LinkedIn Free Version: An Analysis for Small Businesses
Why We Are Moving To Substack
Audience: Small business marketers, entrepreneurs, freelancers and aspiring business persons
Contents
Executive Summary
Introduction
Increasing Risks, Barriers and Costs to Entry
· Algorithm Changes since June 2023
· Boosting Posts
· Newsletter Navigation
· Black Box Robot
· Censorship
· Cancel Culture
· Noise and Junk Content
· LinkedIn Free is Essentially Social Media in Disguise
Conclusions
· Business Functions Free LinkedIn Can Reliably Perform
· Business Functions Free LinkedIn Cannot Perform
· Final Thoughts and Summary
Updates
Footnotes
Executive Summary
LinkedIn was once considered the go-to platform for networking, doing business, getting jobs and creating visibility and reach for small businesses. Over the years, it has become increasingly apparent that the free version of the platform is no longer effective for marketing startups and other small businesses. We have found this to be the case through several years of daily experiments, hundreds of articles and thousands of engagements. We gave up on the notion that there are rapid, practical and effective marketing solutions via use of the free LinkedIn version, in favor of more manual, traditional business gathering solutions.
There remain a few interesting corner cases where effective, free LinkedIn marketing is still possible. However, experience has shown that most successful efforts are still essentially manual in nature, and involve the use of LinkedIn as a sort of extended phone book of businesses.
The fledgling marketeer must still identify a target audience, laboriously search for and contact members of that audience, carefully and gradually build up business relationships, collect and maintain dossiers on target companies and individuals, and close deals the old-fashioned way. It should go without saying that LinkedIn, absent exorbitant payments in advance, won’t help with this process in any significant way, and does not represent a rapid pathway to business success. That ship has sailed, and is gone forever.
LinkedIn is like a stormy, shark-infested ocean; there are fish there that can be caught, but the labor to catch those fish becomes more difficult over time. The sharks supply competition for the available fish and make the endeavor hazardous. We explore the specifics of how and why this has happened here.
TL;DR conclusions: LinkedIn is good for personal, and (separate) business profiles. LinkedIn can be used as a sort of large phone book of businesses, if one knows who to look for. One can also develop and use LinkedIn to create an online portfolio. Person to person business relationships can be developed over time.
Some people use it as social media, but with extremely limited business development success. In our opinion, the free version of LinkedIn, viewed as a mass communication tool to automate certain aspects of business marketing, is now ineffective for serious small B2B marketing.
Introduction
This essay, originally intended for inclusion in our newsletter, The Overlogix Sunday Times, became too lengthy for that purpose, and so was moved here. From reading numerous posts on LinkedIn, we noticed an increasing trend among the minority of users who employ LinkedIn to market their businesses: it has become progressively more difficult to market a startup business on LinkedIn, and continues to get more difficult as time passes. In writing it, it became clear to us that the end result is a blunt business analysis of the free version of LinkedIn, and so it was relabeled to reflect that reality.
In this article we briefly explore the changes to LinkedIn we feel are presenting an increasingly steep barrier to doing startup business on the platform, as well as challenges originating from the mass of LinkedIn users themselves, present in any very large collection of people: noise, culture differences, appeals for attention, trolling, scolding, criticism, scamming and other, more nefarious activities. The changes to the platform chronicled here have not, to our knowledge, been compiled, curated and published in the organized and succinct manner we explore here.
Readers should not interpret this article as criticism of LinkedIn; rather as a narrative of how LinkedIn evolved from a cool and very useful business networking platform prior to its sale to Microsoft in 2016, into a strictly controlled income generation machine for the Microsoft Corporation. We seek here to characterize, as precisely and thoroughly as possible, exactly what small business owners and marketers can expect from LinkedIn free, how they can profitably use the platform, and what they shouldn’t bother to try, due to very long odds against success.
The combination of apparently deliberate business decisions by LinkedIn, their emphasis on engagement, constant changes in algorithm behavior, increasing time and money costs, unclear documentation and (often contradictory) rules, less-than-careful coding and programming, junk posting noise, censorship, and a distinct minority, but vocal, cohort of self-appointed guardians of all that is right and holy, have created an unsafe environment and a very high barrier to entry level business activity, particularly, mining LinkedIn in any sort of automated fashion for business prospects. While each factor, considered individually, is surmountable, the sum of all of them together presents the small business marketeer with a nearly impossible, insurmountable ascent.
We concluded long ago that we must move the bulk of our business content here to Substack, and have been working on that project for more than a year now. Moving the newsletter is the latest step in this lengthy process.
It has occurred to us, again from daily readings of hundreds of posts and comments, that for many, if not most, users of LinkedIn, it’s the only game in town. LinkedIn certainly hasn’t been shy about using their virtual monopoly position to rake in revenue; we read recently that their intake from premium memberships alone exceeds $2B (yes, billion) annually.
Add in revenue for job listings, post boosting and advertising, and one can easily see that LinkedIn is an enormous cash cow for Microsoft. What it isn’t, is a platform small marketers can use to effectively market their business. Microsoft monetized that function years ago, and won’t give it up until the platform fails.
We believe the notion that LinkedIn is the only business platform worth using, needs close re-examination, particularly for beginning, startup and small businesses. There are already niche and alternative platforms awaiting the craftsman, such as the current one, Substack. Each has their place in the total marketing picture, and it is up to the prospective marketers to examine their own business needs and craft overall marketing strategies that work for their businesses.
Part of our business philosophy, adopted prior to the commencement of our marketing journey, was building our business largely in the open. This gives other business people in the same position as ours the chance to read our results, witness our progress, question the conventional wisdom zeitgeists, and possibly apply what we have learned to their own situation. Perhaps some time can be saved and pain avoided. In that spirit, we present our findings and conclusions, and explicitly label them as our opinions, for postings such as these are to be taken as editorials rather than established facts. Your mileage may vary.
Increasing Risks, Barriers and Costs to Entry
Algorithm Changes since June 2023
We see a pretty classic business conundrum when considering business marketing on LinkedIn. The platform has in the last few years implemented a number of algorithm changes, particularly since June 2023, that strongly limit so-called “viral” posts. A throwaway post there used to generate hundreds to thousands of impressions; now, a very carefully written, high quality post might get tens, or occasionally, hundreds of impressions.
At roughly ten impressions (counted when a post occupies a user’s screen for at least 300 milliseconds, or 0.30 seconds) per view (when someone actually reads the post), those numbers are far too small for any type of effective marketing. We once outlined the pathway from impressions all the way to sales, counting the likely filtration at each step in order to estimate the effort required, and arrived at staggering numbers, easily outside our own reach by multiple powers of ten.
LinkedIn gamely sends us notifications such as “You’re getting noticed! …” like this:
We computed a conservative minimum estimate of around 600,000 impressions would be needed for one sale. Even if wrong by a factor of 10 times (guessing 60,000 impressions per post), comparing with the number in the image above, we are looking at 17 years of effort for a single sale, clearly in failure territory.
LinkedIn constantly urges us to boost our posts (more on this below), at an upfront cost, with zero guarantees of success, nor even a straightforward price per 1000 impressions. However, with such paltry impression results, far smaller than the noise surrounding them, we have no way of estimating which posts to boost, nor what we could expect to gain by paying the platform for boosted posts. Conventional wisdom in advertising holds that if you don’t know exactly what you are doing, and can’t estimate what you’ll get out of it, advertising is a waste of money. We agree with that wisdom.
That fact exposes our business conundrum mentioned earlier. We need business revenue in order to potentially pay for advertising, but cannot get revenue from LinkedIn activity due to negligible reach. We also cannot get enough data to compute any probable return on our advertising budget, nor what type of advertising would be effective (default decision: there are none that would be effective), and therefore, must not buy any advertising from LinkedIn.
Many commentators have noticed this fact, too: LinkedIn has effectively (and quietly) introduced pay to play. In our opinion, the virtual gaming table that is LinkedIn paid advertising has terrible odds and high initial expenses, and so is effectively out of the question. The article linked above claims that this was a predictable consequence of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn in 2016. We are forced to agree.
Boosting Posts
LinkedIn offers boosting if a marketer is willing to pay for it. Estimates on the cost vary wildly, with some authors claiming around $2.00 per click, others up to $65 - 70 per click. We’ll note that between 20 and 100 clicks are generally considered necessary for a single sale, sometimes, much more.
The consensus is that boosting is inordinately expensive and not particularly effective; one survey we read showed that 57% of marketers who employed boosting were satisfied with their ROI, while 43% were not. Another source commented, in passing, that roughly 50% of any advertising budget is wasted. Neither commented meaningfully on the degree of advertising expertise required nor the budget needed to be effective. Those numbers are high and prohibitively expensive for a small startup business.
Newsletter Navigation
The Overlogix Sunday Times (TOST) was originally published on LinkedIn, once we had enough followers there for the infamous algorithm to grant us the right to create a newsletter. The first twelve editions (and one special edition dedicated to the hype surrounding DeepSeek) are still available on LinkedIn.
Our intention, starting with the 13th edition, is to publish the newsletter going forward here on Substack, while continuing to publish a brief summary and index, with links, on LinkedIn. Very soon, we will create an index page for The Overlogix Sunday Times here on Substack and treat that as one of several landing pages for Overlogix content.
We compose most of The Overlogix Sunday Times in Microsoft Word, and so have a rough measure of the length of the newsletter in number of pages. Now that the newsletter has, rather naturally, grown to its current size, we found that the available LinkedIn article editor lacks the features to allow internal navigation of a long document, limiting the utility of the newsletter considerably.
This practical reality was the main driver of the newsletter move to Substack. We can, and do add internal links as well as tables of contents so that readers can easily navigate long articles.
Black Box Robot
LinkedIn is run by automation, some of whose behavior is detailed in our algorithm article. We have repeatedly encountered instances where that robot is poorly programmed, makes arbitrary and often incorrect decisions regarding content censorship, serves up blank pages and otherwise interferes with the smooth marketing and operation of our business.
Other users of LinkedIn have likewise complained, displaying screenshots to show what the robot did to them. Many of those complaints corresponded exactly with incidents that happened to us. After a little digging into the matter, we concluded that LinkedIn’s issues are baked into the cake and are unlikely to change anytime in the near future.
Censorship
LinkedIn’s robot does not appear to be programmed very well; we suspect both business rules and nuts-and-bolts programming to be poorly thought out, sometimes contradictory, and constantly changing. This results in sometimes arbitrary behavior on the part of the bot, including automated deletion of content it deems unacceptable. The robot does seem oblivious to most forms of sarcasm and irony; we have noticed from comments that the human readers of LinkedIn aren’t very good at spotting it, either.
Most of the robot-policing is there to protect LinkedIn’s advertising business, in addition to removing more egregious forms of bad conduct. This results in content that increasingly resembles baby food. Occasionally, good thoughts do make it through the filters; however, we have wearied of considering LinkedIn’s fussy robot when composing content.
Substack, on the other hand, works on a different, subscription-based business model entirely, and so is refreshingly free of censorship. While we are certain there are content filters on this platform, we have yet to encounter them, and so far can write what we please.
Cancel Culture
We occasionally forget our own rules, intended to avoid bar fights on LinkedIn, and step on a emotional landmine, as happened recently. Incident details are unimportant; we read another, subsequent post complaining about similar things (and commiserated with the poster by a comment).
People misread the intent of the comment, or perhaps it was not written in a manner that could not be misunderstood, and went ballistic over it, causing others to also go ballistic (social proofing). We wound up deleting the comment, despite strong positive feedback in the form of likes. The ratio of likes to dislikes, in the form of scolds, was about 10 to 1. We deleted it to prevent further backlash; our policy demands avoiding online bar fights as impossible to control and likely bad for business. Additionally, we consider likes to be virtually worthless for marketing purposes.
Normally, we are cautious, knowing from experience that the audience can be emotional, fickle and volatile. This leads to a deliberate policy of self-censorship, a topic that has been much discussed on the platform. Formulating such a policy is not a trivial undertaking, as we learned from both experience and online discussions.
Such misunderstanding is a relatively mild example in a spectrum of possible responses from the LinkedIn audience. There are also professional scolds, trolls, people with a chip on their shoulder looking for an opportunity to start trouble, and a small cohort of genuinely bad actors, loosely organized into squads, who choose targets with content they disapprove of, or want to silence. The unfortunate target is then made the victim of a campaign of online harassment that can be very damaging.
Despite recent cultural shifts, cancel culture is still with us. There is a strong enough component of it on LinkedIn, despite robot policing, to make the platform less than safe, and sometimes risky, to use. Avoiding emotional landmines is a statistical, rather than deterministic, process, and yet another impediment and cost of doing business there.
Noise and Junk Content
The sheer mass of the platform, with more than 1.2 billion users, about one-eighth of humanity, north of 300 million active users (regular, long-term comments, posts or articles), generates a huge volume of noise with very little signal. Posts to LinkedIn rarely are allotted more than a handful of impressions. Thus, an individual business’s messages are statistically much more likely to be lost in the ocean of noise content than seen by prospective customers. The signal to noise ratio for a single post is on the order of one in ten million (1 / 10,000,000), or 0.0000001.
Despite dedicated and repeated efforts to prune our LinkedIn feed, we find that it is overwhelmingly filled with junk posts that have no business value whatsoever. Real, probative content is diluted to homeopathic concentrations. LinkedIn essentially can no longer be used as a source of business news, one of our primary motivations to produce our newsletter. We need to know what’s happening in the business world, in a timely manner, especially news that directly affects our own business, and we cannot rely on LinkedIn’s noxious prolefeed any longer to accomplish that.
Worse still, LinkedIn’s emphasis on immediate engagement as a primary yardstick for judging the value, and therefore the number of impressions a post is served, has proved to be an enormous black hole of time, with zero business gained in months of engagement. We are aware that engagement does increase reach, but balance that against the large time costs, the ever-present allure and risk of social media addiction, and direct competition of engagement time with productive, remunerative actions.
When we looked into LinkedIn’s sources of revenue, we found a slow, but steady, increase in advertising, often signaled, simply enough, by the robot’s constant urging us to pay for advertising. We have multiple reasons to believe that LinkedIn is slowly, but steadily, increasing the priority of advertising (and our AI zoo unanimously agrees on this point) as a source of revenue, and that advertising revenue is in fact increasing as a fraction of total revenue.
No thanks, LinkedIn. Previous (2023) algorithm changes have strongly depressed the reach of posts, often down to less than ten. The junk content overwhelms all else, despite dedicated pruning. Data that sparse cannot be used in any meaningful manner to guide advertising purchases; it would be foolish to pay for shooting arrows in the dark.
In our opinion, LinkedIn is gradually dying of its own obesity. The platform is no longer about business, and is innocent of lasting value. As the accumulated barriers to entry inexorably raise the cost of doing business there, users will, like us, gradually migrate to other platforms and marketing methods. One site we read stated the obvious: “If you aren’t paying for it, you are the product being sold.”
LinkedIn Free is Essentially Social Media in Disguise
Given the high costs of entry, poor odds and the large amount of noise, there are no other practical conclusions to make about using the free edition of LinkedIn; it’s a place to hang the one version of your resume (your profile) that does not need to be altered for each job you to which you apply. It can be profitably used to find people to connect with and build business relationships, like a phone book. As we have pointed out earlier, paying LinkedIn is probably worse than doing nothing, and so is off the table, too.
We have already documented one corner case where one might get business without paying LinkedIn, there may be others. Be advised though: LinkedIn looks for these corner cases, and finds ways to monetize them, so any such cases that appear are essentially happy accidents with limited lifetimes.
Beyond that, LinkedIn is essentially social media, with low to no business value. We long ago made the decision to move our content creation to Substack. We are in the process now of finding manual pathways to find our ideal customers and develop relationships with them. Those pathways are of necessity slow, and demand an incredible amount of legwork.
Conclusions
Under no circumstances should small businesses be fooled by LinkedIn hype. Promises, no more valuable in practical terms than the ephemeral and cynical promises routinely uttered by politicians, aside, startup business folk should coldly and objectively evaluate what LinkedIn has to offer them in their current state.
Our thesis remains that LinkedIn has strictly limited value for startups, and effective marketing comes with up front, high costs, requiring considerable expertise and experience to gainfully exploit. Beginning entrepreneurs need to define and locate ways to earn income, without depending on a platform that has long abandoned them, prior to contemplating paying good money for potentially, and likely, ineffective results.
We cannot justify paying LinkedIn for anything, given the vague documentation and uncertain results of any of their advertising options. We expect that other entrepreneurs will discover the same things, before risking their businesses and livelihoods on hype and, frankly, greed.
The following is our distillation of the likely and accessible values free LinkedIn can be expected to provide. This knowledge cost us well over a year of painful and painstaking research, and we offer it, free of charge, in the hopes that other, fellow entrepreneurs will find it probative and on-target. Beyond that, we can only wish you luck.
Good fortune to you!
Business Functions Free LinkedIn Can Reliably Perform
We have now examined the free version of LinkedIn in detail and at length, and concluded that it is useful for the following business purposes:
Personal profile (online resume or CV) + contact data
Business profile (services and / or products offered) + contact data
A business phone book used to search for and connect with potential clients and partners
A home for an online portfolio showcasing one’s capabilities (but Substack is better and monetizable).
Limited social media usage, which should be very strongly focused on business development only.
Business Functions Free LinkedIn Cannot Perform
On the other hand, LinkedIn free is essentially innocent of value for:
Mass communications to potential customers
Creation of a sales pipeline
Advertising
Marketing
Business automation
Final Thoughts and Summary
The free version of LinkedIn requires marketers to dig up their potential clients by hand, find them, connect with them, and, develop separate business relationships with each one individually. Posting or writing articles in the hopes of attracting customers cannot be made to work; the process takes decades, while the market shifts almost completely in a matter of months. We cannot recommend it, and strongly advise against any such quixotic efforts. You’ll have to find your customers yourself, woo them, and close whatever deals you can, the old fashioned way.
We wish you prosperity and good fortune, and hope that this article has saved you time.
Back to Contents · Back to Top
Updates
27.05.2025 Other commentators have recently confirmed that LinkedIn is now essentially 100% monetized = pay to play. The small windows described above are still open, and that’s about it. Small business owners are advised to begin hunting for other marketing avenues, since LinkedIn is essentially gone. The video linked here goes so far as to question even paid LinkedIn memberships, and we agree. Job hunters should have a look at our article Why the US Job Market Feels Broken for some practical tips on looking for a job (TL;DR: employ massive and careful networking, using LinkedIn wherever possible, and be very careful about believing anything you read on the Internet).
Back to Contents · Back to Top
Footnotes
Thank you for reading this article!
More information about Overlogix can be found at Welcome to Overlogix!
We currently publish on both LinkedIn (general interest articles, summaries, TL;DR’s: easier and faster to read) and Substack (in-depth articles, how-to’s, technical studies and new approaches to business).
· Introduction: Welcome to Overlogix!
· The Overlogix Sunday Times Our newsletter, with occasional specials, published roughly every two weeks.
· Master Index All our articles can be found from here in two clicks.
· The Overlogix Table of Context All Overlogix articles in reverse chronological order
· Applied Artificial Intelligence: Index of Articles One of our specialties is Applied AI. This index lists all relevant articles on the topic, in reverse chronological order.
· Applied AI: Stories in the News Our semi-permanent, curated listing of interesting and important news from the world of artificial intelligence, from many different sources.
· Index: Getting a Job Up until recently, getting a job, much less a good job, has been a nightmare for most job seekers. We publish articles on how and why this is so, and what job hunters can do to find the perfect job for them. We also supply credible external resources, so people can consider their alternatives.
· Starting a B2B Business For everyone who can, we heartily recommend starting your own business. The tools are there, and there has never been a better time to do it.
· Building Our Own Robot We’re automating Overlogix from the start, and this series of articles tells exactly how we are doing it.
· Rebuilding the Linux Server: Index of Articles Running AI on your own machine (recommended) requires a modern, up-to-date operating system, and often a lot of additional software infrastructure. This series, dedicated to exactly that sort of system administration, details what we have done to build a powerful server that runs both databases and artificial intelligence, locally.
· The Gospel According to ChatGPT Conversations with various AIs and additional articles on the various challenges associated with actually making profitable use of artificial intelligence.
· TL;DR: Index of Fast Reads Brief, fast reads on various topics in artificial intelligence. If you are a beginner at AI, or a busy human needing fast and factual explanations of complicated technical topics, this is the place to start.
· TL;DR: Overlogix Artificial Intelligence Mini-Wiki Same Fast Reads as previous but arranged in a mini-wiki format some folks may like better.
· Welcome to the Overlogix Substack
· Overlogix: Table of Context Index to our Substack articles arranged by topics.
· Criteria for Paid Content Rules for what goes behind our paywall.
Curated IT and AI Sources Annotated links to sites and YouTube channels we think are valuable.