The feed hasn't collapsed. Attention has. Here's what's replacing it — and what that means for your pipeline.
Marius Brits made a point this week that more B2B marketers and founders need to sit with.
People have been stopping him at events to say they saw his posts, that the content landed, that it made them think. But when he looked at the posts themselves, there was almost no public signal. No likes. No comments. No visible indication that the content had registered at all.
So he ran a test. He dropped an obviously AI-sounding sentence into a post. Within minutes, people messaged him privately asking what had happened. Which tells you everything you need to know: they were paying attention the whole time. They just were not engaging in a way the platform could count.
That is the part of LinkedIn most teams still underestimate.
The platform does not distribute content based on quiet agreement. It distributes content based on visible engagement: comments, likes, saves, reposts. If those signals do not appear early, reach stalls. The post gets buried. And the content that may have been exactly right for the right audience never gets the chance to travel.
This is not really a conversation about LinkedIn hacks. It is a conversation about distribution mechanics.
A large share of LinkedIn users are silent consumers. They read closely. They follow people consistently. They absorb ideas. They form opinions. They may even make decisions based on what they see. But they do it without leaving a trace the algorithm can use. From the platform’s point of view, that silence looks a lot like indifference.
That creates a real operating problem for B2B brands. You can publish thoughtful, well-positioned content aimed at the right ICP and still watch it underperform publicly. Not because the message is wrong, and not because the audience is irrelevant, but because the people you most want to reach are often the least likely to signal their interest in public.
I see this with clients repeatedly. The content is strong. The targeting is right. The point of view is clear. But performance gets judged through the narrow lens of visible interaction, which means the 10% of people willing to engage publicly shape distribution for the 90% who are only observing. That is not just a social media quirk. It changes how thought leadership compounds, how brand familiarity builds, and ultimately how pipeline gets influenced.
So yes, if a post makes you think, it is worth engaging with it. A like takes a second. A comment takes half a minute. But that small action does more than flatter the author. It affects whether the next relevant buyer, founder, or operator sees it at all.
Credit to Marius for calling it out so clearly. This is not about ego. It is about understanding how the system works.
90% of users on LinkedIn are silent consumers.
If you made it this far, we probably share a bias: that marketing is a craft with numbers attached, not a brand project with money attached. If you want to pressure-test that bias against a real business — yours — I offer a free 30-minute consultation. No slides.
Pressure-test this on your business.
Free 30-min consultation. No slides.