LinkedIn Is A Conversation, Not A Broadcast
A lot of people use LinkedIn like a megaphone. They stand on the platform, broadcast their message into the crowd, and wait. They post, they wait, they get a handful of likes from people they rarely speak to, and they conclude that LinkedIn does not work for their kind of business.
What has actually happened is that they have mistaken the tool for a poster on a bus stop or an advertising hoarding, when it is much closer to a room.
Think about how relationships work everywhere else. You do not walk into a business or networking event, announce your services to the attendees through a loudhailer, and then stand in the corner waiting for an orderly queue to form. You talk to people. You ask what they do. You might even ask if they have a dog or have a favourite coffee shop. You find the ones you click with, you follow up, you stay in touch, and over months and sometimes years, some of those people become clients and many of them become something better than clients. This is very much how it’s worked for me.
LinkedIn is the same. The posting is the smallest part of it.
This is why I tell people that comments are gold. Not the comments on your own posts, although those matter too. The comments you leave on other people's. A considered comment on the post of someone you would like to know is worth more than three posts of your own shouted into the void. It is a way of being genuinely present in someone's world, of adding to what they said rather than waiting for your turn to talk. It is visible to their network. And it is, fundamentally, the start of a conversation.
The broadcasters never do this. They are too busy broadcasting. They see other people's posts as competition for attention rather than as opportunities to connect. And so they remain strangers to the very people they are trying to reach.
There is a phrase I keep coming back to: relationship first, business second. It is not a soft, fluffy idea. It is the most practical thing I know about how business actually gets done. People buy from people they trust, and trust is built in conversations over time, not manufactured by a well-timed post. When you treat LinkedIn as a place to build relationships, the business takes care of itself, because the business was always going to come from the relationships.
The shift is simple to describe and surprisingly hard to make. Stop asking what you should post. Start asking who you want to know, and how you can be useful to them. Read what they write. Respond like you genuinely give a shit, not simply with "Great post". Notice what they are working on and remember it. Reply to their replies. Send the occasional message that is not a pitch.
None of this is scalable, and that is rather the point. The broadcasters chase scale because scale lets them avoid the slow, particular work of knowing people. But knowing people is the work. It is the thing that LinkedIn is genuinely good for, and it is the thing the megaphone approach can never deliver, no matter how loud it gets.
You do not need a bigger audience, stop chasing the numbers — that’s vanity, ego-stroking. They really do count for bugger all in the big scheme of things. You need a real conversation with the people already in front of you.
