LinkedIn’s Quietly Changed the Rules. Have You Met 360Brew?
By Sanem Horridge, Digital Manager, Attract & Engage
Sanem leads digital delivery at A&E, working across SEO, PPC and paid LinkedIn for industrial and infrastructure clients across Essex and East London.
If your LinkedIn posts have been getting less traction lately, it’s probably not you. LinkedIn’s got a lot better at telling the difference between a post that’s genuinely useful and one that’s just dressed up to look that way.
So what’s actually changed?
For years, LinkedIn worked a bit like a tick-box exercise. It looked for the right keywords, checked you’d used a few hashtags, noted what time you posted and how quickly the first likes came in, and handed out reach accordingly. Once people worked that out, they gamed it, hence all the engagement pods and hashtag stuffing you’ve probably rolled your eyes at.
That’s gone now. LinkedIn’s replaced it with a single AI system called 360Brew, built in-house, and it works completely differently. Instead of counting things, it reads them. It looks at your whole profile, what you’ve posted before, who you’re connected to, and tries to work out what you’re actually good at and who’d genuinely want to hear from you. Then it checks whatever you post against that picture.
There’s been some analysis floating around suggesting reach has dropped sharply over the past year, video especially. We’d take any single figure with a pinch of salt, LinkedIn doesn’t publish this stuff itself, so different studies come up with different numbers. But everyone we’ve spoken to and every account we look after has noticed the same thing: reach is down, and it’s down most on the stuff that doesn’t have much to say.
Why this matters more if you’re in construction, manufacturing or energy
If your customers take months to decide anything, this isn’t just a LinkedIn creator problem. Most B2B buyers do a lot of their homework before they ever pick up the phone to a salesperson, often well over 80% of them, according to LinkedIn’s own research. They’re forming a view of who’s worth trusting long before a tender or an enquiry ever lands.
What 360Brew’s really doing is rewarding people who actually know their stuff and quietly punishing everyone else. That matters a lot if most of your future customers are still in the “just looking” stage, which in your world, they usually are.
What gets you noticed now
- Saves matter more than likes. If someone saves your post, that’s worth roughly five likes in LinkedIn’s eyes, because it means they thought it was worth coming back to.
- A few good comments beat loads of empty ones. Ten “great post!” replies won’t do much. One person leaving a proper thought or asking a real question does a lot more.
- Slow and steady wins. A post that keeps picking up interest over a couple of days now does better than one that gets a rush of likes in the first hour. A fast spike looks a bit staged. A slow build looks real, because it is.
The bit most people get wrong
LinkedIn reads your headline and your About section, works out what you’re supposedly an expert in, then checks that against what you actually post.
Say a Commercial Director’s headline says “Driving Growth in Renewable Energy,” but their last ten posts are a mix of shared news articles, a photo from a conference and the odd motivational quote. LinkedIn can’t work out what that person’s really about, so it stops bothering to show their posts to the people who might actually care.
The fix isn’t complicated, just hard to keep to. Pick two or three things you genuinely want to be known for, make sure they’re reflected in your headline and About section, and keep most of what you post within that.
Why people beat pages
This is good news if you post under your own name and less good news if your business relies mainly on its company page. A person can hold a clear, consistent point of view in a way a company page usually can’t, and personal profiles tend to get more reach than pages anyway.
So if your company page has been carrying most of your LinkedIn presence, the answer probably isn’t posting more from the page. It’s getting your senior people posting under their own names, with proper time and support to do it well.
A few myths worth putting to bed
- Video isn’t finished. The drop is about people not watching to the end, not a penalty on video itself.
- Posting every day won’t fix this. One decent, on-topic post a week beats seven that don’t say much. Staying on topic matters far more than how often you post.
- Hiding your link in the first comment doesn’t work anymore. LinkedIn’s caught up with that trick too. If a link’s genuinely worth including, put it in the post and accept you might get a bit less reach for it.
Where does that leave you?
None of this really changes what always worked in B2B: turning up regularly with something worth saying, well before anyone’s ready to buy. 360Brew’s just made that the only thing that works, rather than one option among several.
We saw this pattern play out before 360Brew was even a thing. With Ground Control, we built Green Gains, a platform sharing honest, useful thinking on biodiversity and natural capital for landowners, councils and developers. That familiarity built trust and shortened conversations long before any tender was put out. Different mechanism, same underlying idea LinkedIn’s now enforcing its algorithm: say something you genuinely know, keep saying it, to the people who’ll need to hear it before they’re ready to buy.
Worth five minutes of your time: have a look at your last ten posts next to your headline and About section. If they don’t sit together comfortably, that’s probably where your reach has gone. Happy to take a look with you if that’d help.
