Echo Chambers

A lot of executives I work with treat their LinkedIn feed like a market research department. They scroll it over coffee, see what’s trending, read a few takes on a competitor’s launch, and walk into the day feeling briefed. I get the appeal. It’s fast, it’s free, and it feels like the pulse of the market.

The problem is the feed isn’t built to inform you. It’s built to keep you there. The algorithm serves whatever holds your attention, which is usually what confirms what you already believe or what makes you mad enough to keep reading. What feels like market intelligence is closer to a slot machine that pays out in real information just often enough to keep you pulling the lever.

And the people generating what you see aren’t your market. Pew found that the most active 25 percent of U.S. adults on Twitter produced 97 percent of all the tweets . Every platform has some version of that curve. A small, loud slice of users generates almost everything in your feed, and they’re the least representative people on it. The customers who quietly pay your invoices and never post are invisible in that stream. So is most of what’s actually moving your market.

That distortion shows up in a few places that cost you real money. The most obvious is your read on customers. The loudest voices dominate your sense of what people want, and the loudest voices are a sliver of the people who keep you in business, so you end up optimizing for the segment that posts instead of the segment that pays. Your read on competitors warps the same way. Social shows you what a rival wants seen, or what’s entertaining to argue about, while the threats that matter tend to develop quietly and off-platform. By the time a move is generating buzz, you’re reacting to it instead of seeing it coming.

Then there’s timing. The feed moves fast, so everything feels urgent. But speed in the conversation isn’t speed in the market. Something can trend hard this week and mean nothing to your customers next month, and trading real evidence for that manufactured urgency is how you make a premature move you can’t walk back.

What to do instead

None of this means log off. It means knowing what the feed is and refusing to let it stand in for the work.

Start by being honest about where your read on the market actually comes from. If you added it up, how much is direct customer contact, sales data, and independent research, and how much is just scrolling? Most people are more influenced by the scroll than they’d admit, and you can’t correct for a bias you won’t name.

Then go get the inputs the algorithm can’t give you. Talk to customers directly, including the ones who never post a word online. Sit in on the sales debriefs and read the reports your team is already producing. When the feed suggests a trend or a threat, treat it as a hypothesis instead of a fact, and make it earn a second source before you move money or people behind it.

The dangerous part of all this isn’t the bad information. It’s the confidence. The feed hands you the feeling of being well-informed while quietly filtering out anything that might challenge what you already think. You walk away certain, and the certainty is the problem.

Social media can supplement the real work. It can’t replace talking to customers, reading your own numbers, and asking your team hard questions. Skip those and you’re not really running the business. You’re letting an algorithm decide what you get to see, and calling it strategy.