The LinkedIn Post That Flopped (And What I Learned)

I wrote a LinkedIn post once that flopped so badly I considered apologizing to it.

Okay, I’m being a bit dramatic, but…

I'd put real thought into it. The idea mattered to me, the message felt honest, and I assumed it might resonate. Crickets. It became the digital ghost of a good idea, and I immediately wondered if this happened to others.

It turns out the flop post revealed a blind spot… I was thinking only about the human reader. I wasn't thinking about the system that decides who sees what. Hold on, Segars, LinkedIn doesn't show everything we write to everyone on LinkedIn? Nope. It most certainly does not... but more on that later.

It seems this is the real issue for many of us… we simply don't understand how the platform works. Every type of writing we've used (academic, business, diplomatic, etc.) came with rules and a defined audience. LinkedIn gives us a blank box. Write. Put something out there. No instruction. No real rules. Good luck.

So senior professionals do what we often do… we (not purposely, mind you) get dense, we over-explain, and we bury simple points under layers of nuance that work in a strategy paper but fall flat in the “real” world. (My first draft of the flop post, for example, was approximately twice as long as LinkedIn allows. I had to cut it in half. And guess what? It got better. Physician, heal thyself.)

Then something finally clicked… LinkedIn is its own genre. And since every other genre requires us to adapt, I decided to stop guessing and start trying to understand how the platform actually works. Novel idea, right?

That curiosity led me to 360Brew, LinkedIn's new AI ranking model (as of November 2025 anyway). Instead of just evaluating posts in isolation, it looks at your content and your profile together, literally checking whether they're coherent, sound like the same person, contributing something genuinely useful. It turns out the system doesn't reward clever hacks or keyword-stuffed writing. It rewards coherence, clarity, and depth. It “understands” semantics… and treats our posts accordingly.

I also realized (again) that posting on LinkedIn is a test, not a broadcast. Remember the point above about how our content is disseminated? Well, when we publish something, the platform shows it to a tiny group first. If they pause or engage, the post travels. If they don't, it settles quietly to the floor (like my poor flop post). Nothing personal. Just the way it works.

The paradox, of course, is that an AI model ultimately decides our reach… but, get this… what it seems to prioritize is our humanity. Natural writing. Clear writing. Consistent writing. Writing that sounds like someone talking to someone else, not performing for an algorithm. Wild. Kinda refreshing to be honest.

So, once I stopped guessing and started leaning into my understanding of how the platform works, LinkedIn felt different. Lighter. Freer. More human. A very strange thing to say about a platform driven by AI, but here we are.

I'm still learning. Still experimenting. But the more I lean into treating LinkedIn as its own genre—with its own rules and parameters—the more it starts to make sense.