Reposts kill reach. Here’s why.

_{Day 90/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

Monday, 8:02 a.m.
I was still half-dreaming in HTML when I slammed the “Share” button on LinkedIn.

Same carousel.
Same caption.
Same everything I’d shipped last Thursday.

Result? Reach −47 %. 
Two polite likes (thanks Mum).

That’s when it hit me: repost culture doesn’t just feel lazy — it looks lazy to every algorithm in town.

I refresh my feed … and LinkedIn ghosts me

First clue: company pages are now lucky if they scrape 1–2 % of a user’s feed. LinkedIn’s 2025 algorithm straight-up prefers humans with hot takes over brands with boilerplate.

So when I reposted last week’s rant word-for-word, the algo yawned.

I tried again.
Same asset.
Added two fresh lines of context on the Google AI Overview chaos.

Bam: impressions almost doubled.

1. The “RT first, read never” trap

Hop over to X.
Twitter’s own open-sourced code shows that a reply is worth 27X a retweet in the “For You” feed scoring.

Translation: every naked retweet tells the algo (and your followers) you didn’t have the energy to think.

I learned that the hard way when I reflex-RT’d a fake “leaked Google doc” -twelve DMs corrected me before my espresso cooled.

Credibility? Bruised for a week.

2. Cross-posting? More like cross-poison

Instagram’s Reels team has said it out loud: videos carrying another platform’s watermark get down-ranked. 

Adam Mosseri confirmed it last week on his own reel.

I checked a friends social numbers:

• Raw TikTok repost 👉 3.2 % engagement

• Same clip re-shot natively 👉 9.4 %

Nine extra points for ten extra minutes. Bargain.

3. Google’s duplicate detector tightens the screws

Still think copy-pasting press releases is “efficient”? Google’s 2024 spam policy now lists “thin, duplicated, or low-quality content” as reason enough for algorithmic smack-downs.

In our crawl of 50 SaaS blogs, sites that relied on syndicated PR lost an average 18 % traffic month-on-month after the March core update. First-hand POV isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s rank insurance.

So when is a repost okay?

1. You add at least 10 % new oxygen—a counter-take, a dataset, a meme remix.

2. You remix the format
   thread → carousel,
   TikTok → GIF,
   press release → personal breakdown.

3. You credit + link the source. (Audiences despise thieves.)

Everything else? Have a match in hand and be ready to use it.

See you tomorrow with something original.

✌️ Tim "Burn after reading" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S.
I’m not saying don’t repurpose. I’m saying don’t sleepwalk.
If it didn’t take effort, it probably won’t earn attention.

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