r/LinkedIn_Growth_B2B

How do you promote on LinkedIn without the usual "guru" or "celebrity" vibe?

Been avoiding public posts on LinkedIn since I joined almost 20 years ago. (That was way before LinkedIn started feeling more and more like Facebook.) I have over 3200 connections, and I must have sent hundreds of DMs over the years.

Fast forward to today, I now have a newsletter. And a sizeable number of the people who viewed last week's edition came from LinkedIn

GULP!

The stats don't lie, right?

Finally made my first public LinkedIn post today. (Would have linked it here but not sure whether that would be flagged as self-promotion)

It was an excerpt from one of my newsletters, with a soft plug for the newsletter at the very end.

The question now is: what next?

Would greatly appreciate any guide on promoting on LinkedIn without being a "guru" or having to post pics of myself and whatever I may be doing at the time

I posted a low-effort, slightly ragey thing about Sam Altman equating energy taken to train AI with the energy taken to raise a child. Topical, mildly contrarian, basically designed to poke people who were already mad about it. I knew it was ragebait while i was writing it. it felt performative and a little gross.

It got the highest impressions of any post i've ever done. 11k impressions 7x my average.

Almost none of that engagement came from my target audience. it came from people who feel negatively about AI. Basically the opposite of the founders i'm trying to reach. the algorithm saw a pile of activity and decided the post was great. it had no idea it had just handed me the wrong room.

Virality and relevance are a trap. The algo doesn't know the difference between the right 10,000 people and the wrong 10,000 people. it just knows someone's engaged.

I think a lot of us optimize for impressions. More eyeballs was never the goal. The right eyeballs is.

Winning the wrong one is losing.