A few months into building a client's personal brand on LinkedIn, the numbers just stopped going up.

Some context: My client is a consultant in the ERP world. I am not going to name him or the ERP software, but he basically works with very large companies. 

We started out okay. Likes, impressions, comments, all picking up the way they are supposed to. We even had one breakout post, a hotly debated topic in his world, AI in the ERP space, that pulled in 18,000 impressions. And then everything just ‘wasn’t working’.

When we began working together, the key focus was getting more reach and engagement. Here is what ‘working’ looked like to me in week two: impressions going up. Likes climbing. A comment section with a pulse.

Being a marketer for 5 years, I know better than to trust that. I tell people that vanity metrics are the cheapest signal on the platform. And yet, it is a certain kind of cheap thrill when you see the impressions rising and the likes coming in. There is a quiet pull to read it as proof that you are doing something right. 

I felt the pull. I am not above the pull. Nobody watching a number go up in real time is above the pull.

So when the number started going down, I did the exact thing I warn clients against. I started chasing it back. More hooks. More experiments. More of whatever might wake the algorithm up.

It is no secret that I use AI to write his posts. To use it effectively you have to ensure that AI understands your target audience and the way you naturally write.

Was THIS turning out to be the problem?

I don’t think so. This exact playbook seemed to be working for other clients. I just didn’t seem to understand why it wasn’t working for him. 

It wasn’t like his industry (as a whole) was not posting on LinkedIn, but the people in his domain who got the most engagement were those who were training other young aspirants to become adept at the software. 

(Btw small segue, if you want to get AI to help you write better on LinkedIn or for your newsletter. This is the 4-part system I use with my clients when it comes to writing in their voice and being a better ghostwriter for their brand. And I am giving it away for FREE —> View it here.)

LinkedIn has changed its algorithm 1530937 times in the last 6 months. Ughh sooo frustrating. The frustration of getting nowhere finally sent me looking for help. I joined Matt Barker's community, ostensibly to get better at writing for LinkedIn. I asked for help within the community on this particular topic. 

Matt's answer was almost annoyingly simple. LinkedIn isn't and shouldn't be a popularity contest. Focus on the prize, he said. Which in my client’s case is leads and conversations.

I know this stuff. I have said versions of that exact sentence to other people, with confidence, while being paid for it. But I needed the reminder, and it stung that I did. I was treating the falling like-count as the problem to solve, when there were clearly bigger fish to fry. There is something slightly absurd about auditing your own work the way you would audit a client's: you see the gap clearly, and the gap is yours.

When someone hires you to build their personal brand, they usually start with a pilot. They expect to see results in four weeks. Four weeks.

Brand-building does not happen in four weeks, but the invoice, the check-in call and the dashboard tracking the metrics do. That pressure compels you to reach for the thing that produces visible motion fast. Which is almost always a vanity metric.

The timeline, the pressure to deliver and the expectations are bound to make you deviate from your own beliefs. When you have to deliver in 4-6 weeks you are forced to pull out magical vanity metrics no matter how pointless they are.

I eventually realized that the actual prize is not the number of likes and comments but rather the right person reading. So here is what I track now, instead of glancing at the like-count:

Unfortunately, we couldn’t build on the breakout post of 18,000 impressions, because he wasn’t comfortable pushing his positioning and content pillars in that direction. 

Additionally, LinkedIn changed its rules halfway through. And it will continue to do so. This experience made me realize there is no universal formula for building a personal brand. There is a set of decent principles and a thousand variables you do not control, and anyone selling you the formula is very cleverly twisting an unpleasant truth.

That is not the answer a personal-branding expert is supposed to give. It does not convert. However, it is the most honest thing I can say after doing this for a while.

Still no booked calls for him. No real conversations yet. A few follows from the right kind of people, which is either the first sign of the slow thing finally working, or me reading tea leaves because I want it to be.

I genuinely cannot tell yet. I'll report back when I can.