In January I wrote an essay arguing that the fix for B2B content was more genuine expertise. I stand by the diagnosis. The cure has not aged well.
The diagnosis was that the thought leader title has never been easier to claim or less meaningful to hold. Forty percent of B2B marketers said their biggest challenge was creating content that prompts any action at all. Nearly half the industry publishing into the void, hoping someone somewhere might care (this is still true unfortunately…)
Then I prescribed expert-led content. Involve your founders, your technical leads, your customer success team. Stop letting the marketing department manufacture thought leadership alone. Measure pipeline instead of impressions.
Reasonable. Also the safest possible answer, and wrong within the year. Expertise is exactly what the machine got good at IMITATING.
What Actually Died in 2025
From 2022 to 2024 I ran the LinkedIn for three founders in food and beverage, selling into R&D and innovation teams. I wrote posts for them, designed their angles. I also mapped their personas and wrote the messaging that was supposed to tap into what those personas needed to hear.
Which is why I did not have to read about the shift when it came. I had spent three years learning what a founder's account sounds like when it is working, and then I watched the whole feed stop sounding like that.
Everything started to sound the same. Look the same. Feel the same. The sloppification of the entire platform, post after post about industry movements and category trends, all of it competent and all of it interchangeable. Once everyone started using AI to write, there stopped being any point in talking about generic industry topics.
Which is the part I missed in January. I thought the problem was that companies were publishing without expertise behind it. The actual problem is that expertise stopped being scarce. A model can produce a solid take on the state of AI in product innovation. It cannot produce the meeting where your pilot fell apart.
12 out of 62
I have written 120+ LinkedIn posts this year across three client profiles, and at that volume you stop guessing which drafts will land. The ones that go somewhere are almost always the ones where the person told me something I could not have found anywhere else.
Okay, enough with the riddles. Let me break it down for you, since April I have published 62 posts on my personal LinkedIn profile. Twelve of them led with something that actually happened to me. Not a first-person frame on a general observation, which is a different thing and a much easier thing. Twelve posts that narrated a lived experience and started there.
Those twelve ran 40 percent above my median on impressions. Engagement averaged 2.5 percent against 1.2 percent across everything else I published.
Twelve posts is not a study. I want to be honest about that, because I spent January criticizing people for waving around numbers that flattered them. But I see this pattern across my clients and that tells me that it holds true.
An overview of all the posts I made that were ‘Personal Posts’
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So What Am I Selling?
I went freelance at the start of this year specifically to do this. Help people build a presence on LinkedIn. That was the plan and it is still the plan.
But the thing I now believe works is the thing that is hardest to outsource. Your experience. The stuff a model has no access to because it was not in the room. I tell people their own perspective is the only defensible asset they have left, and then I charge them to write it down for them.
You can build someone a position. You cannot build them a LIFE.
I do not have a clean way out of that. The honest version is that a good ghostwriter is an interviewer first and a writer second, and the writing is the easy half. Whether that is a real distinction or a comfortable one, I am still deciding.
Grow-th Architect is where I (Shreya Vaidya) think out loud about brand-building, positioning, and surviving on LinkedIn. If this resonated, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it.