LinkedIn has finally killed Broetry...good-bye and good riddance...

I have never been a fan of anything that smacks of a fad or "flavour of the month". Don't blame me. It's how I was raised. So while many LinkedIn members, including me, struggled to get the content they posted on LinkedIn status updates viewed, some members have had a great deal of success with "broetry". I took a stab at it just to see what would happen. My most successful status update generated over 60,000 views and 0 dollars in revenue.

The term "broetry" was first coined by Buzzfeed reports   Ryan Mac and  Alex Kantrowitz and it stuck...

• People Are Flooding LinkedIn With Strange Stories. We’re Calling Them Broetry.

In case you don't know what it is, broetry refers to the long (annoying) haiku-like status updates that have been dominating our LinkedIn feeds. You know, one sentence paragraphs ending with. Do you agree? 

Broetry helped Oleg, Brigette, Josh, and many others build super-networks on LinkedIn.  (Josh is  a businessman experimenting with the best approach to market his growing business. I enjoy Brigitte's posts so I also don't put her in the pseudo-influencer category either.)

I have previously weighed in on LinkedIn pseudo-influencers and what I have recently dubbed LinkedIn bikini babes who have majored in this format.

• LinkedIn and the Tinder Effect

• LinkedIn and the Tinder Effect....Knock it off Already! (on beBee)

...and now, 3 1/2 months after the term was coined, it's gone.

Josh Fetcher, a major broetry trendsetter, sounded the death knell on March 1st.

• LinkedIn Wants to Put an End to Broetry in Favor of This

I missed the memo but Oleg, Brigette, and other LinkedIn influencers didn't. Their status updates now use a minimalist approach. It's as if they all switched at once. Did they message each other and say "Time for a change?" Many influencers now have mega-networks of 30,000 connections so wherever they pivot, the platform will shift too.

It reminds me of this scene from The Beatles' cult classic A Hard Day's Night.

http://www.askdennisbrown.com/itunes

As for broetry, I am glad to see it go.  In my opinion, anything that smacks of "flavour of the month" and "style over substance" is to be abhorred. Content should stand on its own merit. It should be free from suppression by artificial algorithms that keep us all chasing our tails trying to figure out what to try next. But, just like the rest of us, social media channels are in business to make money. So the algorithms will continue until we all cry "uncle" and pay to play. 

Sure, I'll continue to post but my rate of posting has and will continue to dwindle across all platforms.

Very few have figured out how to crack the code and successfully use social media for our own marketing efforts, especially in the B2B space. Even those who do figure it out find that they have to keep shifting their approach or watch their views plummet. 

"I went from averaging 5,000 engagements per a long-form post to 300!

At first, I thought it was just me.

Then they rolled out these changes to many influencers on LinkedIn –

Reducing their reach by upwards to 90 percent!"

Josh Fetcher

The time and effort it takes to figure this out would be far better spent on marketing strategies that put us directly in touch with our target market. Traditional marketing methods are more expensive but also a whole lot more effective and less frustrating than trying to "pick sense out of nonsense" as we Jamaicans like to say.

I would be remiss if I didn't end this post with:

"Do you agree?"

Anne Thornley-Brown, MBA is the President of Executive Oasis International, a Toronto based consulting firm specializing in the design and facilitation of team building, executive retreats, and meetings. Anne has been blogging for major portals including Cvent, Plan Your Meetings by MPI, Event Manager Blog, and The Huffington Post since 2011. She has written many posts about B2B social media marketing strategies.

Photo Credit:  Clay Junell (Flickr)

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