When I ask an agency where their buyers are, most of them say LinkedIn.
They say it quickly, which is the part I pay attention to. A fast answer to that question is almost never a finding. It’s a repetition, because LinkedIn is what every marketing newsletter, every podcast guest and every peer in every mastermind has been telling them for five years, and after enough repetitions it stops feeling like advice and starts feeling like a fact about their market.
So LinkedIn shows up in the channel plan without ever having been examined. It skips the evaluation every other option has to pass, because nobody evaluates the default. That’s the problem, and it has almost nothing to do with whether LinkedIn is any good.
A room you were told about has never been tested. It just arrived already believed.
Why the advice layer keeps pointing at LinkedIn
Marketing advice gets made by marketing people, and marketing people live on LinkedIn. So when they tell you where buyers are, a lot of them are describing their own room in good faith and assuming yours looks the same.
That works when your buyer is also a marketer, and it’s a big part of why getting off referrals so often stalls on the first channel choice. It falls apart the moment your buyer is a plumber, a clinic owner, a manufacturer, or somebody running a $4M business who opens LinkedIn twice a year to accept connection requests from people trying to sell them something.
I’m not building a case against LinkedIn here. I’m pointing at how it entered the conversation, because a room that entered by inheritance gets defended like a belief instead of examined like an option. When I suggest testing it, owners argue. They rarely argue about the other four rooms on the list, and that difference is the tell.
The four things I score before anything gets picked
The Five-Room Map is the tool underneath this, and it looks at five kinds of room: peer rooms, authority rooms, tool rooms, gatherings, and search. Every candidate gets scored on three things, and then a fourth one that can only ever push a room down.
Density. What share of the people in this room are your buyer? Not how many people are in it. The share. A room with 400 of exactly the right people beats a platform with a hundred million of everyone.
Intent. Are these people in this room because of the problem you solve? This is where most rooms fail. Attention and intent are different things, and one of them buys.
Access. Can you get in and be useful, or does the room have a gatekeeper, a paywall, or an algorithm deciding whether you’re seen today?
Operator fit, which only ever demotes. A room can win on the first three and still be the wrong room for the person who has to show up in it every week, and if the operator hates the format they’ll stop in six weeks and you’ll have taught them that marketing doesn’t work.
Now run LinkedIn through it honestly. Access is good, since you can reach almost anyone and nobody stops you. Density depends entirely on your buyer. Intent is where it usually breaks, because nobody opens LinkedIn to buy anything. They open it between meetings.
The room that keeps winning instead
Across the agencies I work with, the room that keeps beating LinkedIn is Facebook groups.
I know how that lands. It sounds like 2016. It has no prestige, nobody puts it in a deck, and there’s no conference track about it, which is a decent part of why it’s still worth something.
The reason it scores well is structural. A Facebook group exists because of a problem, so people join it to solve that problem and post about the problem while they’re having it. Density and intent arrive at the same time, which almost never happens anywhere else. Search has intent without density. A big platform has density without intent. A room organized around the problem has both, and it has them in the buyer’s own words, which is also where your messaging comes from for free.
The trade is access, and it’s steep. Groups have gatekeepers, most of them ban promotion, and you can’t buy your way in. You have to be useful in public for a while before anything happens. That cost is exactly why the room stays uncrowded, and it’s why the agencies that write it off as beneath them keep leaving it available for the ones that don’t.
What being useful in there looks like
The reason most agencies bounce off group-shaped rooms is that they show up selling, get warned once, and conclude the room doesn’t work. The room works fine, and it’s the promotion that doesn’t, because every group with a moderator has spent years learning to spot it in the first line.
What I tell people to do instead takes about fifteen minutes a day. Answer questions that are already being asked, in full, with the answer in the comment rather than in a link. Nobody has to click anything and nobody owes you anything, which is what makes it land. Do that for a few weeks and two things happen: the moderator stops watching you, and people start tagging you when the question comes up again, which is worth more than any post you could have written about yourself.
The other move is to read the room for language rather than leads. The way buyers describe the problem in a group is the way they’d describe it on a sales call, and most agency messaging is written in the agency’s words instead of theirs. So even a room you eventually decide against pays for the time you spent in it, because you leave with the vocabulary.
You’ll know it’s working when somebody sends you a message that starts with “I saw your comment on.” It usually takes a couple of months to get there, which is the part that makes people quit at week five.
When LinkedIn is the right answer
I’d rather give you the conditions than a rule, because a blanket position on this would be wrong about half the time.
LinkedIn is the right room when your buyer is a marketing leader, a founder at a company big enough to have a marketing function, or anyone whose own job runs on the platform. If you sell to VPs of Marketing at Series B companies, they’re there, they’re reachable, and their intent is low but their attention is steady. That’s a room worth working.
The failure is picking it without ever having asked, and then spending nine months and a lot of goodwill finding out. If you’d score it as a candidate and it wins, work it with everything you have. My objection is only to it skipping the audition.
The version you can run this week
You don’t need the full map to get most of the value. Take the buyer you want more of, one specific person, not a segment, and answer four questions in writing:
- Where were they the last time they went looking for help with this problem? Not where they scroll. Where they went when it was urgent.
- What share of that room is people like them? If you can’t estimate it within a wide range, you haven’t looked at the room, you’ve heard of it.
- Is anything in that room organized around the problem I solve? A group’s name, a recurring thread, an event track, a subreddit’s whole reason for existing.
- Could I show up there every week for six months without hating it? If no, it doesn’t matter how well it scored. Pick the second-best room you’ll sustain.
The fourth one is the one owners want to skip, and skipping it is how good strategy documents turn into nothing. A room you’ll work badly for six months beats a room you’ll work brilliantly for three weeks, because consistency is what most of these rooms pay for.
If you go through this and land back on LinkedIn, you should feel better about it than you did before, because now it’s a decision instead of an inheritance. And if you go through it and find yourself looking at a Facebook group with 900 contractors in it, arguing about the same problem you fix, that’s a good day. Go be useful in there.
Best of luck with it.
If you want a second opinion on which room to pick, that’s most of what we talk about in the Dynamic Agency Community.