August 1, 2026 | Read online​

This is tough to admit out loud, but I've never really had a strategy when it comes to how I use social media, specifically LinkedIn, unless you count throwing spaghetti against the wall as a strategy.

I was member #36,541 on the platform, which means I was one of the first 15,000 real people on it, since the story goes that the first 20,000 accounts were dummies created to make the place look populated.

I used it originally as the networking and relationship platform it was meant to be. I kept my circle tight, only connected with people I'd actually met, and only made or asked for referrals when I knew both parties.

As it grew into more of a "social" platform and people started posting, so did I. I posted whatever I thought was interesting and helpful.

Then LinkedIn turned on the follow button and my followers exploded. I was in the right place at the right time and had stayed consistent with adding value to the people and to the platform, so the platform rewarded me for it. That's a big part of why I'm creeping up on 420k followers (which I will absolutely be celebrating when I hit it, btw 🙂).

The problem was that the platform kept changing but I didn't.

I still posted whatever I found interesting to whoever I thought might be interested. I was talking to everyone, which means I was talking to nobody.

What actually changed

In March, LinkedIn's engineering team published the most detailed technical explanation of the feed the company has ever put out. Almost nobody in sales read it.

The old way was simple. I post, it goes to my network, they engage, it climbs. Followers were the launch pad.

Now, before a post goes anywhere, the machine reads what it's about and turns it into a mathematical fingerprint of the topic. It does the same for every member based on what they've actually engaged with, not who they've followed. Then it matches the two.

The question is no longer "who follows John Barrows?" It's "who cares about this?"

Three things in that document that should change how you show up.

1. Your profile is an input, not a billboard. Your headline, your company and your industry get read by the model before it decides who your post is for. A clever title nobody searches for misfires you before you type a word.
2. Only content you engage with counts. LinkedIn confirmed they discard the posts you scroll past entirely because keeping them made the model worse. So a follower who hasn't touched my content in two years contributes nothing to my distribution. Not negative. Nothing. My 420k is not a moat and it's not an anchor. It's inert.
3. The first hour matters more than it used to. Engagement counts get bucketed into percentiles and fed back in as a relevance signal, so early traction compounds mechanically rather than metaphorically.

To be clear, LinkedIn didn't kill network distribution. They still balance your network and your followers alongside everything else. What changed is that the topic now decides who's eligible to see you, and your follower list went from being the main input to being one of several.

The part that's on me

The first thing I teach in my Filling the Funnel program is that you cannot write a good message until you know exactly who you're writing it to. Ideal Customer Profile, then personas, then triggers, then messaging. In that order. Skip the top and everything downstream becomes a waste of time.

I've taught that to teams at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and Okta for 25+ years.

And I've been posting to 417,000 people with no ICP at all.

It took getting overwhelmed recently for me to start paying attention. Meghan (my COO) and I are running a training business, an advisory practice, a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, three social platforms and a sponsorship business, and there are two of us.

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At some point I stopped choosing and started reacting.

So I did what I tell every team to do when the pipeline gets noisy. Slow down and refocus. I stopped adding and went back to fundamentals.

The Claude audit hurt

I asked Claude to run a full analysis on my posts, including type of post, engagement, time of day, etc. and yikes….

My typical day used to run around 15,000 impressions. It runs closer to 5,000 now. My median post reaches about 1.2% of the people who chose to follow me. Three posts accounted for roughly a third of an entire quarter, which means I don't have a reach engine, I have a lottery ticket I buy four times a week.

The part that shocked me a bit was that plain text posts where I asked a real question I hadn't answered yet are about 18% of what I publish and produced six of my top seven posts. The videos I spend actual time on average a fraction of that.

I've been using my worst format the most and my best format the least, for months, while telling other people to look at their data.

So here's the fix, and it's the same one I sell

I asked Claude to help me identify my ICP for social and we came up with two types of people who we gave names to:

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Miles - 31, mid-market AE, six or seven years in. His fear isn't getting fired for missing quota. It's getting replaced because AI now does the parts of the job he was hired for, and not trusting his employer to hand him the training to stay relevant. He wants the actual prompt, the actual script, and the tactics and tips he can use immediately to drive results.

Jordan - 45, VP of Sales, 12 to 100 reps. Her fear is getting the AI decision wrong in public. The board is pushing to cut headcount, the reps below are watching to see whether she protects them or trades them for a number, and there's no framework and no cover. She needs a defensible way of thinking and a strategy, not a hot take.

Every piece of content now answers one question before it goes out - is this for Miles, for Jordan, or both? If it's neither, it doesn't go, no matter how good the idea is. A good idea used to be the bar. It isn't anymore.

That's the hard part for me. I generate ideas constantly and they all sound good to me. Killing one because it doesn't serve a named person feels like waste. It isn't. It's the whole job.

Now here's where I need you

If you read that and thought "I'm neither of those people," you're exactly who I want to hear from.

You followed me for a reason and I'd rather know what it is than guess. Hit reply and tell me who you are and what you actually want from me. I read every one.

I'm not going to stop being me. The stories, the rants, the occasional stupid joke are all staying. What's changing is that I'll know who I'm talking to before I open my mouth, which is the only way any of it gets seen now.

And if you want to run this on yourself, reply and I'll send you the two prompts I used this week (Ideal Customer Profile and Personas), both out of the Filling the Funnel pack. No catch.

I'm running this in public for 90 days and I'll report the numbers either way, including the weeks it doesn't work.

You didn't lose your touch. The machine changed underneath you, and it changed in a way that rewards knowing exactly who you're talking to. Which is what we should have been doing the whole time.

Go define your two people.

#MakeItHappen