📈 How To Find Content-Audience Fit

Read time: 4 minutes

Your LinkedIn posts might be failing for a reason nobody talks about.

If you’re already writing useful content and making people have “aha” moments, it might be something else:

You're creating content for an audience you don't have.

You don’t have content-audience fit.

So how do you fix it?

I spent this week diving into LinkedIn's feed engineering blogs (with Claude's help) to understand what you can do about it.

Fair warning: These blogs are a few years old. But here's what hasn't changed: LinkedIn primarily shows your posts to your followers and connections first, not to people outside your network.

How LinkedIn Actually Decides Who Sees Your Posts

Most people think LinkedIn shows their posts to random followers.

Not quite.

When you post, LinkedIn analyzes your content and picks a test audience from your network who:

1. Normally engage with the topic

2. Normally engage with YOU

3. Are online right now

These people are primarily from your followers and connections - LinkedIn isn't TikTok.

Then it watches everything:

• Dwell time (how long they stop scrolling)

• Comments (comments from 3rd degree connections are most valuable)

• Reposts (a sign you’ve created something valuable)

The algorithm actually wants your content to succeed.

Remember, LinkedIn makes money from Ads when people stay on the platform. Relevant content keeps people scrolling.

But here's the problem:

If your current audience doesn't care about what you post about - you're making the algorithm's job impossible.

Your posts don’t get out of the test phase.

Real Example: How Miko Found His Content-Audience Fit

Take Miko Pawlikowski - one of our Saywhat users.

For 100+ days, he posted leadership content regularly.

But his followers were engineers, not managers.

Classic content-audience mismatch.

The algorithm kept showing his leadership content to his engineer followers. And they just didn’t care. So his posts didn’t perform.

During our strategy call (I still do these with annual Saywhat subscribers), we figured out the fix by:

1. Aligning his content with his audience - software engineers, not generic professionals

2. Switching to a developer-friendly visual style we'd seen work in Saywhat's inspirational content database

It honestly shocked me how quickly his content's performance changed.

He had 5 posts in the ~4 weeks that exploded:

• "17 Subtle Rules of Software Engineering" got over 16,500 reactions

• “10 years of coding advice in 60 seconds” got over 8,000 reactions

• “5 Archetypes of Software Engineering” got over 2,500 reactions

• “4 Horsemen of Software Engineering” got just under 2,000 reactions

• “7 Brutal Truths of Software Engineering” got over 1,500 reactions

Why did it work? Perfect content-audience fit:

• Audience: Software engineers who follow / are connected with him

• Content: Engineering wisdom

• Posting Time: 1-2pm UK when they were online

• Style: Simple visuals that resonated with developers

There was finally a match between who followed him and what he posted about.

How to Find Your Content-Audience Fit

Many creators have this backwards. They create content and just hope it lands.

You can’t forget building your network too:

1. Check who's actually following you - Look at your follower demographics

2. Build more of the right audience - Send 100+ weekly connection requests to your ideal readers

3. Create content THEY care about - Not what you think everyone needs to hear

4. Post when they're online - ideally 7-9am for them

5. Use their visual language - Polished for corporate, simple for developers, video for marketers

6. Name them explicitly - Write "software engineers" not "professionals" in your posts

The formula is simple:

Right Audience + Great Content = Algorithm Success

When you nail this, you realize the algorithm isn't broken.

You were just talking to the wrong room.

See you next time,

Will

P.S. Want to see what content styles work for your specific audience? Search Saywhat's inspiration feature with keywords for your industry and see what’s already working.

Will McTighe

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