Edward Ford: The Algorithm Is Not Your Audience
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
Edward Ford has spent much of his career helping B2B SaaS companies build demand, sharpen positioning and grow faster. He is currently VP of Marketing at Sellforte in Finland. Alongside his full-time role, Ford is also a co-founder of haamu.io, a business that helps founders and executives build a stronger presence on LinkedIn.
In this conversation, ahead of his appearance as a speaker at Parrot 2026, he speaks with Hando about thought leadership, the limits of LinkedIn vanity metrics, how to think about reach and relevance, and why consistency matters more than trying to outsmart the algorithm.
Why LinkedIn topic is such a big part of your work today?
I come at this from two angles. My main role is VP of Marketing at Sellforte, a SaaS company that provides marketing mix modelling and incrementality testing for consumer brands. Part of our playbook is getting our experts and leaders active on LinkedIn. We have very strong specialists, including people with consulting backgrounds, and our CEO is active too. I look at this as a marketing leader thinking about how LinkedIn fits into a wider growth playbook.
Then I also have another perspective through haamu.io, which I co-founded on the side. haamu.io helps founders, executives and company leaders build thought leadership on LinkedIn. It is a productised service. We work with clients to define their strategy, tone of voice, goals and topic pillars, and then turn regular interviews into a month’s worth of content.
So I see both the strategic side inside a company and the service side from outside.
On LinkedIn, what I mostly see is a platform dominated by consultants and coaches. You don’t see that many actual business leaders – CEOs, board members, senior operators – posting regularly. Instead, you see consultants selling to other consultants, and a lot of self-congratulatory posts from people announcing personal milestones. Is that your impression too?
I don’t think it’s only junior people doing that. You see it at senior levels too. But LinkedIn can also become a bubble, where you keep seeing the same type of content. If you step outside that bubble, there are actually many different people using it well.
What we are seeing more clearly now is a shift from brand-led marketing to people-led marketing. More marketing teams are building their go-to-market playbooks around the people inside the company. HubSpot is an obvious example. Many of their leaders and executives are active, and other companies are following the same model.
The obvious question then is: what is the connection between LinkedIn content and actual business growth? If a marketing leader asks for a budget to invest in executive visibility, founder content or a service like yours, the CFO will ask the same question every time: where is the ROI?
That depends very much on who the audience is and what they are trying to achieve.
For some, the goal is not sales at all. It might be industry influence, category education or even lobbying for change in a particular sector. For others, the goal is much more commercial. But even then, it is usually a long-term play.
This is where expectation-setting becomes critical. One of the things we learned early on with haamu.io was that we had not done a good enough job of managing expectations. Some customers assumed they would publish a post and immediately start getting leads. In reality, you need to show up consistently over time before you begin to see the effect.
I think the mistake is often not the activity itself, but the expectation attached to it. The time frame is too short, and the hoped-for result is too immediate.
Some LinkedIn consultants seem obsessed with algorithm hacks. They say things like: post on Tuesday at 9.30, structure your sentences in a certain way, use this format because the algorithm likes it. What is your view? How important is the algorithm really?
My view is that if you are creating content for the algorithm, then you are focusing on the wrong audience.
You should be creating content for the people you want to reach. Your audience, your ideal customer profile, the people you want to influence – that is the starting point. Then the next question is what you want the content to do. Is it building awareness? Is it shaping a category? Is it driving opportunities? You need to be clear on that first.
Of course, you should understand how the platform works and keep up with major changes. But it should stay in the background. You should not obsess over it or let it dictate every decision. The most important things are to show up consistently, understand your audience, and create content in a style that feels natural to you. If you become too fixated on the algorithm, you lose the plot.
Do you also see organic reach going down?
Yes, definitely. Over the past year, organic reach has become harder to get.
In the earlier days of LinkedIn, it was relatively easy to get visibility. Now the platform is more crowded. But again, I don’t think that should become an obsession. The more useful way to think about it is this: what do you want to be known for, and are you showing up regularly enough for the right people to associate you with that topic?
In many cases, it is better to be seen by a smaller, more relevant audience than by a huge number of people who are never going to buy from you or work with you.
There are also practical ways to build from that. If you see that a piece of content performs well organically, that can be a very good signal to support it with paid spend. Then you can combine organic testing with paid amplification and build a more structured LinkedIn content playbook around that.
So yes, reach is down. But I don’t think that is the most important thing to worry about.
What about formats? A few years ago there was a huge obsession with video. Now it seems less dominant. What is working today?
Right now, text with a strong image is performing well.
This changes over time. Video had a moment when LinkedIn clearly rewarded it more heavily, and you could get a lot of visibility very quickly. But again, the bigger question is whether that visibility was actually useful.
The key is to figure out what format suits you best. If you are good on camera, comfortable speaking, and enjoy video, then use it. If you are more comfortable writing behind a laptop, then write. The goal is not to force yourself into whatever format the platform appears to favour for a few months. It is to find a format you can sustain, that matches your strengths, and that helps you communicate clearly.
That matters more than chasing whatever the algorithm seems to want at a given moment.
