When you use a platform like LinkedIn, you get the promise of more than a billion individual users and over 65 million businesses. It’s estimated that (U.S. data only) 16.2% of LinkedIn users log in daily, while 48.5% do so monthly.
So far, that sounds like an ideal platform to reach vast numbers of people with your thinking, insights, marketing messages, and offers. In turn, LinkedIn reportedly makes roughly 45% of its revenue from marketing solutions, i.e., sponsored content, display ads, and message ads. The longer people stay on the site, in part because of the stickiness of your content, the better it is for LinkedIn.
You win, they win—that’s the ostensible deal with most social platforms.
The problem, of course, is the fine print on that deal.
- You don’t own your content or control its use (for example, as AI training data).
- You don’t control your audience and can even potentially lose it for various reasons, with little recourse.
- You give up some of your freedom—what you think and how you write—if you want to buy into the deal.
The first two of these are obvious and well-understood. The last point is worth exploring.
To get meaningful numbers of views or other engagement, you need to follow the constraints of the algorithm. That’s why there’s an entire industry of people selling frameworks, templates, tips, and courses about how to write on LinkedIn.
“How to write on LinkedIn” actually means how to write for the algorithm. You end up with a wasteland of posts written in annoying formats, posts written with “hooks,” posts that look and sound like other posts. Maybe it doesn’t matter if you have nothing new or interesting to say. Maybe it doesn’t matter if your goal is to tap into people’s aspirations and fears.
But what if you want to challenge conventional wisdom? If you agree with the notion that writing is thinking, then distorting your writing distorts your thoughts.
Over time, you can get better at writing for LinkedIn, but you will get worse at thinking. Everything you write and think will depend on the bet you place on how the algorithm works.
It might seem like a trivial concession to get views and likes, but it ultimately becomes a corrosive complicity. Views at the cost of thinking? Suddenly, you’ve made a very bad deal.
There is one major piece of good news here, however. You don’t have to make this deal at all.
