"Organic reach is dead"

Sometimes I have my wife take pictures of me for LinkedIn whenever we go somewhere that might look cooler than my desk.

Most recently she took a few of me in downtown Olympia, WA. I thought the porch of this punk house would look kind of cool and edgy— and instantly regretted my choice when I sat down and remembered how bad punk houses smell 🤢

But anyway, Grant Sundbye has a great question about organic reach:

Is organic reach actually down on LinkedIn?

The short answer is yes.

I looked back to some half-assed posts I made back in 2021 when I didn’t care that much about LinkedIn and they got 200+ likes and 20k+ impressions.

It was so easy back then, like the good old days of Facebook circa 2013 when you could get insane organic reach from anything, even external links!

(anybody remember that?)

Those days are definitely gone— organic reach is down at least 50% since then.

With that being said, here’s another post of mine from a week ago: 253 likes and 15k impressions (and it took me about 5 minutes to write the post).

To be fair, that’s not average— I cherrypicked this one to make myself look good and impress you with how good I am at LinkedIn so you’ll hire me 🤑

Most of my posts get ~5k impressions and 50-100 likes, which is definitely not like it was in the good old days of LinkedIn.

And you may have heard other people saying similar things: “I have 5 billion followers and only got 75 impressions on my last post 😡”

(they didn’t mention that the post was lame promotion for their newsletter or course)

Oh no!! LinkedIn is dying, right?! 😱

Not quite:

You CAN still get great organic reach

It might not be what it was in 2021 (easy mode) but as you can see from my above, it’s still totally possible. I have 15k followers and I get better engagement than people with 100k followers.

Why? Because my content is better, and I show up with some genuine personality.

The personality component might be the most important part. “Giving value” isn’t enough— people want to see YOU in the content.

Lessa Raebiger is maybe my favorite example.

She’s only been on LinkedIn for a month, has 1200 followers and gets 100-200 engagements all the time because she’s absolutely unhinged and hilarious (but also very, very smart and driven):

So you CAN still get solid organic reach.

It just comes down to these two things:

• Credibility. Do you know your sht?

• Personality. Are you authentic and different?

When you bring both of those, your content will find an audience.

The people who are struggling are the ones with mid, personality-less content. Look at who’s complaining about reach all the time— most of them kinda suck, right?

(there are some exceptions… but not many)

The algorithm is burying them because they SHOULD be buried.

You don’t NEED a ton of reach

Like I said, most of my posts get 3-10k impressions and 50-100 engagements. Sometimes I have a stinker that only gets 1-2k impressions and 25 engagements.

That might not seem like a lot compared to the numbers you see on Instagram or YouTube but think about it:

→ 2,000 people is a lot! That’s like the entire student body of a good sized high school.

And LinkedIn users are WAY higher quality than YouTube or IG users. At least 10x, maybe 100x or more.

Even better: you can reach them every day! It doesn’t take much to convince a few of those people to hire you— and for most of us, even a few new buyers/clients a month is enough.

→ Also, the lurkers who don’t engage are oftentimes the most valuable. The majority of my clients who pay me never like or comment on my posts!

And I’ve gotten over 40 clients this year purely from inbound. Christian DiBratto has 2,400 followers and gets 1-2 new retainer clients a month.

You do NOT need a big following to get results.

So my advice: Don’t worry about reach.

Focus on making great content that shows that you know your sht and brings your authentic personality to the table.

Get in the DMs to make friends with cool people.

Do that, and everything else will come.

PS - Here’s the part where I try to sell you something. If you want to talk about how you can use LinkedIn or YouTube to grow your business, reply to this email or just set up a call here!