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Two weeks ago, I showed you how pocket culture is quietly breaking marketing.

Then I gave you The New Rules of LinkedIn — and promised to blow up and rebuild my own strategy in public.

Consider this Day 1.

For a couple weeks, my connection requests looked a little… off.

I noticed I was getting more small founders, consultants, and agency owners. Like, a lot more. 

Usually I’d get one or two here and there. But a couple of weeks passed, and this became the majority.  I'd wake up to 10 requests a day, almost all of them from the same crowd.

I didn't think anything of it at first. It’s social media, you get random requests. Life’s busy, you move on.

But then it crept into my comments too. The people showing up to my posts weren't the SaaS marketers and executives I write for.

And here's the weird part: I hadn't changed anything. Same topics, same posts, still writing for the same B2B marketers that I’ve focused on for years. But the crowd that used to show up had quietly been replaced — drifting from the people that I sell to toward the ones who wanted to sell to me.

It was like LinkedIn decided I wasn’t a B2B marketer anymore. It put me in the "founder and agency" group. 

The audience I wanted was slowly drifting out of reach, and every single day I was getting a little closer to the wrong one.

Remember what I told you last time: the interest graph doesn't care who follows you. It reads what your content is about, then decides which people to show it to.

It builds you a “pocket.” A universe of one, right there on the platform.

But it can also build you the wrong one.

When the graph looks at your profile and content, you end up in one of three buckets:

I’m currently misclassified. The graph had decided I was founder-and-agency content and started building me a pocket full of… founders and agencies. 

But here's why that's oddly good news.

"My reach is down" is a dead end. There's nothing you can do with that sentence.

But "I've been filed under the wrong heading" can be fixed. 

You can't open a dashboard and read your classification.

But the graph leaves fingerprints. Here are the three checks I used to catch my own misclassification. Run them for yourself this week.

Pull the viewer demographics in your Analytics tab. Look at your last 28 days — job titles, company size, seniority, and industries. 

Then (manually) look at who's liking and commenting on your posts.

Is it the same two or three types of people, over and over? Then the graph has a clear read on you, and it's matching you to a defined crowd. Good.

Or is it scattered — random titles, random industries, no pattern? Then it hasn't figured you out yet. You're unclassified, and your reach stays capped until that changes.

For me, it wasn't scattered. It was the opposite — a clear, consistent audience. Just the wrong one. The graph knew exactly who to send me to. It was just sending me to founders and agency owners instead of the marketers I wanted.

Scan your last ~20 posts and tag them by theme. Not what you meant to post about — what you actually did.

I use Stanley to automatically tag my content pillars, so I can see my real mix versus the strategy in my head. 

And here's where it got interesting (and uncomfortable):

Look at the top two by volume: Founder Wellness and Modern Content & AI. 100+ posts each.

Now look at Marketing Leadership & Executive Alignment — the thing I actually sell against. 29.

Every post is a signal telling the graph what to file you under. I'd sent it a hundred founder signals and thirty marketing ones — so of course it filed me as founder content.

So it misclassified me, and I accidentally did it to myself.

Does your real content mix match the thing you want to be known for? If it doesn't, you're not misclassified by some mystery algorithm. You're telling it the wrong thing, and it's listening.

Read your headline and your About section. Now read your last month of posts.

Would a stranger say they're about the same thing? Would a machine?

If your profile says one thing and your content says another, you're handing the graph two conflicting signals — and it responds by losing confidence in you across the board.

This one's a big deal, and it's the first thing I'm rebuilding. Next week I am going to share my profile audit, then completely rebuild my profile step-by-step. 

Diagnosing the problem is the easy part.

Fixing it is a strategy job, not a posting job. No amount of "post more" gets you out of the wrong pocket — you have to tell the graph, clearly and repeatedly, exactly what you are.

So here's the strategy I'm rebuilding on. There's more to the full system — the profile layer, the engagement habit, the cadence — but these are the five that matter most, and the ones I'm locking first.

Everything I do has to ladder up to one idea I want to own. Mine is content strategy.

I was tempted to chase shinier words — AI, the future of marketing, all the stuff getting attention right now. But content strategy is the thing I can actually own, the thing my buyers actually search, and the thing my business actually runs on. 

I’ve been building towards this for 5+ years. I refuse to give up that compounding value.

So it stays. Consistency over shiny.

Executive LinkedIn, B2B content strategy, thought leadership.

They all ladder up to content strategy. And just as important, they're things people know me for and that I sell. (Not clever phrases I coined.) The graph files you by the topics it recognizes, so I'm handing it three that it can't miss.

Note: I’ll pepper in "personal posts” that share my personality, things like dad life, sneakers, and golf too. Because my philosophy is that people follow the person, not just their expertise.

“Marketing to marketers” is too broad to be useful. The specific person I'm building for is what I call the VP-IC — the marketing leader who's senior but still does the work. Director, Senior Director, VP of Marketing at a B2B SaaS company. Accountable for the strategy, still in the craft.

My content will also attract adjacent people from CMOs to entry-level marketers, and that's totally okay. 

The graph won't index a job title. It indexes the topics those people care about — which is exactly why the three topics above are the targeting.

This is the one that ties back to everything I've been saying. I don't just want the VP-IC to see my stuff. I want them to walk away believing something they didn't before:

Every company creates content. Almost no one creates believers.

Sharing and getting my audience to buy into that belief system matters more than massive reach. Because the marketer who gets closest to one specific customer wins — not the loudest, not the biggest.

If I do this right, they don't just read me. They come around to a new way of thinking. 

This is the hard part. For the next ninety days, every post lives in one of those three topics. No trend chasing or clever detours, no matter how good the post would do.

That's how you teach the graph what you are. I need to prove it over and over until it has no choice but to file me correctly. 

I'll be honest: this is the part I'm dreading. I like the detours. But the whole point is I've been drifting, and drift is the enemy right now.

Over the next few weeks, I'm sharing my rebuild and the results (good or bad) to go with it.

Next up: rebuilding my profile from scratch. 

If you've felt that same drift — not attracting the right people and reach decreasing— next week's the one to read.

Holler at you next Saturday,
Devin

PS: It took me 6.5 hours to research, write, and edit this newsletter.

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Pen by Devin Reed​
​Founder, The Reeder​

Follow me on LinkedIn | YouTube | Instagram | TikTok

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