Spoiler Alert: Engagement Bait Is Going to Backfire

All those creators who used ‘Comment KEYWORD and I’ll DM you’ posts to help grow massive followings?

Congratulations! You’ve built a perfect storm for low reach and engagement: a massive audience that likely doesn’t care about your content, a track record of artificial engagement that’s working against you, and a network optimized for vanity metrics instead of business results.

Let’s dig into why this tactic is about to blow up in everyone’s face, shall we?

The “Old” LinkedIn Algorithm Rewarded Volume

For years, LinkedIn’s ranking system for posts was relatively straightforward. It rewarded:

• Follower count
• Total engagement volume
• Connection growth

So when it came to engagement bait, the game became simple: force lots of people to comment “nonsense” to get an asset. This resulted in comment velocity (ahem: artificial engagement), then the creator gained connections and followers when people connected to get the DM for the resource, inflating follower counts.

This was easy to manipulate by growth hackers and gurus who understood how to work the system. Post something that seemed valuable, ask people to comment a keyword, watch the engagement numbers soar, and convert that into social proof for their next launch.

The “New” LinkedIn Algorithm, 360 Brew, Rewards Relevance

But LinkedIn’s new reasoning engine has fundamentally changed the game. The 360 Brew system now rewards:

• Relevant community engagement and velocity
• Conversation quality
• Authentic interactions

Simple signal processing has been replaced with a powerful reasoning engine that learns by analyzing your audience’s “Past Interaction Data.” If that data is filled with people who only commented for a free PDF, the AI gets weak, scattered signals about your true professional identity.

So first, we have an AI that’s confused about the creator’s professional identity and who it should show the content to. Not a great start for potential reach.

And then we have the matter of engagement velocity.

The Engagement Velocity Problem

According to all the research, the new system still uses “fast, rule-based checks” to see if a post is gaining engagement quickly to determine viral potential. The first 60-90 minutes remain super important for success when it comes to the good-old algorithm.

But here’s where this is all going to backfire: if your post is shown to an inflated network of inactive — or worse, irrelevant — users who aren’t interested and will never engage, the ranking engine flags this as being shown to an irrelevant audience and throttles reach.

According to Trust Insights’ Unofficial Algorithm Guide Fall 2025 Edition, this creates a vicious cycle where poor engagement velocity from your artificially inflated audience actually hurts your future content distribution.

The Data Doesn’t Lie

(A lost Sharkira follow-up single?)

Here’s a fun stat that should make every engagement-bait creator nervous: creators with smaller, tighter communities (15,000–25,000 followers) now enjoy up to 2.3x higher median reach per post than very large accounts (+50,000 followers), according to Richard van der Blom’s LinkedIn Algorithm Report 2025.

The creator with the artificially inflated network is the polar opposite of this tighter, genuine community that the algorithm now prioritizes.

Your LinkedIn Strategy for 2026

Create content that your ICP will save and share. Focus on providing genuine value that your ideal client profile finds worth preserving and distributing to their networks. LinkedIn released new metrics late this summer, and you can now track saves and shares for every post. These metrics are gold!

Focus on meaningful conversations and connections. Seek out posts and conversations that are directly related to your core area of expertise. Quality engagement from relevant professionals beats quantity every time under the new system.

Let growth happen organically. Add new contacts on a regular basis, but make sure they’re squarely in your ICP. And I’d recommend carving out time quarterly to remove any connections that are no longer in your niche/industry, are inactive, etc.

Again, this isn’t actually new, groundbreaking advice. But it’s been proven to work for true networking, business development, and success time and again.

It’s just not as sexy as promising 10x follower growth in 30 days.

Course Correction for Reformed Growth Hackers

If you’ve used engagement-bait tactics in the past, here’s my recommendation:

Clean up your connections gradually. Take steps to disconnect from people outside your niche/industry or those who are inactive. Go slow here; you don’t want to trigger any automation flags.

Go deep with your content. Focus on posts that get saves and shares. These are the metrics the new algorithm optimizes for, not vanity engagement.

Engage strategically. Participate in conversations with others who discuss your area of expertise. This helps the algorithm understand your professional context.

Add relevant connections regularly. Quality over quantity remains a classic principle for good reason. Focus on building genuine professional relationships.

The Bottom Line

LinkedIn’s algorithm evolution isn’t punishing creators, even though rock-bottom reach sure feels that way. The goal of 360 Brew is to reward professional relevance in an age of AI slop (and I hate that term).

The platform is doing what it should have been doing all along: connecting professionals with content and conversations that actually matter to their work.

I truly hope that the age of growth hacking and engagement baiting on LinkedIn is ending, and genuine professional networking and thought leadership is going to thrive.

And honestly? That’s exactly what a professional network should prioritize.