I looked at an MSP’s LinkedIn page the other day and immediately felt bad.
Not tragic bad. More like “you were picked last for the kickball team in gym class” bad.
They were posting two or three times a week. Good-looking graphics. Cybersecurity tips. Blog links. The whole deal. Somebody was clearly trying.
And every post had exactly one like.
Same person every time.
Their marketing manager.
Who wrote the post!
Now, I’m not judging the marketing manager. I’d like my own post too. Nothing wrong with supporting the cause. The problem is when your employee is the entire audience.
So I kept scrolling.
A few posts had more than one like, but those came from the same little cast of characters. Other MSPs. A vendor rep. A distributor. Maybe Steve in Cleveland, who also owns an MSP and likes to comment “Great reminder!” on every cybersecurity post he sees because some other “guru” told him to comment on other people’s posts.
That’s the LinkedIn engagement wasteland. Either nobody sees it… or the wrong people do.
And I see this constantly with MSPs. They’re posting. They’re being consistent. They’re doing what some webinar, consultant, or enthusiastic marketing person told them to do. But it’s not turning into conversations. It’s not creating leads. It’s certainly not making the phone ring.
This is activity… NOT accomplishment.
Most of the time, it comes down to three mistakes.
Mistake #1: You’re Writing To Other MSPs
This is the big one.
Most MSPs sit down to write a LinkedIn post and naturally write about what’s interesting to them. Supply chain attacks. Zero trust. Cyber resilience. Compliance frameworks. Ransomware. All the stuff we like to talk about because we live in this world every day.
Other MSPs find it interesting because they’re you. Vendors find it interesting because they sell to people like you. Your marketing manager finds it interesting because she wrote it and would like to remain employed.
But your actual buyer?
Crickets…
The CFO at the manufacturing company down the street does not wake up thinking, “I need to improve our cyber resilience posture.” She wakes up thinking, “Why is payroll broken again?”
The dentist doesn’t care about “the evolving threat landscape.” He cares about not hearing from his practice manager on Monday morning complaining that the printer doesn’t work and the WiFi is down… again. And he definitely doesn’t want to call patients on a Sunday because their records were leaked.
The business owner doesn’t want servers, cloud services, backup, cybersecurity, or compliance. Not really. They want their business to keep running. They want their employees to stop complaining. They want to avoid getting hacked, sued, fined, embarrassed, or fired.
That’s what they care about.
You’re talking about products you sell. You need to talk about the problems you solve.
So when you post something like “Another Day, Another Supply Chain Attack,” you might get Steve in Cleveland to hit like. But Steve is not your prospect.
Your prospect is scrolling right past it because it’s about as interesting as reading the owner’s manual to your vacuum, in Chinese.
The One-Sentence Test
Here’s the test: Can you say, in one sentence, what specific problem your post solves for one specific kind of buyer?
If not, you probably wrote it for another MSP.
Mistake #2: You Keep Sending People Off LinkedIn
This one feels professional.
You write a little teaser, then end with “Read more here” and link back to your blog. Or your YouTube video. Or your webinar registration page. Or some landing page your web guy is very proud of because it has a button that changes colors when you hover over it.
I get why people do this. For years, the advice was, “Drive traffic back to your website.”
And that made sense.
Sort of.
But LinkedIn wants people to stay on LinkedIn. Shocking, I know. A platform wanting users to stay on the platform. Who could have guessed?
So when your post says, “Hey LinkedIn, thanks for gathering all these people. I’m now going to send them somewhere else,” LinkedIn has very little reason to show that post to more people.
It’s like inviting prospects into your office and then letting another vendor stand by the door trying to pull them back outside. You wouldn’t love that either.
Most People Aren’t Clicking The Link Anyway
Not because they hate you. Because they’re standing in line for coffee, half-reading your post, checking the time, thinking about an email they forgot to send, and wondering if their kid has soccer tonight.
They are not in “deep research mode.”
They are in “scrolling while distracted” mode.
So if the good stuff is hidden behind a link, most of them will never see it.
Put the value in the post. If you wrote a blog, pull the best idea out and make that the post. If you recorded a video, upload it directly to LinkedIn. If you have a checklist, give away a few useful points right there.
Make the post valuable without requiring extra work.
Mistake #3: You Hit Publish And Walk Away
This is the MSP specialty.
Write it. Schedule it. Publish it. Disappear.
Basically treating LinkedIn like a fax machine. If you’re under 30, fax machines were basically text messages that got printed out.
Send the thing and hope the right person reads it.
That is not how this works.
LinkedIn is not really business-to-business. It’s business person-to-business person. People don’t want to interact with your logo. They want to interact with a human being.
The owner. The salesperson. The account manager. The person who actually has a point of view, a face, a name, and preferably a pulse.
But most MSPs post from the company page, walk away, and wonder why nothing happens. Then when someone does comment, they respond three days later with, “Thanks for sharing!”
Outstanding.
Really bringing the heat there.
Engagement Requires Engaging
If you want engagement, you have to engage.
I know. Annoying how that works.
After you post, stick around for a few minutes. Like your own post. Yes, really. Drop a first comment with something useful you didn’t include in the post. Reply to anyone who comments. Go like a few posts from local businesses, clients, prospects, or referral partners.
Leave a couple of comments that prove you are, in fact, a living person and not a scheduled content robot wearing khakis and a polo.
You don’t need to spend your life on LinkedIn. Please don’t.
But you do need to give the post a chance to breathe.
Ten minutes can make a big difference. If you don’t have ten minutes after posting, don’t post yet.
The Real Problem Isn’t LinkedIn
The real problem is not that LinkedIn “doesn’t work.”
That’s what people say when they’ve been posting into the void for six months and Brenda from marketing is still the only person clapping.
LinkedIn can work. But not if you’re writing for peers instead of prospects. Not if every post is trying to drag people off the platform. Not if you publish and vanish like you’re tossing a message in a bottle into Lake Michigan.
The fix is not MORE content.
It’s BETTER content.
More human content. More prospect-focused content. More useful content that lives where the reader already is.
And then, after you post it, act like a person in a conversation with another person. Reply. Ask a question. Add something useful.
Crazy, I know.
Next Week: The Fix
Next week, I’ll show you the simple system we’re using to fix this.
One blog post. Three LinkedIn posts. A short engagement routine.
No 14-post-a-week content treadmill. No hashtag bingo. No pretending a stock photo of a hacker in a hoodie is going to make a business owner stop scrolling.
For now, pull up your last five LinkedIn posts and run the test.
Were they written for your buyer?
Did the value live in the post?
Did you stick around after publishing?
Or did your marketing manager like it at 9:04 a.m. and the whole thing died quietly before they finished their second cup of coffee?
No shame.
Just don’t confuse posting with marketing.
