Why Your LinkedIn Connections Might Not Be Yours—and What To Do About It

I told you so.

I’ve been writing about human networking for a long time. And this week, Richard van der Blom dropped a newsletter that basically confirmed everything I’ve been saying.

Richard has a great newsletter (RVDB Insights) and he’s a credible voice on LinkedIn, someone who’s been helping people drive commercial results on the platform for years. I subscribe to his newsletter and I agree with a lot of his stuff, even if I don’t always agree with the focus on LinkedIn. But this particular issue? He nailed it.

Here’s the thing I need you to hear: LinkedIn is not your friend. Facebook is not your friend. These are platforms you do not own. These are algorithms that change whenever the company decides they should. These are sites dedicated to doing one thing and one thing only: monetizing your presence online to sell ads.

Below, in bold, are three of Richard’s points from his blog and my thoughts:

Stop Optimizing for the Algorithm. Start Optimizing for the Human.

Richard’s first point is that LinkedIn’s new system is designed to surface content to people who don’t follow you yet. The algorithm got smarter, which means shortcut content got cheaper. Generic value posts won’t cut it anymore.

I agree with the principle. But here’s where I diverge: don’t just optimize for the human on LinkedIn. Do it in your real life with real people and in fact, prioritize that above everything else.

Make sure you are maintaining the fields that you own. In Can I Borrow Your Car we talk about the CPR system: Cultivate, Plant, Reap. The whole framework is built on the idea that you control your own pipeline and that of your company. The challenge with investing your hopes and dreams on platforms you do not own is exactly that. You don’t own them. They can change. They can be taken away.

I just talked to somebody the other day who lost complete access to LinkedIn because they were hacked. They have no way of getting it back. Think about that for a second.

You Don’t Own Your Network. You Never Did.

Richard’s second point is that the relationship layer of LinkedIn, the thing that made it different from every other platform, is being deprioritized in favor of topical relevance. Your connections are increasingly invisible to you, and you to them.

I’d go further. LinkedIn never guaranteed you access to your network. They exploited your network to drive revenue for themselves, and gave you, in some cases, an authentic ability to have your connections see what you were sharing. But so many strategies on LinkedIn are built around this completely false concept that you own the platform and you own your network.

You don’t. You’re renting it. And you’re renting it with no rights whatsoever.

Do not, online or in person, let someone else own your relationships. Richard’s point is you need to be actively engaged, and this is something I’ve talked about many times. Tim Hughes and Adam Gray have done great work on this with DLA Ignite, and Tim’s book Social Selling makes the case clearly: if you’re passive and expecting these platforms to do the work for you, you are going to fail.

You either need to pay for ad placement (which, by the way, pretty much guarantees reach), or you need to be actively networking with people on purpose. That means doing things they can’t screen out: commenting on your prospects’ posts, jumping into replies, starting real conversations.

Build Your Audience Somewhere LinkedIn Can’t Touch

Richard says to build your audience somewhere LinkedIn can’t take it away. Email. Community. Substack. YouTube. I find it ironic that he mentions other platforms can’t take it away, because of course they can’t. LinkedIn doesn’t own them.

But here’s the bigger point and are you ready?

You need to be doing things that further connect you to people who already know you. So much of where we fail as advisors is when we don’t create strategies that give us control over communicating with the best referral sources that have ever existed: our current clients.

The Relationship Audit

The last thing Richard recommends is a relationship audit: scheduling thirty minutes every Monday to get on LinkedIn and actively, purposely engage with the people who matter most to you.

This is something I’ve done informally for years and formally ever since taking the DLA Ignite course on social selling. The principle is simple: if you want results from LinkedIn or any other platform, you need to directly speak to the other human beings there. You need to be in a relationship with them. Not broadcasting at them. In a relationship.

Am I Saying You Should Leave LinkedIn?

Absolutely not.

LinkedIn is becoming one of the greatest social vetting tools I’ve ever seen. It’s increasingly being used by AI (which is somewhat terrifying) to determine who’s credible and who isn’t. So ironically, posting and being active on LinkedIn is potentially an insurance policy against being marginalized by AI recommendations down the road.

I’ve also noticed that whenever I connect with people live, whether that’s webinars or meetings, I almost always see profile visits as a direct result. LinkedIn has real value. The mistake is treating it like something you own.

So What Do You Actually Do?

First, spend more than thirty minutes a week on your relationships. I recommend at least an hour, and not on freaking LinkedIn. Spend it looking at your personal, live network. Update yourself: what did you do last week, what are you going to do this week, who do you need to speak to, how are you going to reach them.

And I know this is sacrilegious, but maybe instead of listening to another podcast or another book on Audible, you spend some of that time while you’re driving or hanging out actually talking to real people. Call your clients. Check in. See what’s going on in their lives. One of the easiest ways to find potential referrals is to ask people in your network what they’re working on. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.

Don’t rent your success. Don’t rent your ability to generate what actually counts, which is sales. If you believe in authentic relationships where you and other human beings are adding value for each other in non-transactional ways, then you need to own your sales process. Own your marketing. Stop handing the keys to someone else’s platform.

Richard van der Blom’s full newsletter:

The Algorithm Got Smarter, So Why Is Your Reach Dying? - RVDB Insights