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Buying posts on linkedin pages just opened my eyes about it

★★★ signal-strong   r/smallbusiness  ·  ↑ 452  ·  💬 45  ·  2026-01-17  ·  kw: automate review reply  ·  open on reddit ↗
your rating:
Tool
LinkedIn
Issue
Paid influencer posts on LinkedIn generated 3,500 likes and 500 comments across 6 posts ($150 spend) but zero website referrals, zero visitor conversions, and zero DM responses from commenters, indicating engagement metrics are artificially inflated by bot activity.
Cost
$150
Recommendation
none
Date context
2026-01-17
extracted with
anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 · 2026-05-08

Body

As a "founder" in my job title, I attracted several people asking to share and promote my business to their linkedin fanbase. Some were cheap, starting at $100 but I noticed these people were hungry so I got a few to tone it down to as low as $20 per post. So these guys have profiles with 10k-100k followers, and I notice they're quite active so I bite, because I just want to try it out and I can afford it. So these guys start sharing my business, their posts explode with 300-500 likes, the comments are basically what I read on linkedin posts every day, interests, questions, some snarky replies as well. Pretty authentic. Lots of marketers, software devs So I start answering some of these people, and nothing. Even the "heavily interested" commenters lead to zero responses. I check my website analytics, zero referrals from linkedin, literally. Total spent: $150 Total posts: 6 Total likes: \~3500 Total comments: \~500 Visitors in page: 0 Conversions: 0 DM responses from "interested people": 0 It's literally bots. Bots everywhere. Now I'm thinking, even the most authentic looking linkedin thread is just a bunch of bots who have automated their linkedin to take the thread into context and create a comment. Might even close linkedin now as well as pull off my business page from it.