Is linkedin worth the effort anymore?
Everyone came back from summer complaining about LinkedIn. The reach has collapsed, the feed is full of AI slop, and the people who make their living on it are quietly wondering whether it's still worth the effort. So we asked the person best placed to answer.
The guest
Ash Jones is the founder of Great Influence and Ingo Company, and has spent a decade building the personal brands of some of the UK's best-known founders, including Stephen Bartlett and Gary Neville, alongside global brands such as Booking.com and Santander. He was also, as far as anyone can tell, the first person on LinkedIn with "personal brand manager" as a job title. On the question of whether LinkedIn is still worth it, he is genuinely torn.
Why LinkedIn fills with slop
Ash's diagnosis is that LinkedIn is the only platform where people post because they feel they have to rather than because they want to. Tell most users they're off work for five years and they'd never post again. Humans take shortcuts on things they don't enjoy, and that's where the AI content comes from. The flip side, he argues, is that anything genuinely interesting now stands out ten times more.
What LinkedIn is for now
Less a place to learn or find new people, more a place to stay front of mind with the people who already know you. Ash's new relationships now come from Instagram and TikTok, where a BBC reporter recently found him. Dan admits to deleting the app for a week over the summer, and that the posts that land for her are about being a mum and a founder rather than business.
Video, and getting over yourself
Stephen Bartlett's first video took seven hours to shoot for two minutes of footage. Practice is the whole story. Alice, a self-declared XY cusper, describes undoing a career's worth of keeping work and home separate: "You just basically have to get over yourself, I think, is the new world order."
The employee who becomes a media channel
The Catherine Turner effect at Marks and Spencer, why Ash thinks it will fatigue within three years, and what happens when an employee builds an audience the company can't replace. Ellie Middleton's exit from Great Influence, the On The Beach creator with 200,000 followers, and the new job title Ash predicts: brand ambassador.
Personal brand or creator?
Ash's cleanest reframe. If you are the business commercially, you're building a personal brand. If not, you're a creator, and "B2B creator" is a niche with guardrails. For founders who hate the term, he offers a better one: founder creator.
True or false, and the scenarios
Can everybody be an effective content creator? True. Then Ash answers for a 22-year-old graduate who isn't a natural creator, a fifty-something leaving corporate life to build a portfolio career (write for the hundred people closest to you), and an experienced creator wondering how much AI is acceptable.
The magic wand
Ash would make LinkedIn video first, whether its users like it or not. Alice starts pricing Botox.
Find Ash
Website: greatinfluence.com
LinkedIn: Ash Jones
TikTok and Instagram: Ash Jones
The website and handles are as Ash gave them at the end of the recording. Worth confirming the exact TikTok and Instagram handles with him before this goes up.
