<b>'Personal branding' is reach cosplaying as strategy</b>

<b>'Personal branding' is reach cosplaying as strategy</b>

Everyone says: "Build a personal brand and the audience — and the algorithm — will follow."

The claim: a consistent persona, a niche, a content pillar system, and reach compounds into authority.

What's actually true: LinkedIn's model has no concept of "brand." It scores individual posts on who engages and how. "Personal brand" is a useful idea for humans deciding whether to hire you — it's a positioning concept, not a distribution one. People conflate the two and then blame their "brand" when a post flops, instead of the post.

Credit where due — consistency of topic does help humans remember you, and memory drives the profile clicks that do feed reach. That's a slow human loop, not an algorithm switch.

Tested alternative: separate the two scorecards. Judge brand by inbound DMs and offers; judge posts by saves and reach.

It's not your brand the feed sees. It's one post at a time.