The women of LinkedIn are not okay

You may have noticed rumblings in your LinkedIn feed that women feel like their posts aren't reaching as far as they used to.

That their content looks like it's being suppressed.

Or worse, that fellow female thought-leaders are finding themselves banned, shut out of the platform for posting "political content." (By political we mean the word "woman," because that's the dumpster fire the U.S. is living in now.)

Earlier this summer, Erin Gallagher, founder of Ella and author of the upcoming book Hype Women, announced that she had canceled LinkedIn Premium and was taking her following of more than 80k readers to Substack after she noticed how much her organic reach had dropped.

You can read an entire thread of Cindy Gallop's efforts over the last few weeks to call out the deplatforming of women on LinkedIn. Search through the comments and you'll see many other women who've also noticed their post reach and follower counts have stagnated or even shrunk.

And a recent survey from UK-based CensHERship found that of 100 brands, medical educators, charities, and other creators in the women’s health and sexual wellbeing space, 95% had had their content censored on social media in the last 12 months.

How social media algorithms become a weapon

Some are quick to say this is just a bug in the algorithm; that it's misinterpreting women's sexual and reproductive heath content as pornographic. Or that some women's posts are just falling victim to the algorithm's formula:

• wrong time to post

• not enough engagement within the first hour

• link in the post instead of in comments

• no photo attached

Yes, every social media platform has (nearly the same) algorithm formula that determines how content shows up in our feeds, how far it reaches, and why. Time Magazine's recent article about how this works is fairly easy to follow, even though the sight of things like this:

Score = V_like × P_like + V_love × P_love + V_angry × P_angry + V_comment × P_comment + V_share × P_share

...gives me anxiety from the ghosts of math tests past.

But women's health topics aren't just being suppressed because the algorithm "accidentally" thinks the topic is NSFW. It's being suppressed because it's women thought leaders talking to other women about women's health.

The real formula that makes us vulnerable to being silenced online?

Woman creator + audience of women + topic advocating for women

I can't stress enough that all it takes is a little tweak, a -Vtopic if you will (clearly I am not a coder), to the algorithm's formula to shut you out completely. Not because you violated any rules, because you posted something inappropriate, or that you got hacked.

You can be shadow banned because you're talking about something people in positions of power don't want you talking about (women's financial independence). Your content can be suppressed because you're talking to an audience they don't want you to support (LGBTQ+ women, single moms, women of color, etc.)

Your entire life's work can disappear tomorrow if it only lives on a social channel because the platform owner's lost his damn mind and morals...I don't even need to name names here. You know.

You can be silenced just because you're a woman who's too visible, too influential, growing too powerful for someone else's comfort.

Overnight, your access to your audience, your platform, your financial pipeline can disappear. And it's why women especially have to build systems they own and control.

How not to lose your business to social media

You need to invest in a good website so your audience knows where to find you if you get banned from LinkedIn tomorrow. You need to take the time to collect email addresses, build your CRM, and engage your audience through email so you can still communicate with them no matter what an algorithm is or isn't doing.

These aren't sexy tactics and they take time to do well, which is why I think so much (bad) marketing advice people pass around sounds like "Just start posting on Instagram!" "Do lives and you'll build an audience!"

That might be faster, but it lacks strategy, is loaded with the wrong signals about what "doing well" looks like, and you're building on quicksand if you're skipping the foundational steps like a website, email marketing, and content marketing.

It's why I constantly tell women, especially women business owners, that they absolutely cannot make LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or any other social channel the primary plance where they connect with their audience, sell their products or services, and try to find new business.

And it's why I started my company, to put my almost 2 decades worth of marketing experience toward helping women market their businesses without social media. If you're a female business owner and you're realizing you're too exposed, too vulnerable to platforms you can't trust, let's talk.