two types, actually – volunteered and automatic.

‘Volunteered’ includes Likes, Shares, and comments/replies. These are volunteered by people in the sense that they have choose to click on the Like button (or the other 5 buttons offered by LinkedIn) voluntarily. They have choose to leave a comment. They have choose to share your post.

‘Automatic’ includes impressions that LinkedIn shows under your post and is only visible to you. People don’t choose to see your post. LinkedIn’s algorithm puts it on their timeline and they see it, either on a quick glance, or if the visual or the first 2 lines intrigue them, they click ‘Show more’ and see it fully. Even with the latter being a conscious choice, the first trigger is LinkedIn’s algorithm. So, impressions are automatic.

Now, take any of your older posts and do a check on the ratio of volunteered vs. automatic. That is, add up all the Likes, comments, shares, etc. and see that total as a percentage of the impressions. Chances are, mostly, it would be about 1-2%.

In other words, only about 1-2% of all your readers choose to volunteer to leave a digitally visible reaction. Or, unflatteringly, about 98% of all your readers simply read and move on. They don’t care about letting you know.

To be sure, this is not unflattering at all. This is how the internet has always functioned. The internet is made of three kinds of audiences – creators, commenters, and lurkers. The majority is lurkers. Far fewer people create and a small set of people comment.

And lurkers are, by nature, invisible. And yet, this “invisible audience” includes:

Silent observers who regularly read your content but never engage publicly
Occasional visitors who see your content when researching you professionally
Second-degree connections who notice your comments on mutual connections’ posts
Potential employers or clients evaluating you without direct interaction
Industry colleagues forming impressions of your expertise over time

Yes, when it comes to LinkedIn’s reduced reach both are affected – volunteered and automatic. But don’t worry about the former. And you don’t control the latter anyway, LinkedIn does. So, no point worrying about it either.

But does that mean there’s no point in looking at the Likes, comments, etc. at all? Not at all. See the next point.

3. What to value more?

Consider your best performing post on LinkedIn in recent times. Go to the comments section and take a look at all the comments. If you were asked to pick your favorite comment, how would you go about it?

One option is to consider the best articulated comment.

Another would be to pick the comment that added most value to you, or the topic.

A third option would be consider the kind of people who left a comment.

The first two are fairly occasional and rare, after you seive through AI-generated comments or other such fluff. The third is a lot more valuable, and rare of course.

But this is what you should value when it comes to ‘engagement’. The kind of people who leave a comment or Like your post. More senior? Consider that your post has left a mark!

This is the direct answer to how and why you should consider quality over quantity. It’s very easy to get swayed by large numbers in terms of Likes or comments. But pause and scratch the surface, and you get more meaningful details to look at and remember.

Is there something even more valuable? Oh yes! Has someone told you, offline/face-to-face/via direct message (say, before a meeting began, as part of small talk after talking about the weather and traffic) that they read one of your posts on LinkedIn? That! That is the most valuable ‘engagement’, even though it is happening off-LinkedIn. It means someone remembered or thought of your post long enough to tell you directly, face-to-face. The value of that reaction outweighs anything you see online, inside LinkedIn.

Take for instance, this message I got sometime back.

Are there more people who think this way about how I handle comments/replies? I don’t know. There may be. But when someone bothers to let me know, that kind of ‘engagement’ is far more valuable than any comment below the post.

4. Focus on what you gain

What do you gain by sharing something on LinkedIn?

Wait! Before you answer that, consider this question first: what do you gain by running for 30 minutes (a day, for health reasons; not just running because a wild dog chased you)?

The response, naturally, would be: better health, provided you do it regularly.

Now, what if someone says, ‘I loved that people cheered me as I ran!’? The equivalent of ‘my LinkedIn reach has tanked’ would be, ‘Last month, 12 people cheered me, but these days, barely 2-3 people cheer me’.

Now, back to the earlier question: What do you gain by sharing something on LinkedIn?

Consider the gains as an inward-facing exercise, not as an outward-facing task. That is, consider what you gain, yourself, instead of worrying about how many people saw or reacted to what you shared.

This would mean you get excited by the process of preparing something to share, in the research and thinking you undertake on what to share and how to articulate it. Your brain lights up during the entire process and you gain new perspectives, new knowledge, among others.

Reach is an outcome. Your gains happen long before the outcome, in and for yourself.

This would naturally not be the case if you are an ‘influencer’ because, by definition, you would be pandering to an audience, not that there’s anything wrong with it. It’s just a fundamentally different model and mindset.

5. Avoiding hacks and tips

Some of the most enduring hacks include haiku-style formatting, posting a selfie even if its irrelevant to the post, liking own post, among others.

The haiku-style is very obvious in many posts. Even a simple paragraph would be broken down in two short sentences each for no obvious reason. Sometimes, even sentences would be abruptly cut just to fit the formatting. The last time someone did that with great nuance and grammatical efficiency was Tamil sage poet ThiruvaLLuvar, many eons ago.

Why do people write like that? Because they read in some ‘hack’ that LinkedIn pushes up and prioritizes such short snappy sentence formatting.

Posting a selfie in every post regardless of how pointless or irrelevant it looks is another ‘hack’. Why do people do that? Becasue they read that LinkedIn prioritizes selfies!

Ditto with Liking your own post or comment.

Everytime you use a hack like this, it further pushes your effort into the ‘influencer’ zone away from the credibility-accumulation zone.

6. LinkedIn’s compounding effect

What you share on LinkedIn doesn’t exist in isolation—it compounds. Your last post might have received engagement that you deem minimal, but it builds on the foundation of everything you’ve shared previously. This creates a body of work that:

Demonstrates depth of expertise beyond any individual post
Shows consistency in professional values and perspective
Establishes patterns that reveal your authentic professional identity
Creates multiple entry points for others to discover you

While a single post’s reach might decline, the cumulative impact of your LinkedIn presence continues to grow if you maintain consistency. This compounding effect is invisible in day-to-day metrics but powerfully influential in your professional reputation.

The running joke is that if you are complaining about dwindling reach in LinkedIn, you should see the platform formerly known as Twitter 🙂 The ‘reach’ on Twitter is abominably worse.

But jokes aside, broadly, don’t start believing that the power of your words and the choice of your stories is what gives you reach on LinkedIn. That logic cannot explain pointless, pedestrian posts gaining humongous traction in terms of reach, engagement and what not.

You, and I, and everyone else is a benefactor of the platform’s mysterious algorithm. It can give you fantastic reach for a period of time where any and every post of yours can ‘perform’ incredibly well. The same algorithm can dump you and prioritize other people in another period of time.

In such a situation, instead of anticipating the algorithm’s benevolence, focus on what you gain from the effort to share something on LinkedIn. The only variable in your control is what you gain during the process of planning to share something on the platform.

Think of this way: there are 3 Os in any process – outtake, output, and outcome.
Outtake is what you produce and share online.
Output is how people react to it in ways you can see visibly.
Outcome is the long-term impact of what people think about you, the kind of associations they build about your presence on LinkedIn, not just in terms of what you post but also how you conduct yourself during interactions in the comments section.

You can control only one of these variables – outtakes. Output happens beyond your control. Outcome is the culmination of your effort over a period of time, but you don’t control it directly – only indirectly.

If you direct your focus inward, you would truly be free of the tyranny of the algorithm while also building a bank of content that assert your credibility. The consistency of your effort compounds over time and that is what builds your brand.

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