Vol. 2: I Paid to Do Worse
Last week I showed you that boosting a post appeared to suppress it. I said I'd keep collecting data. Here it is.
Posted Feb 21. Boosted Sunday night targeting executives and C-suite.
4 days · 6,967 total impressions
Posted Feb 23. Zero budget. Zero boost. Completely organic.
2 days · 4,797 total impressions
The organic post is outperforming the paid post by 37%.
I can do bad all by myself.
I specifically curated my boosted audience to target executives and C-suite leaders. That was the whole point. Here's who LinkedIn actually showed my boosted post to:
I targeted executives. I got interns at Big Tech.
The algorithm I didn't pay for found the exact audience I wanted.
I am not paying for distribution. I am paying for audience degradation.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is two Excel spreadsheets exported from my own LinkedIn analytics dashboard. I am a physician-scientist with a PhD from MIT and Harvard. I know what a controlled comparison looks like.
To be precise about what I am claiming:
I paid for a service. The service specified an audience. The analytics show a different audience was delivered. The organic algorithm outperformed the paid product in both reach rate and audience quality.
That is the data. You can draw your own conclusions.
I can do bad all by myself. I don't need to pay for it.
The data is documented.
Now here's what we're building instead.