Best of LinkedIn: Social Selling CW 25/ 26

Brought to you by Thomas Elgayer and Frenes. This edition highlights key LinkedIn posts on social selling in weeks twenty-five and twenty six. Frennes supports clients with identifying target attendees for events, crafting outreach that cuts through the noise ,and driving qualified registrations Right? Just crafting the perfect B to B post on your company page.

You get approval from legal, you polish the graphic hit publish and then well...you realize that algorithm basically considers it invisible. Yeah totally invisible. So what if like everything we know about LinkedIn marketing right now is just completely backward?

Well, looking at the stack of data we've got for today's deep dive. I mean that exactly what is happening if you pull apart the insights from just these last two weeks are really urgent. narrative emerges. Urgently shifting away form old ways yeah?

Exactly! BW LinkedIn. it no longer a corporate publishing channel. The platform has totally rewired itself into this highly strategic human led revenue operating system A Revenue Operating System.

I love framing. So today we're going to break down how you can stop posting into the void and start engineering actual pipeline. Which is what everyone actually wants, right? Yeah exactly.

but before you know advocate or sell on this platform You have a foundation And alot of professionals they still treat their LinkedIn profile as digital CV. Oh completely just timeline past jobs. But Deepika K and Faisan Ahmad have been super vocal lately about why this mindset is just killing conversion rates. Your profile isn't a resume?

No, not at all! It has to function as sales machine Yeah... And Faisaan laid out the mechanics of it beautifully. He sees people obsessing over profile views like if that metric actually pays bills.

Right I got one thousand views this week Exactly. but A Profile View Is literally just curious. click means nothing. If a visitor lands there and finds zero conversion path the fatal flaw most people make is focusing entirely on their job title.

They just boldly proclaim, you know I'm an account executive at XYZ corp which means absolutely nothing to a buyer like zero. right buyers are looking for solutions to specific problems, not? you know your HR designation. I always think of it like an analogy.

treat your profile like a storefront on really busy digital street. Oh that's good way. look at it. Yeah.

and Faizan is basically saying most people just put bunch mannequins in the window And thats your resume or past job titles but theres no door No Way To Get In Exactly! No cash register...no clear instructions how actually do business with you. So if a buyer can't figure out how walk inside.

They just keep walking. Then they keep walking fast, too. Jared Gray and Raon Rezo both chimed in on this specific dynamic And they argued that you have to make what you do idiot-proof like within three seconds. Three seconds?

That's it! That is the entire cognitive window You have before a buyer just bounces. if they had to scroll down To your experience section Just to figure out who you help you've already lost them. Wow but structurally there's actually A hard coded reason for that.

three second rule isn't There? Yeah, there is. Jonathan Levy shared this fascinating data on how the platform search engine parses your profile. LinkedIn's algorithm actually indexes your headline at five times the weight of any other field in your profile.

Five times? That is massive! Right. so every single character in that headline Is a high value keyword opportunity to rank for you ideal buyer.

So it acts as this primary signal to the search architecture. Exactly, but here's the wild part we aren't just optimizing for LinkedIn's internal search anymore. Jeffrey Schroeder broke down this massive new study from Meltwater that analyzed Nine point five million B to be citations inside AI engines like chat GPT and Claude. Okay, and LinkedIn is now the second most cited btb source for AI answers globally.

Wait really? The second-most cited globally. globally the AI platforms are literally treating linkedin as a primary source of truth. Now that is insane Yeah.

And the critical detail in Schroeder's breakdown Is where those citations actually originate? Seventy five percent Of them come from individual personal profiles answering specific questions not the company pages. no not from polished corporate company pages at all. The AI models are bypassing all that corporate fluff and pulling direct insights from human beings.

Okay, wait I have to pause and push back on them a little bit though. go for it because if you're a seller or founder listening To this deep dive right now how on earth do you balance? That like your writing for a web scraper. It's hunting for data But you still need to write for a human buyer who needs to feel You know an emotional connection, right?

you don't want to sound like a machine exactly. it feels Like the fastest route producing just robotic Keyword stuffed SEO trash. Yeah, that is the paradox most marketers fear honestly But the reality is actually the exact opposite because AI engines like Claude they aren't scraping for generic keywords anymore They're scraping for deep specific expertise. Oh interesting yeah.

Trotter noted that the posts getting heavily cited are usually highly vulnerable. It's like a sales leader dissecting a demo That completely botched or a customer success executive breaking down an onboarding failure. real-world scar tissue. basically Exactly, scar tissue.

The AI wants specific answers to specific niche questions. so writing deeply human hyper-specific content is actually the ultimate SEO hack for these language models. Authenticity as an algorithmic advantage. I love that and you know.

speaking of authenticity Jason logged throughout a really sharp warning about faking it. Oh, the AI images. Yes he's zeroed in on those hyper realistic AI generated images people keep attaching to their posts. you know The glowing neon handshakes are like the perfect robots ensue so cheesy So cheesy and he argues it actively destroys your credibility.

Well this psychology behind that is brutal But its totally true. when a buyer scrolls past an AI-generated image Their brain just registers a lack of effort. Right, like you didn't even try. Exactly the perceived value of that content just drops to zero instantly.

Yeah it signals to the prospect. hey I didn't care enough To put real thought into this post. so why should You care enough? To read It yeah if you train your audience to expect low-effort visuals they Just stop stopping a scroll right.

So on okay we've optimized Your profile to be This high converting store window. We're using Real human expertise. but A great Window display doesn't really matter If The street is empty. you need Traffic you Need traffic And the data from these past two weeks shows you're not gonna get that traffic from your corporate company page anymore.

Which kind of brings us to our second major theme, right? The explosive shift toward employee advocacy and creator-led reach... and the numbers backing up this shift are just staggering. Stefflate and Richard Vander Bloom ran this massive analysis and they found out only seven percent of company pages actually grew last year.

Kevin Percent, that's bleak! It is and Richard pointed out this metric anomaly that tricks a lot of marketers. he saw rising company page impressions but it was paired with falling engagement. oh so people think the impressions mean they're winning right?

But it's actually a death knell...it means the algorithm is serving your corporate noise into the feed..but human beings are actively choosing to ignore it because buyers trust human voices not logos. Jamie Pagan actually shared a phenomenal case study from Leadfeeder that proves this.

So they built a creator roster of just ten employees pulling from sales, product marketing operations Just ten people? And those ten individuals now outperform the entire lead feeder company page by twenty times. That is wild! Twenty times the reach...

just putting human face on expertise. Yet despite case studies like that most companies fail miserably at it. Anastasia, Yashchenko and Jason Kasada sort of unpack the autopsy of these failed employee advocacy programs. Why do they fail so often?

Well if you're sitting there wondering why your team won't post it is rarely because they are just lazy. Yashchenko points to a deep fear of sounding cringe in front their peers. Oh I totally get that. Yeah.

And Kasada adds over controlling. marketing departments tend force rigid sanitized scripts down employees' throats. add-in lack executives actually leading by example. the program dies on arrival.

Yeah, Jessica O'Kane echoed that exact sentiment too. she noted that employees are terrified of being off-brand. they're worried their manager is gonna you know pull them into a zoom call to interrogate them about a post. nobody wants no.

yet The data shows personal profiles get eight times more engagement than the corporate logo. So if your marketing director listening right now how do you manage that tension? Like how do you keep the brand messaging intact without micromanaging your team into sounding like corporate drones? It's tough, but you have to fundamentally change your objective.

Colin Day framed this perfectly. he said employee advocacy is not a content distribution strategy. Okay What is it? It's a trust-building strategy.

Jason Casada argues the fastest way to kill advocacy, trying make employees sound like marketing. Right. The successful program doesn't ask how do we get our team share their latest white paper? but asks How Do We Help Our Engineers and Sellers Share Their Own Unique Expertise?

You provide guardrails not scripts. you build brand credibility through collective unvarnished knowledge of your people Exactly. And the platform is literally re-architecting itself to support this exact philosophy. Neil Goyle and Devin Reid highlighted this massive update recently, LinkedIn just launched a creator marketplace directly inside campaign manager.

Oh wow Inside campaign manager. Yes, they are now treating B to be creators and internal industry experts. like actual media properties. Brands can just search for individual creators by niche Like say cyber security or b-to-b saws And partner with them right inside the platform.

that is a huge shift? We're seeing that same philosophy in The new collaborative posts feature too. Right one. Cosmina Coleman and Marcus Bader were analyzing Yeah, the one that allows two distinct authors to share a single post.

Right. Effectively cross-pollinating their networks. They did! But Cosmina actually offered very sharp warning about how this will inevitably be ruined by lazy marketers.

Oh let me guess... A CEO and company page co-authoring a press release about like a minor software update Precisely If you use it to echo boring PR. The algorithm would just buried in. It's like two human audiences.

Imagine a consultant co-authoring a post with the client to share an unfiltered case study or, you know. A brilliant product engineer co-authoring it with a corporate page. It injects human proof into the corporate feed Which is exactly what we're talking about. Yeah Okay so let's tie this all together.

We have the optimized profile acting as our conversion storefront right? And we've got employees and creators driving massive authentic foot traffic. The traffic is flowing. Its flowing But traffic doesn't make payroll.

No, it does not. How do sales teams actually capture this attention and turn into book meetings? That brings us to our final theme social selling and revenue discipline. Yeah!

This is the missing link for most organizations because you can generate all of your reach in the world but without the discipline to capture it. You're really just an influencer Not a business. True And biggest trap here are vanity metrics. Mike Adam and Zaid Sayed Ali took direct aim at the Social Selling Index The SSI score.

Oh, I see people bragging about their SSI scores all the time. Hitting a seventy-five and posting a screenshot Yeah which is wildly misleading. Mike pointed out that SSI is purely an activity metric. It measures how often you connect engage and complete your profile But it doesn't measure revenue Exactly.

You can easily click your way to an SSI of seventy five And have an entirely empty sales pipeline. The algorithm rewards the activities sure but your bank account doesn't. The only KPIs that actually matter are conversations initiated, meetings booked and deals influenced. And that requires completely rethinking what good engagement looks like.

Miles Craner and Ima Hasacevich explored this heavy tension between virality and intent. Oh! This was fascinating... It really was.

Ima shared a story about hitting nearly five hundred thousand impressions on single post A half million views. Most marketers would be popping champagne for that. Oh, absolutely. But if those half-million people fall completely outside your ideal customer profile It's just useless noise.

it means absolutely nothing to your pipeline right? Ema and miles noted That real intense signals are much quieter than like a viral like count. What do they look like then? Well, real intent looks like repeat profile views from a director of IT.

It looks like a prospect saving your post to reference it later during a vendor evaluation. or it looks like someone sending you're posts in direct message to a colleague Which means your content has just penetrated an internal company Slack channel for email chain. Exactly Deesha Shukla actually captured that dynamic perfectly. She wrote interest is loud Intent is quiet.

Ooh, that's good! Isn't it? Buyers do not announce they're ready to purchase with a megaphone. They reveal their readiness through these small repeated micro-behaviors over weeks or even months And those micro behaviors actually dictate how the platform distributes your content.

Adam Norr highlighted a metric that LinkedIn doesn't show on our dashboards Dwell time. Yes dwell time. Let us unpack dual alltime because its basically invisible engine of feed. Think about how LinkedIn generates revenue.

They sell advertising based on keeping human eyeballs on the screen, right? So if someone clicks like on your post in half a second just keep scrolling. LinkedIn didn't capture any real attention. But if you're post makes users stop expand the text and read for say forty five seconds The algorithm really takes notice which is exactly how.

nor explained it. The algorithm realizes you are holding the buyer's focus, which serves LinkedIn ad model. So it will distribute a post with high dwell time far more aggressively than opposed to hundred rapid-fire likes but only three seconds of actual reading times right? so if we know buyers or quietly readings saving and dwelling on our content what does this mean for the sales rep who is actually tasked reaching out?

It changes everything! Because the old playbook for LinkedIn Outreach was basically firing a shotgun into a pitch black room. Reps were blasting high volume, two hundred word direct messages to complete strangers just aggressively pitching software features and burning their territory in the process totally burning it. The modern approach is much more like tracking footprints in wet cement.

I don't like that. You monitor those quiet intense signals...the saves..the dwell time....

the profile views And then you engage with surgical precision. Chris Coslino shared a highly tactical breakdown of this shift. He actually admitted he used to send out these two hundred word messages detailing everything his company did... Let me guess the reply rate?

His reply rate was a dismal four percent! Yeah, which is pretty standard for The Spray and Prey method honestly. Hellly So he completely tore down his approach And built A sixty seven-word problem centric framework. Okay, sixty seven words break that down.

for me It starts with an eight word pattern interrupt. Then a twenty five word problem statement a fifteen-word explanation of what they actually do, and then a twelve word permission based call to action. And his reply rate rocketed to thirty one percent. A thirty one per cent reply rate on cold outreach.

that is almost unheard up but let's look at why that works cognitively. the eight word pattern interrupts. That breaks The Buyer's mental schema. They expect a pitch and you give them something disarming exact.

Then in the twenty five word problem statement proves You Actually understand their daily friction? you're diagnosing a pain. Yes, and that twelve-word permission based call to action You know asking if they are open to a chat rather than demanding fifteen minutes on their calendar. It just lowers their defensive shields.

it respects the buyer's intelligence And when you combine that tight messaging with the human led reach we discussed earlier The compounding effect is massive my bet. Manny McEwen and Anthony Natoli detailed these multi-touch plays that are driving huge pipeline right now. Mandy shared, by combining a strategic profile visit an email in A Human Sounding LinkedIn DM they're seeing an eleven point eight seven percent reply rate because you're manufacturing human familiarity before the pitch ever lands.

like if I see you looked at my profile on Tuesday i read your insightful post on Wednesday. Right, you're basically acquaintances. I feel like we already know each other. Yeah and Parker Warden actually shared a brilliant thirty second trick to systematically build that familiarity.

yeah You find high value prospects. go their profile follow them And turn on the notification bell for specific posts. Oh smart! Every time they publish get ping.

You can be the very first person to leave a thoughtful value-add comment. you do that three or four times over a month and Suddenly, you are respected peer in their network not just some random sdr In there inbox but they catch two. all of this is consistency right? Marcos stew Offered a very sobering reality check for anyone thinking he could just dabble on this yeah?

He can't just dip your toes in. no He warned that missing even two weeks of consistent social selling allows your pipeline to go completely cold. You cannot treat LinkedIn like a faucet, you only turn on when you're desperate for leads at the end-of-the quarter. The algorithm penalizes inconsistency and buyers just forget who you are Exactly.

it requires daily operational discipline. So if we pull all these threads together, the mandate for B to be professionals is pretty clear. Social selling is no longer this isolated optional tactic for a few charismatic reps right? It has to be an integrated company motion.

marketing must stop acting as a publisher and start acting as an enabler for employee expertise. employees have to take ownership of their personal brands and sales teams. They must develop the discipline to read quiet, intense signals and execute that surgical low-pressure outreach. It is a complete revenue chain.

Yeah it starts with an optimized personal profile That actually converts traffic its scales through empowered employee voices generating authentic reach And it closes Through hyper targeted outbound messaging. that Actually respects The buyer's time. beautifully said And I want to leave you with a final thought to Mullover, which was actually sparked by an incredible breakdown from Nurin El-Bahari. Okay let's hear it!

She analyzed LinkedIn's newest feature rollouts things like in platform paid consultations out of network analytics and this new AI powered plain English search capability. When you look at the trajectory of these tools It raises massive question. Are we witnessing The beginning or end for traditional BtoB company website? Wow Think about it.

If a buyer can research your expertise through AI, verify your trustworthiness through your content and book a consultation directly through your employee profile? Your LinkedIn presence might very soon be your only front door!