The argument in one line.
LinkedIn's reach collapse isn't personal underperformance — AI tools and a flood of founder posts crowded the timeline, so the winning move is publishing content AI structurally can't copy while manually feeding the algorithm instead of trusting it.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A founder or B2B marketer who publishes on LinkedIn regularly and has watched engagement drop despite doing the same things that used to work.
- Someone running founder-led content for a B2B SaaS company or agency client who needs a concrete playbook to counter AI-flooded feeds.
- A creator willing to spend 10-15 minutes a day on manual outreach (connection requests, ICP commenting) and eventually put a small budget behind ads.
SKIP IF…
- You're building an audience outside B2B — this is written specifically for B2B founder and executive content, not consumer or entertainment creators.
- You have zero appetite for any paid spend — the fourth move assumes at least $30/day is on the table eventually.
The full version, fast.
LinkedIn's organic reach has dropped for nearly every founder-led account, and it's not a personal failure — AI tools made average content nearly free to produce, more executives are posting than ever, and LinkedIn itself is suppressing organic reach to push paid thought leader ads. Content that survives has to be provably human: pair posts with a specific story (narrative moat), share data only your company has (data moat), or draw from real-life photos and behind-the-scenes footage (physical moat). Then stop relying on the algorithm — send 20 connection requests and leave 5-10 comments daily, and put $30+/day behind proven posts as thought leader ads.
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Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 00:36
01 · The reach drop nobody can explain
Founders' posts get less reach despite the same effort and topics; sets up the real cause instead of blaming the algorithm.
00:36 – 02:16
02 · Force #1: AI content commodification
AI tools cut content creation to a prompt, flooding the timeline with average posts; more execs posting than ever compounds the crowding.
02:16 – 02:59
03 · Force #2: LinkedIn's own dysfunction
LinkedIn suppresses organic reach in favor of paid media, repeats posts on refresh, and surfaces irrelevant suggested posts.
02:59 – 03:52
04 · Why LinkedIn still wins + the newsletter plug
LinkedIn remains the default B2B buyer channel with no real competitor; soft plug for the Social Files newsletter.
03:52 – 06:13
05 · Adaptation #1: the narrative moat
Pair every post with a specific story or anecdote; Reid Hoffman's origin-story post and a hiring post that hit ~60K impressions as examples.
06:13 – 08:35
06 · Adaptation #2: the data moat
Share proprietary data as charts and graphs; Peter Walker at Carta cited as the model example.
08:35 – 10:36
07 · Adaptation #3: physical moat + bending the algorithm
Real-life photos and office B-roll prove human origin; then start manually feeding the algorithm with 20 daily connection requests and 5-10 comments.
10:36 – 12:53
08 · Adaptation #4: lean into thought leader ads
Build ICP lists with Apollo, budget from ~$30/day, and edit posts after the fact to add a PS-line CTA around LinkedIn's boosted-post restrictions.
12:53 – 14:48
09 · The one mistake to avoid + recap
Don't over-index on unrelated personal stories; keep narratives tied to what the ICP cares about, then run every post through the moat filter.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- LinkedIn's organic reach dropped for most founder accounts not because the content got worse, but because AI tools made average content nearly free to produce, crowding the timeline.
- A hiring post seeded with two specific new-hire names and a founder-story detail pulled almost 60,000 impressions and nearly 600 likes — specificity is what AI can't replicate.
- LinkedIn auto-follows both sides of an accepted connection request, so your next 1-2 posts are guaranteed to reach anyone who accepts.
- Sending 20 connection requests every weekday adds up to about 100 a week — roughly LinkedIn's practical upper limit for most accounts.
- Comments often earn more impressions than the original post, so leaving 5-10 comments a day on ICP-relevant content is a cheap way to bend the algorithm.
- Thought leader ads barely look like ads — the only tell is a small 'promoted' label under the poster's name — which is why they outperform obviously-paid posts.
- A thought leader ad budget of about $30/day ($900-1,000/month) is enough to meaningfully extend a top-performing post's reach to your ICP.
- You can edit a thought leader ad's post after it's live to add a PS line with a link, working around LinkedIn's rule that boosted posts can't carry a direct CTA button.
- Data visualizations outperform on LinkedIn because they get screenshotted into private group chats and Slack channels — reach the platform's own analytics never capture.
- Over-indexing on unrelated personal milestones can spike engagement without building any actual pipeline for the business.
AI made publishing free, so specificity became the differentiator.
CONTENT MOATS
Every post now needs a narrative, data, or physical moat AI can't copy — plus a manual routine to force the algorithm to actually show it to people.
02Force #1: AI content commodification
- AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude cut the barrier to publishing from 'sit down and form an idea' to 'type a prompt', flooding LinkedIn with passable-but-average posts.
- Founder-led content went from a fringe tactic three years ago to a default post-funding hire, adding real competition on top of the AI flood.
03Force #2: LinkedIn's own dysfunction
- LinkedIn is deliberately suppressing organic reach to push paid thought leader ads, a progression most maturing social platforms go through.
- Product glitches — repeated posts on refresh, irrelevant suggested posts — are actively degrading the feed experience on top of the reach suppression.
04Why LinkedIn still wins + the newsletter plug
- LinkedIn remains the default B2B buyer channel with no real competitor yet, so the fix is adapting to it, not abandoning it.
05Adaptation #1: the narrative moat
- Pairing a post with a specific, verifiable detail — like naming the two people you just hired — separates it from anything an AI could generate from a generic prompt.
- A full narrative post doesn't have to be the whole strategy; supporting anecdotes inside otherwise-standard advice content do the same job with far less effort.
06Adaptation #2: the data moat
- Proprietary data only your company has access to is structurally uncopyable by AI tools, and LinkedIn audiences specifically over-engage with chart and graph posts.
- Data visualizations get quietly redistributed into private Slack and group-chat shares that never show up in the platform's own reach numbers.
07Adaptation #3: physical moat + bending the algorithm
- Real-life photos and behind-the-scenes footage function as proof-of-human content, so building a habit of shooting b-roll around the office pays off later.
- Sending 20 connection requests and leaving 5-10 ICP-relevant comments every weekday manually re-seeds your audience instead of trusting the algorithm to surface you.
08Adaptation #4: lean into thought leader ads
- Thought leader ads barely read as ads (just a small 'promoted' tag), which is why they outperform more obviously-paid formats.
- A boosted post can't carry a direct CTA button, but editing in a PS line with a link after the fact routes around that restriction.
- Budgeting from roughly $30/day (~$900-1,000/month) is enough to meaningfully extend a proven post's reach to a built ICP list.
09The one mistake to avoid + recap
- Unrelated personal milestones can spike engagement without building pipeline — the narrative moat only works when the story ties back to what your ICP actually cares about.
- Run every post through one filter before publishing: does it carry a narrative, data, or physical moat that AI-generated content couldn't produce?
Terms worth knowing.
- Narrative moat
- Content built around a specific personal story or anecdote that AI tools can't fabricate because it requires lived, proprietary detail.
- Data moat
- Sharing data or metrics unique to your company — usually visualized as a chart or graph — that competitors and AI tools can't access.
- Physical moat
- Content sourced from real-life photos, behind-the-scenes footage, or in-person events that proves a human, not an AI, produced it.
- Thought leader ad (TLA)
- A LinkedIn paid ad format that boosts an existing organic post while barely reading as an ad; limited to brand-awareness or engagement objectives, so it can't carry a direct CTA button.
Things they pointed at.
06:13channelPeter Walker (Carta Head of Insights)
10:50toolApollo
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“Something changed on LinkedIn this year, the founders I talked to are able to feel it without being able to name it.”
14:26
“The founders who win on LinkedIn are publishing content that is uncopiable by AI.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphor
00:00Something changed on LinkedIn this year, the founders I talked to are able to feel it without being able to name it. Your post used to do fine. Same effort, same topics, but now the reach isn't there.
00:08So you assume you got worse or just blame the algorithm and post less. Here's what actually happened. The LinkedIn timeline simply got way more crowded due to more people posting on the platform and the rise of all these AI tools.
00:18I run content for over 30 founder led accounts at Compound, and I've watched this shift hit every single one of them the same way over the past few months. The founders who understood it are now reaching people who have never heard of them and turning those strangers into pipeline. So let me show you exactly what changed in the strategy that's working on LinkedIn right now.
00:32So there are few forces at play here. The first thing is AI content commodification. Over the past year in particular, there have been the rise of a lot of AI tools, whether it be just Clod or ChatGPT or even LinkedIn specific AI tools that promise to help you write posts faster and easier.
00:46And because of this rise of LLMs, the barrier to entry to create content has gone down drastically. Before, you actually had to sit down and think of ideas and go through the difficult work to formulate your thoughts into a coherent post. Now you enter in a prompt in Claude or ChatGPT, and you have a passable post in seconds.
01:03Some people argue this is a good thing. I understand the thought process. You wanna make creating content more accessible, but it also makes the timeline a lot more crowded with very average content.
01:12And independent of AI and all these new tools, more and more execs and founders are posting content on LinkedIn. It's gone from over the past two to three years a fringe marketing strategy that only a handful of people used to now being pretty commonplace. A lot of companies will raise a round of funding and immediately go and hire someone to run their founder's LinkedIn.
01:30And for good reason. It's a very powerful channel for b to b marketing. But because more and more execs are starting to understand this, similar to the trend that we saw with those AI tools, the platform is just becoming more crowded and more competitive.
01:41And what it takes to stand out is evolving. And on top of the increased competition, LinkedIn as a platform is not making growth any easier. And there are a few forces at play here too.
01:50First and foremost, they seem to be suppressing organic reach in favor of paid media, which is not all that surprising. A lot of social platforms go through this progression as they mature. For the past few years, there's been a ton of free organic reach on LinkedIn, and now they've got more and more b to b founders and creators on the platform, of course, they're gonna wanna get people to spend more ad dollars.
02:09Now, there's also just the reality that LinkedIn as a platform is all over the place. When you compare it to other social platforms like Instagram, even Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn as a product is just very all over the place, and a lot of the updates that LinkedIn product team seems to be making just don't make sense.
02:26In particular, recently, if you go on the timeline and refresh your feed, you'll see the same posts appear over and over and over again. Like, there's just no reason for that to happen. They're also trying to emulate the interest graph that TikTok helped pioneer by introducing suggested posts, but a lot of these suggested posts, they tend to be posts with a small handful of likes that aren't very relevant to you.
02:45So the LinkedIn team seems to be making some questionable decisions on how to build their product, which is making the user experience worse. So you have a suppressed organic reach, and the product itself is not in a great place right now. All in all, it's a pretty difficult environment.
02:59The thing is that LinkedIn is still the default channel for b to b marketing. You can reach b to b buyers on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or Twitter, but LinkedIn is still the de facto b to b content marketing channel. And until a true competitor comes to take its place, it is gonna stay that way.
03:14So you wanna learn how to adapt and succeed even in a more challenging environment. Now if you want the whole picture on this, I write a weekly newsletter called Social Files where I break down everything you gotta know about founder led content for b to b company. It's where I go way deeper than I can in just one video, so it's entirely free.
03:29If you wanna check that out, I'll drop the link in the description for you to sign up. So now that you understand what's changed on LinkedIn over the past year and how it's making it more difficult for you to grow, we gotta talk about how you adapt. Because like I mentioned, LinkedIn isn't going anywhere.
03:41Despite the challenges it's having right now, the challenges that you might be feeling at this very moment, it's still the best channel to reach b to b buyers. How do you adapt? There are two ways to overcome these headwinds.
03:52First is at the content levels. How do you change the content that you're publishing to make it more likely it's gonna get served to your ICP? And the overarching theme here is that you wanna find ways to create content that is very obviously not AI generated.
04:05One, because LinkedIn itself has come out and said that they're working to keep AI content from being surfaced, so you don't want it to get flagged by LinkedIn itself. But also, readers don't want to read AI slots. So you wanna have ways to prove that your content is unique, and you wanna have a moat against these LLM tools.
04:21And there are three ways you can do that. One is through a . One of the pieces of advice I give to all the founders that I work with and how I train my team to write exceptional content is to pair every take with a story.
04:31It's no longer enough to post generic advice content or how to content. So five tips for growing on LinkedIn, not enough. You have to pair that with a story or a narrative.
04:40There are two variants of a narrative that you can include in content. So one is actually making the entire post one singular story. One common way this shows up with founders is the origin story post.
04:50We run this post with single exec that we work with, and it crushes pretty much just telling the story of how and why you started your company. The other way you can use narrative and content as a moat is by using supporting anecdotes. So the entire post doesn't need to be a story.
05:01Even this video you're watching right now is still advice content, but I'm using specific stories and anecdotes and examples from my day to day that make this content unique to me. You can do the same thing in your content. So look at this post that I wrote.
05:12It's a very simple hiring post. Nothing that revolutionary. This probably took me ten minutes to write.
05:17Yep. It got almost 60,000 impressions, which is quite a bit, and almost 600 likes that reposted 20 times, almost a 170 comments. This post ripped, but it was simple, easy, and pretty standard relative to the content you would have seen on LinkedIn two years ago.
05:30The one thing that I made sure to include was specific anecdotes in the copy that make this content specific to me. So a few examples here. I made sure to shout out the specific new hires that we made and and call out that we made these two hires already.
05:43I included this line for the first three years, myself, my head of content were the de facto head of services. As we continue to mature, it's time to change that. So again, telling part of my company story in this very simple hiring post.
05:54And then for this freelance job posting, including this section about how I get a bunch of DMs asking if we take on freelance writers and we're finally opening it opening it up. Again, that's not something that AI would know if I just asked to, hey, write me a hiring post. And I think one of the things that keeps founders from using more narrative in their content is that they believe that every post has to be one of those long form, single narrative pieces of content.
06:15Those can be quite overwhelming to sit down and write. Like, when we work on a narrative post for a client, like an origin story post, that'll take almost an entire day to do exceptionally well. So don't just rely on that.
06:24Use supporting anecdotes too, and you can still do advice content just by using those specifics as well. The second moat you have that will make your content stand out is called a . So share unique proprietary data that only you have access to.
06:36Again, the through line here is that AI cannot copy that data. On top of that, people on LinkedIn love data visualizations. If you can put unique data into a chart or a graph, people will eat that up.
06:47One example of someone who does this very well is Peter Walker at Carta. He's their head of insights, I believe, and he just consistently posts graphs and charts and data visualizations using Carta data about the startup and VC ecosystem, and it crushes every time.
07:02So here's an example from him where he talks about some of the trends in the market when it comes to seed rounds and the valuations and the number of seed rounds that are being done in the market at the moment. This is all data that's coming from Carta. As you can see, it does quite well, almost 300 likes, 80 comments, 22 reposts.
07:16That's very strong by today's standards on LinkedIn. And you have to imagine that a lot of these visualizations are getting shared in group chats and Slack channels, driving that dark social behavior that so many of us are after. There's likely something in your company right now that you can turn into a LinkedIn post like that.
07:30Now, the third moat you have against AI content and just the more crowded timeline in general is what I'm calling a . Taking things from real life and putting them on social as content. This is why IRL photos are often the best performing media type.
07:43So if you're doing a new hire highlight post, taking a picture with said new hire and including them in that post will help it perform better because it's proof that this is a real person, and you're not just putting this through Claude. It's also why if you ever go to an event or a conference, you should always get pictures, always get b roll photos that you could use in content.
07:59And it's why oftentimes the purpose of doing conferences or dinners or in real life stunts is to get that social footage because it does so well on the timeline. One funny way this shows up is a lot of times startups will get billboards either in San Francisco or what you'll often see is like they they get their logo on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square, and then the founding team will take a picture with it and post it on LinkedIn.
08:20I'd imagine they get more visibility and more impact from that photo they post on LinkedIn of the billboard than they do the actual billboard itself. This phenomenon plays out over and over again, and it's one of the best ways to insulate yourself from this . Where I would start is if you have an in person office, turn your office into a set.
08:39Have someone on your team, could be your marketing person or social media manager, follow you around and just snap photos of you going throughout your day and taking b roll footage of people behind the scenes in the office. It'll feel kinda weird at first because, like, I don't wanna be an influencer. But having that library of images and footage to use in content when it's relevant will go such a long way, and it's just such a low lift, so why not do it?
08:59Now, the content's just one part. The second part to adapting to the current state of LinkedIn is what I call . You cannot just rely on the organic algorithm to serve your content to the right people.
09:09I'm not even seeing content from people who I know I wanna see content from. And there's likely people in your audience who miss seeing your stuff, who haven't seen it in weeks or months or maybe even the past year. So you wanna increase the likelihood that people are gonna see that content.
09:21And despite its recent faults, one of the things that LinkedIn has above pretty much any other social platform is it does give you more control over who's in your follower base, who's in your audience. Because when you send a connection request to someone, if they accept it, it's automatically a mutual follow. They're likely gonna see at least the next one to two posts that you publish.
09:39And if you get them engaging, then they might end up in that flywheel. So what I'd recommend is send every single day 20 outbound connection requests. Every weekday Monday through Friday, do that.
09:48That'll add up to about a 100 outbound connection requests per week, which is the upper limit on LinkedIn for most people. In that way, every week, you're manually feeding people and your ICP into your audience. In that same ten to fifteen minute window when you do that, go and leave five to 10 comments on other people's content, ideally other people in your ICP or influencers that your ICP also follows.
10:08That way, you're building a bit of reciprocity. So if they see you commenting on their stuff, they're likely gonna go at least check out your content, and if it's relevant, they'll also engage and comment. That's usually what happens on social platforms.
10:19And even if that doesn't happen, the people in your ICP that are following, the people whose post you commented on are seeing your comments in the comment section. And a lot of times these days, comments will get more impressions than posts themselves.
10:31So I know it feels silly to sit there on LinkedIn and go and search for content to comment on, but don't spend hours doing this. Even just fifteen minutes a day leaving five to 10 comments in addition with your 20 outbound connection request helps you bend the algorithm in your favor and make it more likely that people are gonna see your content.
10:46Now earlier, mentioned that LinkedIn is really pushing thought leader ads and suppressing organic reach a bit, and I don't think you should fight this. I think you should actually lean in. Thought leader ads are really promising ad unit for the reason I mentioned earlier.
10:56If you look on the timeline and find the thought leader ad, it doesn't really look that much like a paid post. If I look at this post that I I saw just now, look under his name. You see this tiny little promoted text.
11:06That's the only indication that it's an ad. So if you take your best performing get pieces of content, ideally best performing that also attracted a lot of your ICP, and put some budget behind them as a thought leader ad, that's a great way to, again, control the algorithm and make sure the right people are seeing your content.
11:21What I'd recommend doing here is using a tool like Apollo. You can connect it to Cloud and actually have it do a search for companies in your ICP if you have some documentation around the type of companies you wanna target. Build a list, and then you can upload that list of companies directly into LinkedIn, and the match rate isn't gonna be perfect, but it's often better than LinkedIn's native filters.
11:39And again, it just increases likelihood the right people from the companies are gonna see those posts that you decide to put some budget behind. What I would recommend is start with like $30 a day. So it still comes out to about 900 to $1,000 a month, but when it comes to ad budgets, if you're in marketing and b to b, you know that's not that much.
11:54So I start there just to get some extra impressions from your ICP on a regular basis, and then you can scale from there if you find that any particular post is performing well. One pro tip with thought leader ads too is you can actually edit the post. So let it run organically without a link.
12:07Even though links don't actually hurt performance anymore, you don't wanna put link in every single post organically. So let it run without a link for about a week. After that, you can go in and edit the post and add a URL as a PS line, which sort of serves as a call to action if you decide to boost it as a thought leader ad.
12:21Because when you boost content as a thought leader ad, you have to use the brand awareness or the engagement objectives. You can't put a direct call to action button in the ad. But you can get around this by doing the editing content trick that I just mentioned.
12:33You edit the content, you put a PS line with that URL. That URL shows up even when it's boosted, so it serves as the call to action button for the ad. And done right, you can drive a good amount of landing page clicks to your email list or to a lead magnet.
12:45And again, the point here is that you're no longer just relying on LinkedIn organic algorithm. If you're playing that game, you could have some success, but it's it's gonna be very unpredictable. Now, I wanna call out one really common mistake that founders can make when they hear this advice, specifically around the narrative mode I mentioned earlier.
13:01A lot of founders hear that they need to include more stories in their content and talk about things that AI can't copy, and they over index on personal story based content, which actually isn't that relevant to your ICP. So you want to include stories and narratives, but make sure it's about stuff that your target audience actually cares about.
13:17So one easy example of this done poorly is, you know, that common meme where it's like, I just got engaged. Here's what it taught me about b to b sales. That's a pretty common way that people will try to gain attention on the algorithm.
13:26Well, they'll post personal events, and it'll get a ton of engagement and visibility because people wanna engage and show their support, but it's not actually that relevant. And you can do that occasionally. Like, example, when I moved to New York, I made a post on LinkedIn talking about how I've been considering it for the past two years, and I finally made the decision.
13:40And that post is one of my highest performing pieces of content in the past few months. Did it drive a bunch of leads? Not really.
13:46But it helped me stay in the LinkedIn feed. But if I made every single post about that, like my personal life and stuff that's not related to content marketing, that if you're gonna work with me, you're gonna care about, it wouldn't do that much for my business overall. So you wanna make sure the stories and the personal anecdotes that you are deciding to include in your content are actually relevant.
14:03So this should likely be conversations that you had at conferences, or on sales calls, or experiences with past customers that you've worked with. And that way, you can tap into this narrative moat without going super broad and top of funnel in a way that dilutes your audience in the quality of the impressions and engagement that you're getting on LinkedIn.
14:19Now if you only take one thing from this video, take this. The founders who win on LinkedIn are publishing content that is uncompiable by AI.
14:27They tap into narrative and data modes that allow them to stand above the noise on the timeline. So this week, when you're writing your next post, run it through that filter. Is there some sort of narrative, data, or physical moat that I can add to this content that elevates it above the AI noise on the timeline?
14:42If the answer is no, you still have work to do. But after watching this video, you should be in a good place to execute this. So I hope this helped.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Reach dropped on the exact same content that used to work, and most founders assume they got worse or blame the algorithm. Tommy Clark, who runs content for 30+ B2B founder accounts at Compound, breaks down what actually happened and the four moves he's running on client accounts to fight back.
Named ideas worth stealing.
03:30list
The Three Content Moats
- Narrative moat
- Data moat
- Physical moat
Three ways to make content AI tools structurally can't copy: pair posts with specific personal stories, share proprietary data as visuals, or source real-life photos and behind-the-scenes footage.
Steal forany B2B founder or brand LinkedIn strategy trying to stand out from AI-generated posts
10:11list
The Daily Algorithm-Bending Routine
- Send 20 connection requests every weekday
- Leave 5-10 comments on ICP-relevant posts daily
- ~10-15 minutes/day total
A manual daily routine to force reach LinkedIn's organic algorithm won't reliably give you.
Steal forany founder or creator trying to grow a LinkedIn audience without ad spend
10:50model
The Thought Leader Ad Playbook
- Let the post run organically ~1 week without a link
- Edit the post to add a PS line with a URL
- Boost with $30+/day budget (~$900-1,000/month)
- Target ICP lists built via Apollo
Boost best-performing organic posts as barely-visible ads while working around LinkedIn's no-direct-CTA rule for boosted content.
Steal forB2B marketing teams with even a small paid budget
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
03:15newsletter
“I write a weekly newsletter called Social Files where I break down everything you gotta know about founder led content for b2b company... it's entirely free... I'll drop the link in the description.”
Soft mid-roll plug tied directly to going deeper on the exact topic he's teaching, not a hard sell — placed right after establishing the problem and before the solution.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
