Why your LinkedIn posts get no reach

The complaint is always the same. I am posting consistently, the writing is good, and it is going nowhere. Usually the writing is good. That is exactly why it is frustrating, and it is also why the real cause gets missed: nobody scrolled far enough to find out.

What the feed is actually deciding

LinkedIn does not publish its ranking, and anyone who tells you they have the algorithm is selling something. What we can say is what we observe across the accounts we run, consistently enough that we plan around it.

A post gets shown to a small slice of your network first. What that slice does in the first hour or so decides whether it goes further. Two behaviours matter more than the rest: whether people stop scrolling and stay on it, and whether they do something that is worth more than a like. A comment someone had to think about is worth many passive impressions, which is why a post with forty thoughtful comments outruns one with four hundred likes.

That single mechanic explains almost every dead post. If the first two lines do not earn a stop, nothing after them is ever assessed.

The five things that suppress a good post

In the order we fix them, because the order matters more than the list.

• The hook is in paragraph three. The most common failure by a distance. People write their way into the point, then publish the warm-up along with it. The strongest line is almost always already in the post, sitting four lines below where anyone will see it.
• The opening is throat clearing. "I have been thinking a lot about leadership lately." Nobody has ever stopped scrolling for that sentence. It is a sentence written to help the author start, and it should be deleted once they have.
• It is not specific. "We grew significantly" is invisible. "We went from eleven customers to ninety in a year and half of them came from one channel" is not. Specificity is the cheapest reach improvement available and it costs only the willingness to say a real number.
• It ends on a question nobody wants to answer. "What do you think?" reads as a request for a favour. Ending on the sharpest version of your actual point invites disagreement, and disagreement is the comment that travels.
• It is posted into a network that does not care. If your connections are recruiters and old classmates, a post about procurement will die no matter how well it is written. This one is not a writing fix, it is a fix to who is in the room, and it is slower than the other four.

The same problem, different rooms

The mechanic does not change by profession. What changes is what the opening line has to survive, because the reader arrives with a different reason to keep scrolling and a different reason to stop.

• Executives. The strongest line usually exists already, sitting in a memo or a talk that nobody outside the company has read. Getting it to the top of a post is most of what LinkedIn for executives actually involves.
• Female founders. Specificity does the heaviest lifting here, because a real number is the fastest way to be read as a person rather than as a category. It is the first thing we change in LinkedIn for female founders.
• Lawyers. The ending is the constraint. A post hedged until it says nothing gets no comments, which is why LinkedIn for lawyers starts with finding the position you are willing to defend in public.
• Nonprofit leaders. The audience is the real problem. Funders and board members have to already be in the room before a good post can do anything for you, and that is where LinkedIn for nonprofit leaders begins.
• Rabbis and community leaders. Consistency matters more than range, because the same people come back every week and they notice a gap. LinkedIn for rabbis and Jewish community leaders is built around that rhythm.
• Content creators. The reflexes are the problem, not the craft. An opening built for a feed that autoplays gets skipped by one that reads first, which is the whole starting point of LinkedIn for content creators.

The uncomfortable one

Consistency beats brilliance, and most people would rather hear the opposite. One excellent post a month loses to three decent posts a week, because the feed is deciding what to do with you on the evidence of recent behaviour, and because the compounding happens in the audience rather than in any single post.

This is also the honest reason most people stop. Writing three good posts a week is a real job. It is not a motivation problem and framing it as one is why so many founders quietly conclude they are bad at this.

What to do this week

Take your last ten posts. For each one, find the best line in it and check whether it was the first line. If it was not, you have found your problem, and you have found it in your own writing rather than in an algorithm you cannot see.

Then rewrite one of them with that line at the top, nothing changed about the argument, and post it. Not a new post. That one, rewritten. If it beats your average, you now know what the constraint was.