For episode 58 of A Guy With A Scarf, summer edition, I spoke with Dani Markovits. Dani joined LinkedIn in 2021 as one of its first creator managers, back when the company was still working out what that job even meant. He stayed four years. Now he is CCO at Shake Content, a LinkedIn agency. Very few people have watched this platform change from inside the building and from the outside the way he has.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dani-markovits/
His main point lands early. LinkedIn stopped being the place you open only when you want a job. Ten years ago almost everyone logged in for one reason, to hire or to be hired. Today Dani sees people scrolling it on the bus like TikTok. His own wife uses it that way. The platform became a mix of social feed, job market, and the room where professional conversations happen.
Dani kept returning to one word: intention. People arrive on LinkedIn ready to connect, to network, to talk about a partnership. That mindset explains why direct messages work there. Send someone a business message on Instagram and you interrupt their NBA highlights. Send it on LinkedIn and you reach them while they are already thinking about work. Trust sits underneath all of it, and Dani sees that trust as specific to the platform.
We talked about the people who complain when a feed drifts into memes, family, or football. Dani’s take is that you earn the right to speak about other things. Keep your core expertise as the anchor, then let personality show through.
“If you only share memes, if you only talk about music or about food, I don’t think that’s a recipe for success,” he said. Complement the expertise with the human side and it works. As he put it, in Latin cultures “we connect with that.” The flavor is the point.
When Dani pushed sport internally at LinkedIn, colleagues were not convinced it fit the platform. Externally it was harder. Athletes told him LinkedIn was “for boring people.” That narrative has flipped.
The reason is that athletes are multifaceted. They want to invest, sit on boards, build companies, promote their causes. LinkedIn is the platform where the audience actually wants to hear about the life beyond the pitch. In Dani’s words, they “don’t wanna be known only as the tennis guy or as the football lady.”
Something else struck him. Famous athletes are more hands-on here than anywhere else. On Instagram the noise is too loud and their agencies filter everything. On LinkedIn the athletes read the comments themselves, because the quality of the audience is different and they are speaking straight to decision-makers.
I saw this in a bar in Torino. Alex Del Piero sat at the table in front of me, in remarkable shape, talking for a couple of hours about family, business, investments, and cinema. Close to zero football. That is exactly the version of themselves athletes bring to LinkedIn.
One line from Dani belongs on a wall for every person chasing follower counts. “You don’t need a huge audience.” What matters is who you get in front of. He has seen athletes with small followings do very well, because they translate what happens in the locker room into something any professional can use. Small and precise beats large and vague.
The biggest recent change, in Dani’s reading, is that LinkedIn measures who is posting alongside what they post. The platform is trying to judge whether the author has the credibility and earned experience to speak on a topic.
His example was sharp. Take one post about football, word for word, published by me and published by him. It should travel further from me, because the signals say I have the standing to say it. “It matters the credentials, it matters the earned experience,” he said.
The result surprises people who only watch impressions. Reach can drop. Engagement holds or improves. Better matching produces better comments, better connections, better conversations. That is the actual product working the way it should. Dani sees the same thing in his own feed, fewer impressions and stronger replies.
Dani ran through the recent moves. A creator marketplace that matches brands with creators natively, work that used to require third-party tools. Native video monetization that lets some voices earn the way they would on YouTube. A call-out feature people had been asking for. Brands now understand that creators and experts drive the conversations and the decisions, and that in B2B those people live on LinkedIn. He believes the direction is right, with plenty still to build, and he thinks LinkedIn coasted for years on a near total absence of competition.
Shake Content’s premise is that LinkedIn is becoming the most important channel in business, and that it stays early despite feeling crowded. Dani pointed to a stat he keeps returning to. The share of people who actually post is in the low single digits, far below other platforms. Room to stand out remains wide open.
The agency works with founders, executives, and athletes on credibility, positioning, and visibility. The method puts the person first and treats the company page as secondary. Dani frames the work as running “through the lens of the face, not through the logo.” People want to hear from the ones doing the work in the background.
We closed on why companies hesitate. The old objection is that an employee builds their own brand at the company’s expense. Dani calls that the wrong lens. He talks about brand equity and benefit from association. If your employee builds a quality audience, the company gains from the connection whether or not the content ever mentions the company. His arc for the market runs like this. Four years ago firms were against employees posting. Then they went ambivalent. Now they push employees to post and even hire people based on their LinkedIn activity. “The best people suited to speak about your company is your own employees,” he said. Cheaper, and more impactful.
His honest caveat came right after. Anybody can do this. Not everybody should. Companies need a framework to scale it, and employees need to play the long game. There is no shortcut.
Dani ended the episode with news. After years of telling other people to launch newsletters, he finally launched his own, “LinkedIn/actually,” a nod to Love Actually. He stopped overthinking it and shipped edition one, a personal piece about why he started and a way to hold himself accountable.
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/linkedin-actually-7477679459437850625/
My position after this conversation is clear. LinkedIn rewarding credibility over raw reach is the healthiest move the platform has made in years. It favors people who know their subject and show up as themselves. That is a game worth playing well.
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