I Detached Myself From LinkedIn and Started Posting Better

I have spent a lot of this year thinking about LinkedIn, and most of that thinking was wasted.

Not the writing. The writing was fine. What was wasted was everything wrapped around it: the reading of other people's posts to work out what performs, the low grinding awareness of how a thing did, the small recalibration after each one. I was treating a platform I do not particularly like as a scoreboard I had to win.

So I stopped. Not posting. Caring.

What detaching actually means

It is not indifference and it is not a strategy of neglect. It is narrower than that.

I decided that the response to any individual post is not information. One post doing well tells me nothing I can act on. One post doing badly tells me even less, because the thing that most reliably determines reach on a social platform is not quality, and I know that, and I was still letting it grade me.

What I watch instead is profile views, over months, as a trend. Not because it is a sophisticated metric. Because it is the one number that means someone went looking for who wrote that, which is the only behaviour I actually want, and because it moves slowly enough that I cannot read anything into a single week of it.

Everything else I look at deliberately rarely. I have written before about not being able to learn search before you have traffic, and this is the same problem in a different building. At my volumes, the numbers are noise wearing the costume of feedback. Reacting to them is worse than ignoring them, because it produces confident changes based on nothing.

The trap I was in

The trap was that thinking about it feels like doing it.

Studying the platform, drafting in my head, working out the optimal cadence, considering whether to do carousels: all of that has the texture of marketing work and produces nothing. Meanwhile the actual job is short and dull. Write the thing. Put it in the queue. Do it again.

I now have that queue. Posts get drip-fed rather than published on a day I felt like it, they go to more than one place, and there is a checklist that records what has gone where so I do not have to hold it in my head. The infrastructure is unglamorous and about a day's work, and it removed most of the deciding, which was where the cost actually was.

And I am doing this while building

Here is the part I want to be honest about, because it is the real constraint and most advice ignores it.

Marketing is a mammoth job. It is not a task at the end of the build, it is a second build running alongside the first one, with its own backlog and its own skills I do not have. I am one person. On any given week the app needs me more than the marketing does, and it usually wins, and it should.

The only way I have found to make that survivable is the same thing that made the app survivable: small bites. Not a campaign. One post. One repurposed piece. One metadata pass on a handful of pages. Something that fits in the gap that actually exists rather than the block of time I keep imagining I will get.

That is not a compromise I am making because I am busy. It is the method. A campaign I do not have the capacity to sustain produces one loud fortnight and then eight months of silence, which is worse than a quiet, boring, continuous trickle, because the trickle compounds and the fortnight does not.

The advice, such as it is

I said I would not turn things into frameworks, so this is one sentence.

Pick the slowest metric you believe in, look at it monthly, and make the unit of work small enough that a bad week cannot stop it.

That is what I would say to anyone in the same position, and it is what I would say inside an organisation too. I have watched marketing functions do the enterprise version of my mistake for years: weekly reporting on numbers too small to be significant, energy spent on the reporting rather than the output, and a strategy that quietly reshapes itself around whatever last month's noise happened to look like.

I am not detached because I have given up on it. I am detached because the alternative was to keep spending real attention on a scoreboard that cannot see me yet, while the thing that will eventually make it move sat there unbuilt.

And yes, this is a post about marketing, which I will be posting on LinkedIn. I am aware. That is roughly the size of the joke and I am fine with it.