Social selling on LinkedIn works best through comments and direct messages, because posts get throttled and DMs do not. LinkedIn consultant John Espirian, who does most of his deal-making in the inbox, advises ten comments for every post you publish, plus fewer, better-researched messages.
In 2015, John Espirian was so busy writing for clients that he stopped marketing his own business. In 2016, he had his worst financial year ever. He told me that story on Embracing Marketing Mistakes, and it is the cleanest argument I know for why social selling cannot wait until you have spare time.
He does not work for LinkedIn, which means he can say things the platform would probably rather he kept quiet. Here is what he told me about where the real selling happens now.
Why is LinkedIn reach falling for almost everyone?
Reach is falling because the feed is crowded with AI-written posts and LinkedIn keeps changing its mind about them. John does not dodge the point: “Almost everyone has had a drop in visibility compared to where we were even 18 months ago.”
He says the AI writing feature has been dialled back into a proofreading tool, and you can now report posts as AI slop. I find that hilarious, because LinkedIn launched a button to help you write posts with AI and then, not long after, asked all of us to report the results.
The platform still matters, though. A Profound study of 1.4 million AI citations, published in March 2026, found LinkedIn was the most-cited domain for professional queries across six AI models, including ChatGPT and Perplexity. So what you say there can surface when a buyer asks an AI tool about your field.
The inbox is the one place the algorithm cannot reach
John’s biggest claim is that direct messages sit outside the feed. As he put it, “Direct messages are not prone to the algorithm at all. So whereas your content might be throttled in the feed, your direct messages aren’t.”
He goes further on delivery: “You’ve got basically a hundred percent delivery guarantee on those things, and that’s where I transact pretty much all of my business, and it’s where I develop my relationships.” Most email marketers would frame that delivery rate and hang it on the office wall.
His conclusion is rather blunt. If your posts are not going viral and you have decided LinkedIn is therefore pointless, you are looking at the wrong half of the platform.
How do you send a LinkedIn DM that is not spam?
Start in the comments, read the person’s profile properly, and write to them like a human being. John gets unsolicited messages too, and he can tell nobody looked at him first: “They haven’t spent even a minute reading my profile, because if they had, then they wouldn’t say some of the things that they do say.”
His alternative begins in public. When you leave a comment, he says, “you are having a silent conversation with the vast majority of people who are just looking at their feed”, and some of them will decide you know your stuff and drop you a line.
For senior targets, he suggests befriending someone a level or two below them first. That is a “slower long-term approach and fewer conversations, but more valuable ones”, rather than ten thousand cold DMs that go nowhere.
The mistake: Judging LinkedIn by post views, and going quiet on marketing whenever client work gets busy.
Why it happens: Views are public and easy to count, whereas relationships built in comments and DMs leave no scoreboard.
The fix: Ring-fence marketing time every week, post once or twice, and put most of your effort into comments and researched messages.
Ten comments for every post
John’s training rule is simple: “make about 10 times as many comments as you do posts.” If you are just starting, that means roughly one post a week and at least ten useful comments on other people’s posts.
He is equally clear about where posting effort pays back. “It’s much more valuable to spend that effort in the comments and in the DMs because you can’t do everything.” Posts rarely produce leads directly, and links barely help. He ran an experiment and “it only got a 1.3% click-through rate”.
That ratio is a habit, and habits are easier to build with guidance, which is where a structured social selling course for your team earns its keep. Skip the fancy upgrades in the meantime. John reckons most people do not need LinkedIn Premium, and asks: “If you can’t drive your family car well, why are you gonna go and buy a Lamborghini?”
Let your people speak, within reason
Company pages still deserve five minutes of your time, but personal profiles win on visibility. John runs a solo business, and says “My personal profile has got 20 times the followers of my company page, even though both of them are me.”
That is why he wants businesses to trust their employees online. The old fear is that a staff member with a personal brand will walk off with the intellectual property. His reply is that “so long as they’ve been trained and they’re trusted, there’s no reason why that can’t work.”
He is also scathing about the shortcut. Twenty colleagues reposting the company update looks a lot like an engagement pod, and he thinks LinkedIn has noticed.
My view on this: stop feeding the content wheel
When I taught at university about eight years ago, I told students to build their LinkedIn profiles so employers could find them. Plenty of them got jobs that way, back when fewer people were waffling content left, right and centre.
Then I became the waffler. I started a LinkedIn newsletter two and a half or three years ago, and it now has around 1,900 followers. I turned into a slave to the content wheel, publishing weekly on top of the podcast. It did brilliantly at first, then I wondered whether LinkedIn had throttled it. John confirmed that visibility has dipped a little, which at least means I was not imagining it.
My own feed is now mostly two podcast posts a week, and John was kind but direct about that. He says podcast clips for his own show tend not to perform, and that “It’s the stuff that you can’t actually Google” which people want to see, meaning the behind-the-scenes effort.
Our editor needs four to six hours to cut one hour of conversation, so Will and I are planning a behind-the-scenes episode. Apparently, filming my editor’s six-hour suffering now counts as content.
Listen to the full episode
Watch the full episode with John Espirian on YouTube, find every episode at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk, and read more about John’s book Content DNA and his community on his own website.
Embracing Marketing Mistakes is my weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where marketing and PR leaders share the career mistakes that taught them the most. Feel free to drop me a line.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
