LinkedIn’s Value Crisis: Why Executives Are Questioning Their Investment

The platform feels broken, but pulling back might be the bigger mistake

A marketing director told me last week that her team constantly asks themselves about “the true and current value of LinkedIn.”

Her team is still posting, still investing time, still showing up consistently. But internally, the conversation has changed. They used to ask, “How do we do more on LinkedIn?” Now they ask, “Should we keep doing this at all?” Every planning meeting circles back to whether the investment makes sense.

She’s not alone in questioning whether LinkedIn is worth it. Other executives tell me their metrics look decent, but they can’t draw a line from LinkedIn activity to actual business results.

Meanwhile, the platform feels different than it did two years ago.

The TMI Problem

LinkedIn has an identity crisis, and everyone can see it.

The platform’s been overrun by overly personal content that feels more like Facebook than a professional network – weekend barbecue photos that somehow become lessons about “grilling strategy,” vacation snapshots paired with captions about “gratitude and mindfulness” that connect to quarterly projections, and personal updates that have nothing to do with work but get forced into leadership metaphors.

Nobody needs another post about how your toddler’s tantrum taught you about stakeholder management.

The Algorithm Confusion

The TMI content would be easier to ignore if LinkedIn’s algorithm actually filtered for quality. Instead, it feels broken.

I’ve watched people post every single day for a year, build massive followings, and share content that offers zero value – just posting for the sake of posting.

One executive told me she doesn’t see any correlation between well-performing content and content she actually benefits from reading. The algorithm seems to reward volume over substance, and when garbage content gets thousands of likes while thoughtful posts get ignored, you start questioning whether the platform can still filter for quality.

Some creators have figured out how to game the system, and every time low-quality content gets disproportionate visibility, it erodes trust that LinkedIn is a place for serious business conversation.

Despite All This, LinkedIn Still Matters

Even executives who see these problems aren’t slowing down their LinkedIn activity because the stakes are too high to abandon the platform.

Right now:

• Investors are reading your profile before meetings
• Recruits are scrolling through your posts while deciding whether to accept your offer
• Customers are forming opinions about your company based on how you show up.

LinkedIn gives you a direct channel to shape those first impressions before you ever meet someone face to face, but the value doesn’t show up as pipeline metrics. Instead, it appears in how your business conversations unfold:

• Sales meetings start with prospects who already know who you are, so the relationship begins warm instead of cold.
• Recruiting gets easier because candidates spend months reading your posts and already understand the culture.
• Investors come to meetings having watched you think in public about your industry, which means they’ve already formed opinions about your strategic thinking before the pitch begins.

You can’t track “They already trusted me before we met” in your CRM, but walk into enough meetings where someone says “I’ve been following your posts,” and the pattern becomes obvious.

What Actually Works Right Now

Focus on business content – industry insights, career lessons, and company stories that your professional audience actually needs.

Personal stories can work, but they’re the exception, not the strategy. When you do share something personal, use what I call the “work-adjacent” rule – your running habit teaches you something about sustained performance, your parenting experience reveals lessons about leadership, your hobby develops discipline that applies to business.

The business connection is what creates value.

The bulk of your content should be overtly work-related because that’s what your audience came to LinkedIn for. Save the weekend barbecue photos for Facebook.

The data supports the idea that teaching gets you further than selling:

• Educational content delivers 42% higher engagement than promotional content
• Posts written directly by you generate twice the engagement of reshares
• Longer posts between 1,500-3,000 characters continue to outperform short posts.

You also need to post frequently enough to stay visible. Most posts earn the majority of their views within 24 hours, which means posting once a week leaves you invisible 85% of the time.

And executives who post 2-3 times per week get 57% more engagement per post than those who post weekly.

Why the Investment Still Makes Sense

Your competitors are showing up consistently and building credibility with the audiences that matter to your business. Pull back from LinkedIn, and you’re letting someone else control the narrative about who the credible voices are in your industry.

The platform has real problems – the TMI content, the algorithm confusion, the quality issues.

But despite these growing pains, LinkedIn remains the only professional network where you can speak directly to investors, recruits, customers, and partners simultaneously, in your own voice.

The platform is going through an identity crisis, but it’s not going anywhere.

Neither should you.