Why is nobody liking or commenting on my posts?
The likes and comments aren't coming because the people you want to reach read without ever engaging. This is so consistent across the internet that it has a name: the 90-9-1 rule, from Jakob Nielsen's research on participation inequality.
In any online community, roughly 90% of members are lurkers who read or observe without contributing, 9% contribute a little from time to time, and 1% do most of the engaging. Nielsen found the pattern holds across platforms, from forums to blogs to social networks.
| Group | Share | What they do |
|---|
| Lurkers | ~90% | Read and observe, never touch a post |
| Occasional contributors | ~9% | Comment or share once in a while |
| Heavy contributors | ~1% | Produce most of the likes and comments |
Now look at who your ideal clients are: senior, busy people inside companies and nonprofits, reading on a train or at 11pm. They're the lurkers. So the silence under your posts mostly means your audience is behaving normally. Most of them never planned to say anything.
Do my posts even reach anyone if nobody engages?
Yes. Every post reaches a slice of your network, and the size of that slice swings for reasons that have nothing to do with quality:
- whether the post carries a link
- whether there's a photo or video
- how fast the first likes and comments arrive
- the time of day you posted
I've posted content I thought would kill, and it didn't. One of my favorite posts ever got 717 views. That's the feed being the feed. Mix it up, keep going, and know that tomorrow's another day.
This is also why the network you build matters as much as the posts you write. When your connections are curated, when they're the people you want to work with instead of a decade of random accepts, then even a post that reaches a fraction of them is landing in front of exactly the right people. Small reach into the right room does more for your consulting business than big reach into the wrong one.
How do I know if my LinkedIn posts are working?
You know your posts are working by what happens off the feed, usually on a delay of weeks or months. Watch for these instead of likes:
- Profile views, and who they're from. Lurkers warm up by looking at you more than once before they ever say a word.
- Connection requests and accepts from the right people, the ones who can hire you or refer you.
- Your posts coming up in conversation. "I've been reading your posts" on a first call is the single clearest sign the system is doing its job.
- Warmer first conversations. Someone who has read you for months arrives already knowing how you think.
And the honest other half: if months of weekly posting bring none of that, no profile views, no conversations, nothing, then something upstream needs adjusting, usually what you're posting or who your network is made of. And if people engage but clients never come, that's a different problem: posting that isn't turning into clients has its own diagnosis.
How long should I keep posting before I see results?
Give a weekly posting rhythm a full quarter before you judge it, because everything about a B2B consulting sale runs on a long clock. A company signing a real engagement takes months of conversations, so the posts and the clients arrive on different schedules.
A quarter of weekly posting buys you three things:
- A body of work. When a potential client finally clicks your name, they see a feed's worth of your thinking, and it works on every silent visitor.
- Familiarity on a delay. The person who reads you in March may not have budget or a burning problem until September. Your posts hold your place until they do.
- A fair test. A dozen-plus posts is enough signal to judge a strategy on. Six posts is a coin flip.
Quitting at week six has a specific cost: the people who were just starting to notice you stop seeing you, and when their problem finally lands on their desk, you're not the one they think of. If the deeper worry is that work is slowing down right now and posting feels too slow, what to do first when work slows down comes before any posting strategy.
Leah's take
Real talk: have you ever read an Amazon review? Okay. Have you ever written one? That's the whole dynamic, and you're living it from the other side. You read, you evaluate, you decide, and you never say a word. Your potential clients use LinkedIn exactly the way you use Amazon. Most of the women I work with are lurkers themselves.
And I know what the silence does in your head. You're a woman who has been excellent at everything, and when you do the work and hear nothing back, you assume you got it wrong. That's not a character flaw. That's how high performers are wired, and it's head trash all the same. The silence is not a grade.
So keep going, judge it by the right signals, and let the lurkers do what lurkers do: read you for six months and then, one day, send the message that starts a real conversation.
The Academy is where I teach the whole system, with a room of women doing the same work.
