The 93% Growth Stall

Joeri Billast 0:00

93% of company pages on LinkedIn didn't grow last year. Not grew slowly, didn't grow at all. Most marketers blame the algorithm. I think the algorithm is innocent. That number comes from a new playbook by Metricool and Favikon, and there is a personal reason it caught my attention.

Why The Algorithm Isn’t Guilty

Joeri Billast 0:34

Before it was published, the Metricool team reached out. They asked if they could feature me as one of their brand ambassadors. I said yes. And full transparency, Metricool is also a sponsor of this podcast. Here is why I'm telling you this up front. The interesting part is not that I am in the report. It's why. That mansion was not built by one campaign or one post, it was built through years of conversations and trust. Which is quite literally what the entire report is about.

People Outperform Company Pages

Joeri Billast 1:26

Now this if this sounds like a LinkedIn episode, it is not, it's about what AI is changing in marketing. LinkedIn just happens to be the first place we can measure it. If you remember one thing from today, make it this. Marketing used to have a distribution problem. AI solved that. Now marketing has a belief problem, and belief travels through people, not pages. Let me show you the evidence. Back to that ninety-three percent. Why are pages stalling? So in the same report I read that personal profiles get roughly the same impressions as company pages, but 63% more engagement. So the gap is not rich. It's what people do when they see the content. Check your own behavior. When did you last comment on a corporate announcement? But you probably replied to a founder this week, an employee, someone with a face and an opinion. People start conversations, company pages distribute them. Now the second shift.

The Rise Of Quiet Engagement

Joeri Billast 3:05

And this connects from an earlier episode. A while ago I asked what happens when the like button dies. Well here is the data. Likes down, comments down, shares down, and yet engagement is up almost fourteen percent. Because clicks are rising. Engagement didn't didn't disappear. It went underground. Your buyers are reading, clicking, deciding silently. So here is the first takeaway. Stop judging your LinkedIn by visible applause. The buyer is watching quietly, and the quiet buyer trusts people, not logos. So people beat pages and the audience went quiet. The obvious question is why is this happening now?

AI Shifts Marketing To Belief

Joeri Billast 4:09

One word AI. For decades marketing and a distribution problem, creating content was expensive, publishing consistently was hard. Whoever could publish the most won. AI moved at bottleneck, every company can now publish at scale. So the scarcity moved. When everyone can publish, being believed becomes the advantage. And nobody has a relationship with the logo. We trust faces, voices, track records. When I gave my Tedx talk and in my book The Future CMO, I argued that trust would become the scarcest asset in the AI era. Now, reading this report, something hits me. We are no longer predicting that shift, we are starting to measure it. And that's not a weakness of trust. The fact that it can be automated is exactly what makes it valuable. Second takeaway. Your competitors can copy your content by tomorrow morning, but they cannot copy who vouches for you. Okay.

Where Brands Actually Get Trust

Joeri Billast 5:38

If belief is the asset, where does a brand actually get it? Not from the page, from the people around the page. The report offers a model alike, three circles of growth employees, customers and partners, external creators. And the counterintuitive part is built inward first. Most brands skip straight to the influencers while their most underused channel is already on payroll. Your employees' combined networks usually exceed your pages reach with far more trust attached. How to activate them? Don't script them. Scripted posts sound hollow. But give them topics, freedom and one habit. And every post with a question. The data shows that posts with a question get about seventy-seven percent more comments. So one sentence is a measurable difference. The second circle customers and partners who become ongoing advocates, not one of the else. That's a section of the report I ended up in. Long term relationship, not a transaction. Third circle external creators, but only after the first two. Because a creator campaign on top of an empty trust layer doesn't land. One last thing before you rush off to create, more content is isn't a strategy. Better design content is.

Better Content Design And Closing

Joeri Billast 9:56

Well worth your time. Thank you, Metricool, for supporting the show. If you like this episode, be sure to share this with people around you, other founders, marketers, people that you know are active on LinkedIn. If you are not yet following the show, well, this is a good moment to do this. Click the subscribe button. And I will see you back next time.