The LinkedIn EGO Theater vs Outbound Email and F2f Meetings
If you listened to LinkedIn about LinkedIn, you’d think it’s single-handedly driving the entire B2B economy.
Every day:
“Post more.”
“Comment more.”
“Build your personal brand.”
“DM people at scale.”
I use LinkedIn. I’ve landed real conversations, real relationships, and real opportunities there.
But here’s my take:
LinkedIn is great for ego, visibility, and narrative. It is not your whole B2B growth engine. Email is still #1. And nothing beats face-to-face conversations.
LinkedIn Is a Stage, Not a Sales Funnel
LinkedIn is phenomenal for:
Signaling expertise
Staying top-of-mind with your network
Sharing your point of view at scale
Showing social proof (clients, wins, stories)
But it’s still mostly theater.
People are scrolling between meetings, half-distracted, half-posturing. The algorithm rewards engagement, not necessarily intent. A “like” from a VP of Sales feels good, but it’s not the same as that VP blocking 30 minutes to actually talk about their pipeline.
Use LinkedIn to:
Test angles and messages
Tell stories that make your brand feel human
Warm up cold names before they ever see your email
But don’t confuse content performance with business performance.
Email Is Still #1 (Because It’s Still Intimate)
Email is not sexy. It doesn’t give you dopamine in the form of likes and comments.
That’s exactly why it works.
Email drops into a space people still treat as semi-private. It feels one-to-one even when it’s one-to-many—especially if you actually write like a human.
Email is where you can:
Go deep on a problem
Make a clear ask
Follow up without an algorithm throttling you
Segment and personalize around real buyer personas and their FBMs
Most B2B revenue still quietly flows through:
Sequences
Newsletters
Targeted one-to-one messages
Follow-up threads and forwards
If your LinkedIn is loud but your email is lazy, you’re playing the game backwards.
Face-to-Face Still Wins (And Always Will)
The hierarchy for B2B in my head looks like this:
Face-to-face conversation
Live video call
Thoughtful email
Social content
Face-to-face is undefeated:
You can read the room
You can adjust in real-time
You can see who actually has power and who’s just attending
You build trust much faster than any “personal brand” carousel
A single honest, in-person conversation with the right champion is often more valuable than six months of posting into the void.
Use digital channels to earn the right to that conversation. But don’t let them replace it.
Bottom line:
LinkedIn is a microphone.
Email is a conversation.
Face-to-face is a relationship.
Use all three. But don’t mistake the loudest channel for the most valuable one.
