By Luke Faccini | Founder, Sponge | 27 years in brand strategy | Author, The Humming Team

Six weeks ago I was certain LinkedIn was shadow banning me. I had been engaging with anti-war posts. Anti-genocide posts. Social justice work that mattered to me. Around the same time my own content stopped reaching anyone. The pattern looked obvious. I was being silenced for what I supported.

I was wrong. LinkedIn was not punishing me. It had filed me into the wrong pocket. The pocket it had landed on had nothing to do with my values. It had everything to do with my behaviour.

This is the story of what I actually got wrong, what I have been doing about it, and what I want every founder and seasoned business owner reading this to know about how the platform now decides who sees you.

What LinkedIn Is Actually Doing With Your Posts

LinkedIn does not really run on followers anymore.

It runs on what you talk about. What you scroll past. What you stop on. What you like. All of it teaches the platform what little pocket of meaning you belong to. Then your posts get tested inside that pocket first. Not your follower list.

If the pocket is wrong, your post dies quietly. No notification. No flag. Just zero reach.

Mine was wrong. And the reason it was wrong is the deeper story.

The Bigger Mistake Underneath

The LinkedIn problem was not really a LinkedIn problem.

If you have been on my list for a couple of years, you would have noticed something. I had spent two years posting about what our framework solves. About culture. About impact. About purpose-led storytelling. And all the threads leading out of that work. I posted about it because I know how much good the work does for businesses and the people in them.

But I was missing the customers who actually buy. Because that is not what they are shopping for.

That is the fool’s gold. Marketing to what I knew people needed instead of what they wanted. Selling broccoli when they want chocolate.

Plumber With Leaky Pipes

I teach this for a living.

I preach speaking to real customers. Understanding their buying motivations. Mapping their journey. Aligning to it. It is the foundation of the work we do at Sponge.

I was not doing it.

Plumber with leaky pipes. Baker who doesn’t bake his own bread. The classic founder pattern.

I was advising clients to be relentlessly customer focused. The more detail the better, so we can build strategy that works, because I don’t gamble. Yet for my own marketing, I ignored this and gambled away precious time and energy. That is a hard thing to write down.

Who Sponge Is Actually For

Once I admitted the mistake, the first work was the work I should have been doing.

Refocus on who Sponge actually serves (we had been relentless about it in the past). Founders and seasoned business owners with growing teams. The ones who have recognised they need a rebrand. They do not have all the answers. But they know something is not working.

The pains they actually feel are specific. Sales are slow or they are losing them. The superstars are walking out the door or they have stopped applying. They cannot pull up their own website without feeling embarrassed about what it says about the company they have built.

What they are shopping for is their answer to the relief of these pains. Not a framework. Not a philosophy. Relief from those three pains.

How the Two Mistakes Compounded

Two years of culture and impact content had filed me with the wrong audience. The audience was real. It is a part of who I am. It is just not where our ICP lives.

Every post I wrote for the right audience was landing in front of people who had no interest in it. And here is the painful part. The posts that had actually been working for two years were working because LinkedIn knew exactly where to put them. But the wrong place for me as for business generation.

Real engagement. Wrong engagement. Every successful post made the next one harder to land.

The data was lying to me. The posts that worked were training me to make more of the ones that did not. That was the moment I knew the whole thing had to shift. Another version of the Reality Distortion Field playing out, but this time on me.

There was another layer underneath. Since the October 7 restart of intensities I had been engaging hard with social justice and anti-genocide content. Liking. Commenting. Reposting. Every one of those actions taught LinkedIn something about who to group me with. Not the audience our ICP sits inside. The platform was reading my behaviour and grouping me with people who care about what I care about personally. Which is true. It is just a different group from the one that buys what Sponge does.

And then there is the timing. AI is flooding the world with content. The feed is more competitive than it has ever been. Every post now fights more posts for less space. Which means the cost of being filed in the wrong pocket is higher than it used to be. The platform that used to forgive a mixed-signal account is gone.

LinkedIn Is a Marketing Tool

This is what most founders and seasoned business owners miss.

LinkedIn can be an awesome marketing tool. Yes, it is also a place for ideas and relationships and community. But the work I had been unintentionally doing for two years had been treating it as a creative outlet for the work I am most passionate about. And expecting it to convert. I just needed to drop the right post.

The framework. The expansion of human development inside it. The deeper IP. That is all real and powerful. But it just sits further along the journey for our ICP. They do not shop for that. They shop for what solves the pain they are feeling now. Once they have started working with us, the deeper work meets them where they are.

Two different jobs. I had them confused.

What I Have Been Doing About It

Once I resolved to use it as a marketing tool, the moves were clearer. There are three parts to retraining the algorithm.

What I scroll, dwell on, like, and comment on. Every action teaches the platform.

What I post about. Tighter pillars. Sharper. Less.

Where I engage. Who I comment on. Who I do not.

Each part is uncomfortable in different ways. The first means giving up content I genuinely want to read. The second means saying less about things I care about. The third means not joining conversations I would usually join.

The process I am following lives in a workshop I am thinking about running. More on that at the end.

Why My Content Has Been So Confronting

You will have felt it.

The content I have been sharing the last six weeks has been saltier than usual. Pain-led. That was deliberate. Pain pulls. The truth is, people take action to avoid pain rather than seek pleasure.

But I may have leaned too far into the salt. Because people do not publicly engage with content that can make them look stupid or failing. So content reach gets throttled there too.

The salt has been pulling the right people. But also missing people.

This week I have started rebalancing. Pain still does the work of inspiring action in the right audience. But pure pain stalls engagement.

So the mix shifts. More of the towards pleasure. You can see that in my posts. Our goal is readers feeling inspired. Not just the gap.

This Is a Long Play

Unfortunately, two years of teaching LinkedIn to put me in the wrong pocket does not unwind in six weeks.

One of the biggest confounding pieces only got resolved last week. Which means the right categorizing effectively restarted then. It is like trying to lose the kilos after two years of not training.

Six more weeks before I see it fully working.

I am writing this because I want you to know what you have been watching. The intensity is not a personality change. It is a marketing campaign in flight. With mechanics underneath that most people on LinkedIn do not know exist.

If you are a founder or seasoned business owner who has watched their own LinkedIn content stop reaching the right people, the question to sit with is not what you are posting. It is what you have been teaching the platform about who you are.

What pocket is your behaviour putting you in?

A Workshop, Maybe

I am thinking about running a workshop on this. The whole thing. The shadow ban paranoia. What is actually happening on the platform. The fool’s gold. The plumber with leaky pipes admission. The strategy. How to retrain the algorithm for your own ICP. The saltiness and the rebalance. The slow data.

Hands on. What I am doing. The tools I have built to make the work easy. What I am still figuring out.

If you would be keen to come along, hit reply and tell me yeah hell yeah.

Not selling. Just testing whether there is appetite.

FAQ

Why are my LinkedIn posts not reaching my ideal customers anymore?

It is rarely a content quality problem. LinkedIn now decides who sees your posts based on what it has learned about you over time. Every scroll, every like, every comment teaches the platform what little pocket of meaning you belong to. If your behaviour over years has filed you with one audience and you start writing for a different audience, the platform tests your new content with the old audience first. The post stalls before it reaches the right people. The fix is not better posts. It is retraining the platform.

What is the difference between marketing on LinkedIn and using it as a creative outlet?

A marketing tool serves the audience you are trying to reach. A creative outlet serves the person doing the posting. Most founders confuse the two. They post about what they are most passionate about, what their framework solves, the deeper work they are excited by. That work is real and it matters. It just sits further along the customer journey. The ICP is shopping for what solves the pain they are feeling right now. Marketing on LinkedIn means meeting them at that pain.

How long does it take to retrain the LinkedIn algorithm?

Longer than you think. Years of mixed posting and mixed engagement create deep grooves in how the platform reads you. Six weeks of disciplined work is the start, not the finish. In our case the biggest confounding piece took five weeks to identify and resolve, which means the clean interest training effectively only starts after that point. Plan in months, not weeks. It is closer to losing the kilos after years of not training than it is to a quick fix.

What does it mean to market what people want versus what they need?

It is the difference between speaking to your customer’s stated problem and speaking to the deeper work you know they need to do. Both are valid. Only one earns the conversation. People do not buy what they need. They buy what they want. They want relief from the pain they can feel. They are not yet shopping for the deeper transformation that solves the underlying cause. That work happens once they have started working with you. Until then, meet them at what they are walking toward, not what you wish they were.

How do I know if my brand is the reason my marketing is not working?

You probably already feel it. Sales are harder than they should be. The right people are not applying. You cannot pull up your own website without flinching. These are the symptoms our ICP lives with every day. Most founders try to fix it with marketing tactics or a logo refresh. Neither works because the issue is the gap between what the business is and what the brand is carrying. Ember was built to read that gap. Run Ember as the first move. Decide what to do next from what it shows you.

Before you invest in a redesign, find out what’s actually going on beneath the surface. Ember is 27 years of brand experience distilled into a single check. Fast, free, and private.

Run Ember now →

Luke Faccini is the founder of Sponge, a brand strategy and culture practice based in Brisbane. He has spent 27 years helping founders and seasoned business owners build ElectroMagnetic brands that do the heavy lifting before anyone says a word. He is the author of The Humming Team and the creator of Ember, an AI intelligence built on the proprietary ElectroMagnetic Brand Analysis framework.