It’s been a while since the last update. Back at day 170, I said I was well and truly in the swing of things, knocking out a week of posts in about an hour, and that LinkedIn had led to “only a sprinkle of business opportunities.”
So I figured it was time to pull the numbers and see what actually happened over the past year.
What’s happened since day 170
- I kept roughly the same 3 types of posts: Meta ad news, tips and tutorials on Meta ads, and build-in-public stuff about what’s going on with my business. The occasional case study too, but not many.
- Oct to Dec 2025 was my best stretch. About 5-6k impressions a month and 70-120 new followers a month.
- Then from around mid-January to late May 2026, I basically stopped. Burn out and I was unwell. You can see it pretty clearly in the graph above – a flatline in impressions.
- I picked it back up around June and have been posting on and off since.
Return on effort
Over the last 12 months (Sep 2025 to Sep 2026):
- ~40,600 impressions
- ~12,800 people reached
- ~520 new followers (1,493 total)
- Engagement rate around 3-4.5% in the months I was consistent
Those are the vanity numbers.
The part I was more curious about was whether any of it turned into actual work. So I analyzed my CRM and emails to traced where each lead came from this year for LinkedIn and found out:
- I got ~60 clicks to my websites (47 to this blog, 12 to Hungry Bear). Probably undercounted, since the LinkedIn app tends to hide where traffic comes from, but even if you doubled it, it’s microscopic.
- 7 leads that started on LinkedIn.
- 3 of those turned into paid work.
These all came through DMs and conversations that started on LinkedIn itself. Looking back, this is pretty expected since I rarely plugged my website directly.
Takeaways on post types
Meta ad news
- By far the most reach. My top 3 posts by impressions were all news: 3.1k, 2.5k and 1.6k.
- But almost nobody commented. 0-3 comments on posts seen by thousands of people tho…
- The people seeing them also looked more like other ad people (folks doing Meta, Google, and big agencies) than potential clients. Which makes sense, but isn’t useful reach.
Tips and tutorial posts
- The weakest on both reach and engagement! A case study where cold lead costs dropped ~91% got about 300 views.
Build in public / journey posts
- These actually get THE highest engagement rates of any posts. Usually 5-6% plus. The day 170 post was my 2nd most engaged post of the year.
Asking my network a genuine question
- One example, my post asking what newsletters are actually for these days, got 39 comments. More than anything else by a mile. I have a feeling there’s something to this because LinkedIn wants conversation – not necessarily self promotion.
- Tacking “anyone else seeing/doing/thinking about this?” onto the end of news post or other tip/tutorials didn’t have much effect. I think the difference is that it has to be a real question I’m actually stuck on where my friends jump in to help.
Memes
- Pretty low effort, surprisingly solid engagement.
PDF / carousel posts
- I made some tehcnical news. updates and recently “trying something new…” (a heavy personal brand style post) all landed around 500 views.
- The humblebrag one did best on engagement: 26 engagements and 6 comments, one of my better rates lately.
Processes
- Previously I used Google Keep to make idea bank: I ended up dropping it. Recently I’ve just riffered of things I see on Twitter and online communities.
- Connecting instead of doom-scrolling: I dropped this too, and I suspect it cost me. June 2026 got about the same reach as October 2025 (~5.8k vs ~5.7k impressions) but only about half the new followers (66 vs 124). I can’t prove it, but my guess is that reach without new connections doesn’t grow much.
- Commenting instead of DMing: Just because I’m lazy…
Where to from here?
Honestly, I’m not sure what direction I take LinkedIn from here.
The thing that stands out most is how vulnerable it was to me taking breaks. Stop posting and you basically never existed on the platform, as you can see in the graph at the beginning.
Meanwhile, YouTube has just chugged along in the background. When I was burned out or sick, there was almost no noticeable difference.
So I’m leaning towards spending the time on YouTube instead, where the work seems to keep working even when I can’t.
But if so, LinkedIn will probably stay the a place to have conversations and stay visible to my existing network, and plug a link or two.
I’m open to being wrong here, though. If you’ve found something similar (or the opposite) with LinkedIn vs YouTube, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
See you in the next update 🫡.