A friend once told me that Hell was a massive spoon, with a billion people trying to sip from it, and nobody could get any. I think she was wrong, though. She wasn't talking about Hell. She was talking about LinkedIn.
As a social media marketer who has spent several years finding ways to make the LinkedIn spoon tip in my clients’ direction, turning ‘vanity’ metrics like reactions, shares and comments into the nourishment of leads and industry connections, I’ve learned a thing or two about making LinkedIn work.
LinkedIn has 1.3 billion registered accounts, enough people to fill Salisbury Plain. How do you stand out in a crowd that size? In the following five steps, I’ll explain. The first two are easy, the third is really just admin, and the last two will take some nerve. But the rewards will be great.
1. Reach the top 23.8% by turning up
Around 310 million people are active on LinkedIn in a given month.
The other billion registered accounts are abandoned CVs, with cropped wedding photos for profile pictures and 7 connections.
It's worth knowing how low the bar for being "active" is too. Activity in this context means opening the app. Not posting, commenting or even scrolling.
Go on, open the app. Congratulations, you just put yourself in the upper quartile of LinkedIn users.
Easy, right? I like to start things easy.
2. Say something and you’re among the 1%
In 2006, Jakob Nielsen described participation inequality: in any large online community, around 90% of people lurk, 9% contribute occasionally, and 1% produce almost all of the content. Twenty years on, this still holds true.
If you create a post this month, you’re in the elite. The 1% who take action.
Which means that if you post on LinkedIn with any regularity, you are right at the top. In just two steps, with little effort.
3. Say something again next week and join the rare few
Most businesses post on LinkedIn the way people go to the gym in January. There's a burst, a plateau, a fortnight of silence followed by a post beginning "we've got big things lined up…"
If you, or whoever writes your LinkedIn content, can manage once or twice a week, month after month, you're doing the thing most of your competitors have tried and abandoned.
So far, so easy. Except posting consistently isn't a skill. It's an act of administration, and it guarantees you nothing. And you only have to scroll through LinkedIn to see that this cadre of regular posters is anything but the elite, in terms of content quality.
Stop reading now if you want, because this is where the real work begins.
4. Become saveable, not likeable
What makes a post successful? A hundred people reacting to it with the little orange lightbulb icon? That’s nice to have, but what does it signal really? Are all those people going to jump into your inbox looking to buy what you’re selling? Possibly, but likely not.
I always advise clients not to track likes, or even comments. This goes back to participation inequality. Those 90% of lurkers include decision-makers, and most of them will never show their hand until they're ready to buy.
You won't see them coming. You'll just get an enquiry from someone who has apparently never interacted with anything you've ever posted, and who turns out to have read all of it.
We call this dark social, and it’s much harder to track. But there's one signal that gets through, and it’s easy to miss. Since September 2025, LinkedIn's post analytics have shown you how many people saved your post as a bookmark, and how many sent it to someone in a DM.
Saves tell you the post was worth keeping. Sends tell you somebody passed it to a colleague, which is about as close as you'll get to watching a referral happen. These are signals I watch closely, and you should too.
So how do you write posts that are worth saving and sending?
- Write for a moment, not a topic. “Our thoughts on the new regulations" gets a lightbulb. "The four things to sort in the 60 days before the new regulations land" gets saved, because it maps onto a date in somebody's calendar. Ask what your buyer has to do later, and give them the steps to make it easier.
- Publish the bit your expert would normally only say on a call. This is where most businesses fail, and it's nerve rather than skill. The saveable content comes from the specific answer: the actual threshold, the real cost range, the order the steps go in, the exception everybody trips over. Firms hedge all of the authenticity out, publish a generic version, and that means the post has the staying power of steam.
- Make it work without the click. A post that needs somebody to visit your site to be useful gets clicked or ignored. It doesn't get saved.
- Shake out your subject matter experts for insights. They already have the best material. They just don't think it's interesting, because to them it's as mundane as a drizzly Wednesday afternoon. Ask them what they find themselves explaining over and over. What they wish people understood before picking up the phone. The answers are almost always saveable. They're specific, come from repetition rather than opinion, and are insights that your audience can’t get anywhere else.
5. Don't use a soapbox, join a conversation
One thing I've noticed is the clients that do best on LinkedIn treat it as a networking opportunity, not a broadcast channel.
Imagine a warehouse containing everyone you've ever known, and everyone they've ever known. A warehouse the size of Dublin. (Sorry for the slightly Bosch-like imagery in this blog, I'm recovering from a fever as I write.)
Every so often someone climbs onto a chair and shouts their news. "We’re delighted to announce that our new UX audit is available for B2B professional services. Here’s ten reasons why you should get in early.”
The people standing near enough to hear are your existing clients, your staff and three competitors. They already know who you are. Everybody you actually want is somewhere else in the building, and shouting alone won’t reach them.
LinkedIn actually did a study on this a few years ago. Between 2015 and 2019, they ran a five-year randomised experiment across 20 million members, later published in Science, and found that opportunity really does travel through distant connections rather than close ones.
Note what they were measuring. Not posts, or reach, or how loudly anyone announced anything. Connections.
The networking half of the platform that many businesses treat as an afterthought is where the value runs. The useful contacts turn out to be the moderately distant ones: your peers, your suppliers, the person you shared a panel with once. Close enough that they'll recognise your name, far enough that their network doesn’t completely overlap with yours.
In practice, that means three things:
- Comment more than you post. A reply on somebody else's post puts you in front of their audience.
- Make the comments insightful. Say the thing you'd actually say if you disagreed slightly, or knew something they didn't.
- Leave a door open. Posts that arrive fully sealed get admired. Posts that invite conversation get replies.
Last notes
Done right, this takes time. Months, not weeks. But all those comments and conversations compound over time. Before you know it, your network will stretch a lot further.
Do these last two points consistently and the spoon problem solves itself. You feed other people enough, and some of them will start feeding you. Which was my friend's point all along. Hell isn't the spoon. Hell is everyone trying to use it alone. And by Hell, I of course mean LinkedIn.
