Why You’re Getting Impressions From the Wrong People on LinkedIn (And How to Fix It)
Hello Reader,
If your audience is in SF, Berlin, or Toronto - but your post is only being show to people in London, Sheffield, or Manchester... it's not accidental. It's the LinkedIn algorithm working exactly as designed.
Here's what's actually happening (and how to fix it):
1/ LinkedIn tests your content LOCALLY.
Even if 80% of your audience is international, LinkedIn runs a small “test” of your post with people you share location with.
If the locals don’t engage, it never escapes orbit.
The logic is: if your neighbours don’t care, it must be bad.
Mario Peshev proved this brutal reality. 21,000 followers, mostly international. He deleted ALL local connections. Result? Still got local reach. Link to his full breakdown here
The algorithm's geographic bias runs deeper than your network.
2/ Your content is dying because it's seen by the wrong people first
Richard van der Blom's latest algorithm report confirms what we're all feeling. Reach is down. Engagement is scattered. Each post now has a lower chance of breakout success.
Translation: Most of your content creation efforts will get wasted. (ROI is still positive if you can automate it, but that's another story.)
In the last 2 months, we've done extensive experiments and I think we have the root cause figured out.
You write about SaaS in the U.S.
Your old classmate in Germany who's now working in HR sees it first.
Doesn’t engage.
Algorithm buries the post.
You didn’t fail.
The test audience did...
Here's the solution:
→ Commenting.
Comments are not geo-locked.
They’re the ONLY way to guarantee your content gets seen by the right people - no matter where they’re from.
That killer comment on a viral post from your target market?
Gets seen by THEIR audience, not your local bubble.
More importantly, strategic commenting:
- makes your feed sharper over time
(you see more content from your ICP, so it's easy for you to engage with the right people)
- signals to the LinkedIn algorithm what content, audience and locations you're interested in
- pushes your future posts more to those audiences & locations
I'll give you one quick behind the scenes example from my profile. First I'll tell you the stats, then I'll tell you why this is exactly what I've been training the LinkedIn algorithm for.
Posts Stats:
8K impressions, 50+ engagements.
Reached a "globally distributed" audience and a very varied set of job titles.
Here's why I want LinkedIn Algorithm to do exactly that:
- In the past, I had up to 40% views from "Software Engineers" - that's not my target audience.
(Now it's down to ~15%).
- My post reach is now distributed, since I'm a generalist, work across sales, marketing, seo, support, programming, everything.. so i write about a variety of things. LinkedIn now understands that, and doesn't "default to 40% software engineers" seeing my posts,
- 6 months ago, my posts had 90% local views. Now it's down to ~10%, rest is global. Because my audience for products is also global.
- Earlier, only 1 out of 5 of my posts reached founders... now ALL of them do in a certain percentage.
Recommendations for you
This is what I've been doing for months, and you should try as well:
- Remove dead/local connections that aren't relevant to your content strategy, they kill your reach (unintentionally),
- Start tracking content impressions (LinkedIn finally shows them)
- Engage/comment on posts that are from your ICPs exclusively, do not write "great post" comments on every random post
- Only post when you've got a hook that make YOU click "See more".
TLDR; Just read Rassam's post.
Cheers,
LiGo Team
P.S: If you want to 5x this process - LiGo's Chrome extension was built for this commenting-first approach in your writing style, with your profile context fed in (uses Human-in-the-loop method, not a "full bot-like automation).
