Growing an audience on 100 targeted comments a week
Eight months of engagement-only work during the worst year on record for LinkedIn reach. It netted just under 2,800 followers and put his profile in front of the right people most of the time. It also showed me exactly why one person should own the whole profile.
He runs an account-based marketing agency and does not have time to run his own LinkedIn presence. Reasonable. Most executives at his level don't.
The solution had been to divide the work. Someone wrote his posts, someone made his videos, and I handled engagement. My scope was comments, 75 to 100 a week, aimed at the accounts his agency wanted to reach.
Everyone involved was good at their piece. The problem was that no single person could see how the pieces affected each other.
This ran through the steepest decline LinkedIn has had. Any number from this period needs that context, so here it is.
The Algorithm Insights report published in October 2025 surveyed 395,000 personal accounts. A post that reached 10,000 impressions in February 2024 was reaching roughly 6,500 a year later, and about 3,500 by September 2025. That is a 47% drop in reach in seven months. A separate industry report covering 13 million posts found average engagement per post down 76%, with the median down 72%.
His year-over-year reach decline came in at 39%, about eight points better than the platform average. Not a headline, but worth knowing before anyone reads a growth number from 2025.
LinkedIn started reporting how often your profile appears across the platform, measured week over week. In June 2025 his account was showing up in the feed 84% of the time. By the end of the engagement that figure read 56%. Averaging across the period, his profile was in front of people more than 70% of the time, and that was coming from the comments rather than the posts.
On follower growth, engagement alone produced 12.3% over roughly 250 days on a base of 24,370. Just under 2,800 new followers, from commenting and nothing else.
If the posts had been pulling their weight over the same stretch, that number would likely have been double.
Commenting matters more on LinkedIn now than it ever has. It will grow your following and it will get you in front of specific accounts. What it will not do on its own is position you as the expert. That job belongs to the posts.
Which is the real lesson here. When one person handles engagement and someone else handles content, nobody can tell which lever moved the number. I could see feed presence climbing and had no control over what people found when they clicked through.
If you don't have time to run your profile yourself, give the whole thing to one person or one team. Posts, comments, and outbound messages together, so the person doing the work can see what is actually working and adjust.
Handing me the account does not mean giving up your own voice. I want you posting and commenting on your own whenever you feel like it. The one thing I ask for is a set window each week that belongs to me, where I log in, publish, and work the comments without us tripping over each other. Outside that window the account is yours, and I'll keep responding to replies through the day.
Seventy-five to a hundred good comments a week will grow an audience even in a year when reach is falling for everyone. That part is proven.
But engagement and content are one system. Split them across two vendors and you get two sets of results nobody can connect. Keep them together and every week teaches you something about the next one.