Down for whom?

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

Last week, I asked a stupid question in the Superpath Slack.

Everyone says, “Reach is down on LinkedIn.” I believe that to be true for the people saying it, but what does that mean, really?

If reach is roughly a fixed pie—total users times total clicking and scrolling—reach can't be down for everybody (unless all the readers suddenly went outside—but that can’t be it…).

Somebody's reach is up. Whomstses?

I asked the question partly because I enjoy being disagreeable. Partly because I assume everything said on LinkedIn is a lie until proven otherwise. But mostly because I actually want to know what to do about it for my company’s LinkedIn strategy. You can’t figure out the right fix without diagnosing the true cause.

The community came up with four theories:

1. More ads. The feed has more promoted content than it did two years ago, squeezing out organic content.

2. More people posting. Everyone said “post on LinkedIn,” so the lurkers started posting. More competition.

3. Followers ≠ distribution. LinkedIn has moved toward a more topic-based and network-activity-based algorithm, so your followers don’t automatically see your posts.

4. Slower burn. Reach happens over weeks instead of hours now, and LinkedIn stops notifying you partway through. 60 likes over two weeks doesn't feel the same as 60 likes in two hours.

Alex Hilleary and Rachel Bicha (bless their souls) actually took the effort to count the first 20 posts in their feed to see what’s up. In our incredibly unscientific research, both Alex and Rachel got 14/20 organic posts, 6/20 ads. That likely rules out theory #1 (more ads).

Of those organic posts, a third were not from people they follow—they were because someone in their network had engaged with the post. Anecdotally, Rachel’s also noticed more engagement from people she’s not connected to. That lends credence to theory #3 (more algorithm-y stuff happening).

And anecdotally, #2 and #4 just feel correct. Great fake science, everyone.

So why am I telling this story?

Because understanding the mechanism behind the commonly shared trope—”reach is down in LinkedIn”—helps you actually do something about it.

Our industry runs on claims like this. SEO is dead. Nobody reads long-form. AI killed our traffic. Reach is down. Claims that are emotionally load-bearing but unfalsifiable at scale get repeated in Slack channels, conference talks, and LinkedIn posts until they harden into Things Everybody Knows, and then we start justifying strategies, budgets, job descriptions, and layoffs with them without understanding what’s actually going on.

Going back to our example: The only people who pay attention and talk about their LinkedIn reach are those with lots of it. The long tail of people now getting more reach has no particular reason to write a think piece about it (or even notice it). The sample we're hearing from isn't representative.

I think the advice I’m trying to land on isn’t just “don’t believe every trend you hear,” but more like: Question the source of Things Everybody Knows. Why might the source’s perspective be unintentionally misleading (even if it’s honest/true for them)? What else would need to be true for that claim to be true? What are the underlying mechanisms? How would that change the solution?

Anyway, the rest of this newsletter is full of great links, threads, events, and a $100 gift card giveaway, and I'd encourage you to give some reach to every one of them.

Cheers,

- Eric

🎥 Webinar Replay: Better Video Workflows for Lean Content Teams

Superpath member Ruth Favela and Wistia’s Sam Balter hosted an awesome webinar last week about building a repeatable video workflow.

They covered:

And now that webinar is available to watch with your eyes and ears—completely freeeeee!

You’ll leave with a sustainable workflow you can bring back to your team or clients, plus a clearer sense of what to stop overthinking. Definitely worth a watch.

🙋‍♂️ Survey (and raffle draw): What are the top 3 content marketing tools you'd like to see in action?

We're exploring a new concept where we bring in software tools for short demos for the Superpath audience.

So that begs the question: what content marketing software companies are you most eager to see in action? Ideally, choose tools that aren't the major LLMs (i.e. not Claude or ChatGPT).

🏆 On Friday, August 7th, we'll have two raffles (you can opt into either one in the survey)*

1. $100 gift card
2. One free year of Superpath Pro**

* You may only enter one raffle, and you may only submit one time.

* Only enter the free year of Superpath Pro raffle if you are an in-house, freelance, or agency content marketer. If you are not a content marketer, your entry will be voided. You may still enter this raffle if you are currently in Superpath Pro.

📆 Upcoming Superpath Community Events

To get the invitations to our member events, join Superpath Pro. You get 30 days free, so you can attend all these events!

🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Can you actually get your company posting?

Jimmy recently wrote this piece on how to operationalize "people follow people," so Alex, Ruth, and I got him on the podcast to talk it through.

Jimmy’s building a creator program at Miro right now, which meant we spent most of the episode circling the question none of us have fully answered: if AI has made the writing so easy, why is it still so hard to get a company full of smart people to publish anything?

All of us have tried this in some shape or form before, with mixed results, so we compared notes on what went right and wrong.

We discussed:

Fun chat!

Listen here.

💬 Great Slack Threads This Week

Here were some great discussions in the Superpath Slack community this week:

📙 The Reading List

Here are some links that got the Superpath Slack community talking this week:

🆓 Get a free 30-day trial of Superpath Pro

Superpath Pro is our paid community membership. On your free trial, you'll get access to:

👉 Sign up for the 30-day trial here

"Most professional groups boast about their member numbers. Superpath intrigued me for the opposite reason: they deliberately shifted from a massive free community to a much smaller, paid one - so they could focus on it, nurture it, and make it genuinely excellent. And they absolutely deliver."

— Farah Cormack, Senior Marketing Leader