Lilach Bullock was Dean Seddon’s guest on Episode 78 of the Expert In Demand Podcast, published on 3 July 2026. Dean, who hosts the podcast at deanseddon.io, titled the episode with a line Lilach says about halfway through: “The truth is I hate social media now.” The 46 minute conversation is two long-time LinkedIn people comparing notes on what has changed since the early days, and it lands on three points. Content alone will not sell for you any more, because everyone is selling and very few are buying. Engagement is a game the platforms win, so judge the channel by money in the bank, not by likes. And the only safe place to build is on assets you control, an email list and a website. The video is embedded below, followed by the key takeaways, a summary of the conversation and a cleaned transcript.
Watch on YouTube: Ep 78: “The Truth is I hate social media!” with Lilach Bullock. Dean’s site is deanseddon.io.
Key takeaways
- The social media gold rush is over. Lilach was an early adopter, listed by Forbes in 2013 as the 14th most powerful social media influencer, and she is open that the results she got then came from being first to a quiet room. Reach on a Facebook page used to be everyone who liked it; now it is around 1 percent if you are lucky.
- The people blowing up on LinkedIn right now are mostly people who teach LinkedIn. High engagement is the shop window for them, so they have to keep it high, and much of it comes from engagement groups. Big reach does not mean money in the bank.
- Lurkers are the buyers. Almost everyone liking and commenting on a big creator’s post is doing it to get likes and comments back. If you want to know whether a channel works, count enquiries and revenue, not reactions.
- Do not put your business at the mercy of one platform. Dean has built an email list of hundreds of thousands from LinkedIn since 2016 precisely because reach can be cut at any time; Lilach’s website carried her through COVID and still drives her income. Build assets you control.
- Experiment and watch the numbers. Lilach posts three or four times a week now rather than daily, sees the same engagement at weekends with less effort, and would rather spend the time a carousel takes on an evergreen blog post because it keeps paying.
- Both expect more pay to play across every network, and Lilach expects social to go full circle back to smaller networks and communities, because nobody can build or remember hundreds of real relationships.
How Lilach got here
Dean asked for the short version of her story. She started 19 years ago as a virtual PA in England before the term existed, sold that business within two years, and was invited to Downing Street for a best entrepreneur of the year award. She then raised money for a social media marketing tool that never shipped, complete with a launch party in Chelsea, and says the failure is what pushed her into tech. From there she ran a digital marketing and social media agency for clients around the world, pivoted into content and online PR, and after the 2013 Forbes listing worked with brands including IBM, Oracle, Twitter and Forbes itself. Until COVID she was also a professional speaker. Today she consults on digital marketing and website conversion, and her own website, where she reviews tools and publishes constantly, drives income of its own. If you want the fuller version of the pivots, it is in her Monday Motivation Spotlight episode.
Content alone will not do it
Dean said he has been telling people for months that content on its own is not reliable or predictable: the algorithm gets in the way, and the real work is a mix of content, engaging people and starting conversations. He quoted a piece asking whether social media content is a pyramid scheme, and a Goldman Sachs estimate that of roughly 50 million content creators the average earns about 50,000 dollars a year, with only the top 1 percent above 100,000. Lilach agreed that the creators generating the most engagement are the ones selling social media help, and that nobody can tell from outside whether it produces revenue. Her advice for listeners: do not compare yourself to what other people are getting, because the magic happens in relationships, and the biggest change she sees is that the majority of people on social media are selling and very few are buying. That is the same argument she makes in what a social media marketing strategy has to do in 2026.
Pods, AI comments and who is really winning
Both were blunt about engagement groups. Dean does not mind people helping each other if they are honest about it, but objects to influencers who condemn pods publicly and then email their list or Slack channel with every post. Lilach called the “rules” a load of nonsense made by people who are not true business owners: every successful entrepreneur she has worked with in 20 years has been a maverick. On AI comments the two disagreed. Dean finds them a plague, all optimism and exclamation marks. Lilach argued that AI lets people who cannot write well or do not have time join the conversation, that most people comment to get something back anyway, and that in time you will not be able to tell who is using it. She was honest that she comments because she wants people to see her profile.
Own your assets
The point they agreed on hardest is that no business should rely on a tech company for its survival. Dean, with over 60,000 followers, said LinkedIn could restrict or remove his account tomorrow, so from 2016 he built an email list through lead magnets and a team of about 35 LinkedIn coaches doing the same. Lilach said she has argued for years that you should create and control your own assets: an email list, and a website, which saved her during COVID. That is the thinking behind her guide to growing on LinkedIn as a B2B founder without depending on the feed. They also covered LinkedIn’s new limit on personalised connection notes for free accounts, the drift of every network towards subscriptions as ad growth slows, and why the quality of relationships will matter more than volume.
What she is doing now, and where social goes next
Lilach is still posting and still experimenting: daily for a stretch, now three or four times a week, with weekends performing as well as weekdays for less effort. Carousels get reach but no extra messages, so she would rather write a blog post that keeps working. Neither of them has cracked groups; Dean gets huge impressions from LinkedIn groups but finds them almost impossible to build community in, and Lilach’s Facebook group cost her a VA to manage and lost a thousand members in a week when she started tagging everyone. She expects big changes in the next few years: more pay to play, more people leaving frustrated, and a return to smaller networks and communities. Dean added Instagram’s own admission that more content is now shared in DMs than in feeds. If you run a small business and are trying to work out where the hours should go, her marketing strategy for solopreneurs with no time is the practical version, and the relationship-first approach they both describe is laid out in how LinkedIn social selling works when you do it by hand.
Frequently asked questions
What does Lilach Bullock talk about on Expert In Demand Episode 78?
How social media has changed since she was an early adopter, why the people winning on LinkedIn today are mostly people teaching LinkedIn, why engagement is not the same as revenue, whether engagement pods and AI comments matter, why she believes lurkers are the buyers, why every business needs an email list and a website it controls, and why she thinks social media is heading back towards smaller networks and communities.
Does Lilach Bullock really hate social media?
She says she still uses social media for business, but that she hates what it has become: noisy, saturated, a time suck, with everyone saying the same things and a return that shrinks every month. She took a two week digital detox, enjoyed it, and used the time to create content for her own website, which she says brings her a real return.
When was the episode published and how long is it?
Episode 78 of the Expert In Demand Podcast with Dean Seddon was published on YouTube on 3 July 2026 and runs for about 46 minutes.
Full transcript
Cleaned and condensed from the episode’s auto-generated captions. Filler and crosstalk removed, obvious caption errors fixed, meaning kept. Lines are attributed to Dean or Lilach only where the speaker is clear.
Dean: Good afternoon everybody, welcome to the podcast. I am Dean Seddon, and I am here with Lilach Bullock. I have known her for what seems like forever on LinkedIn, but we have only chatted in the last year or so. We are going to put the world to rights on all sorts of things. Lilach, do you want to tell us a little bit about your journey and give people an intro?
Lilach: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be chatting to you, especially about LinkedIn. I started my business journey 19 years ago, so I’m showing my age. I started as a virtual PA when there were no virtual PAs, back in England, and I sold the business within two years. We had offices, I went to Downing Street for best entrepreneur of the year, and had quite a lot of success. On the back of that I launched a social media marketing tool which was an epic fail. Very long story, but I raised a lot of money and the product never came to fruition. I even had a big launch party in Chelsea with high-profile business people and celebrities. It was supposed to be the next big thing and it wasn’t. But what it did do was catapult me into the tech space. I launched a digital marketing and social media agency, worked with clients all over the world, a lot of tech companies, and then gradually pivoted from digital marketing into a content and online PR agency. In 2013 I was listed in Forbes as the 14th most powerful social media influencer, and that transformed my career and my business overnight. I was able to work with large brands like IBM and Oracle. I’ve worked with Forbes and written content for them, and Twitter, when it was still called Twitter. So I went down the influencer path, and up until COVID I was also a professional speaker, travelling all over the world talking about everything from digital and content to website conversion and business best practice. Fast forward to today and I still do a lot of consulting: digital marketing, website conversion, anything to do with online marketing. And I have my website, which drives me an income. I review lots of different tools and tech.
Dean: It’s interesting that we have both been in the social media world since it started, and it has evolved massively. I often say the gold rush is over on social media, in the sense that a lot of the stuff that was easy has been done and now it is a lot tougher. What have you noticed has changed over the last 13 or 14 years?
Lilach: I love that and I totally agree. Just the other night a friend was talking about her Instagram and struggling to get more followers, and I said, well, you need to be commenting and doing all these things, and she said, oh my God, that is going to take me hours. Yes, exactly. I’m very honest and open that I could not duplicate my success today. It was because I was an early adopter. When you are first to the party, when it is less saturated, less competitive, less noisy, it is a breath of fresh air. Do you remember back in the day with Facebook fan pages? You could message all the people who liked your page and everyone saw your posts. Now the reach is 1 percent if you are lucky.
Dean: Everybody said Facebook groups were game changing and now they are ghost towns. Everything gets harder the more it develops.
Lilach: And we have seen such fast growth because of COVID, which put everybody online, and there have been so many layoffs, particularly in tech, so a lot of people are creating businesses. The last three to four years have totally transformed things. It is so competitive and so noisy, and I feel sad for brands and entrepreneurs who do not already have a following or a network, because it is really challenging to get results. Getting an ROI, as in money, which is what we all want, is really tough online today.
Dean: I’m prolific with my LinkedIn content, but for the last few months I have been telling people that content alone will not do it. It is not reliable, it is not predictable, the algorithm can get in the way. It is a mix of content, engaging people and starting conversations. I read something recently, and you know when you read something and it hits you and you get almost offended? It was, “Is social media content a pyramid scheme?” The argument was that most of the people doing really well with social media content are people teaching people how to do social media content. Ignoring celebrities and the big entrepreneurs who have done something and got name recognition, the people blowing up on social media right now are people who help people with social media.
Lilach: Exactly. That is very true. What I’m seeing is that they are certainly generating more engagement. But we never truly know if it is generating an ROI for them. And they have to have high engagement, because otherwise they don’t look like they know what they are doing. It is a chicken and egg situation, and they are gaming it by being part of, a lot won’t say pods, but it is certainly an engagement group. Let’s be honest.
Dean: Some of these influencers are saying you shouldn’t do this, you shouldn’t do that, taking high moral stands, and behind the scenes all the influencers are backing each other up. But when a small business owner decides to ask five or six people to help their posts out, they have a major issue with it.
Lilach: I think you and I are very aligned on this. I wrote a post recently about who makes these stupid rules. It is a load of nonsense and it is very unfair. And it highlights that these people are not true business owners. I’m a maverick, and I have worked with so many successful entrepreneurs and business owners over 20 years, and everyone I have worked with who is really successful has been a maverick. They don’t make rules like that. These people have gamed a system, they have a huge reach on the platforms, and it does not mean they are getting money in their bank.
Dean: I was with a group of people a week or two ago who have never posted in their lives, and they said, so what do I do now? I said, posting builds your visibility, that is great, but don’t rely on it. Go and build real relationships with your ideal customers, the people on the platform you can help, and let the content be a bit of awareness. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself to generate leads from content, because one day a post gets you 50 leads and the next day the same post barely gets 100 impressions. If you are building a business you need a system. Content is king in one sense, but if you can’t control who sees it, it is dangerous. And on your point about not knowing how much money people are making: I got my hands on a Goldman Sachs study. There are an estimated 50 million content creators on the planet, and the average earnings across all of them is 50,000 dollars a year. When it takes you 10 to 15 hours a week, an hour a day replying to comments and a couple of hours commenting on other people’s posts, you are doing all of that to make 50,000 dollars, about 37,000 pounds. The top 1 percent make more than 100,000. There is that warm feeling we get when a post does well, that dopamine rush, but when you translate it into a business model, salespeople who spam make more money than that. I’m not saying you should, but when you weigh them up, spamming makes more money.
Lilach: It is very true. They are chasing their ego. As an influencer I’m very aware of the whole ego stroking and vanity metrics. And I’m also aware that it is your lurkers that are your buyers. If I like and comment on a big creator’s post, I have no interest in buying from them, and probably 99 percent of the people liking and commenting are doing it purely to get the likes and comments back.
Dean: To steal the audience.
Lilach: Exactly. It is a silly game, and the only ones winning are the social networks, LinkedIn or whoever, because they get the boost. For all your listeners: don’t compare yourself to what other people are getting. It can be very disheartening not to get a huge reach, and as you say, the magic happens in building relationships. What is very different about social media now is that the majority of people are selling and not buying. That is the biggest change. It is very rare that I buy something on LinkedIn today. Everyone is selling, and how do you find the right person who can buy? That is where things get really tricky and why people get so disheartened. The numbers are so much bigger now. You have to reach out to so many more people, because everybody is selling and very few are buying.
Dean: That is where the power of building relationships kicks in, because when people are in buying mode it is about who they trust. And hopefully I’m not going to get grumpy here, but I have seen a degeneration in the quality of content on LinkedIn. A lot of it is nonsense. I have seen this post a million times; it is clear you are just playing a game. Everybody shares almost the same post because it performed for somebody else. Classic carousels, here are the 10 secrets. Serious people are not going to play with this. It feels like a lot of the content is marketing people selling marketing to marketers.
Lilach: Totally. And there is a lot of personal content as well. People are so desperate for reach that they post their baby or whatever to generate more engagement. It is a game. Everyone is liking and commenting on the carousels, but are people buying from them? That is the big challenge right now.
Dean: I said to somebody the other day, if you post lots of selfies and tell your life story on LinkedIn, people will know who you are but have no idea why. You will be the Paris Hilton of LinkedIn, famous but nobody knows why.
Lilach: I can think of so many really large creators, I won’t say names, and I have no idea what they do or how they help. And another sign is that there is nothing controversial, nobody is disagreeing, everyone is saying, oh yes, that is amazing. Is it? If I comment on something, I either comment because I love it and think it is high value, or I try to find things I disagree with, because I don’t want to be their fan club.
Dean: The worst one at the moment, and it is a bit of a plague, is the AI comments. They are all very optimistic, far too many exclamation marks. People are commenting for reach, not because they want to. I wouldn’t even mind if people said, right, I’m going to have a little group and we are all going to support each other’s posts. If they were honest about it. Somebody with 175,000 followers messaged me saying, “I’d love to connect and chat sometime, here’s my WhatsApp.” I naively thought they wanted to compare notes, and all I get from this person now is their WhatsApp broadcast of their LinkedIn post every day. No replies ever. I don’t mind helping and collaborating with people if it is based on a relationship. Some people have asked, do you condone pods? I don’t care, but at least be honest about it. Some influencers say don’t do it, don’t do it, and then they email their list saying here is my latest post, or send a Slack broadcast to their network. That is a pod too. People in glass houses.
Lilach: Totally. And on the AI comments, I disagree, and I’ll tell you why. Everyone is saying exactly what you are saying, but I think differently. There are a lot of people who don’t have the time and also can’t write that well. What AI is doing is allowing them to join the commenting. I think they should be smarter and more strategic about it, and make it less obvious. But if it means they can comment and engage, go for it. My point is that most people comment to get something back. It is very rare that someone comments just because. If I said to you, instead of spending an hour a day commenting you can spend an hour a day reading or walking or on the beach or with your family, what would you choose? We are commenting for selfish reasons, and I’m very honest about that. I’m commenting because I want people to see my profile.
Dean: It is a fair crack. When I’m teaching people to social sell, I tell them to comment on prospects’ posts to build a relationship. So you are right, everybody is commenting for their own benefit in some way. There will be some people who comment because they disagree or you gave them a great idea, but that is the minority.
Lilach: I think so. Look, I’m using social for business purposes. The truth is I hate social media now. It is so noisy, so busy, so saturated. Everyone is saying the same nonsense. It is a time suck, and the ROI is diminishing every month. You have to do more every month as well. I went on a digital detox a month ago for two weeks. I had reported someone on Facebook and Facebook restricted my account for two weeks, and I was upset and hurt at the time. But then I decided, because I normally repurpose my content across everything, that I would just take a two week digital detox. And I adored it. It was beautiful. I didn’t keep reaching for my phone the way you automatically do to check things. And I was able to create a ton of content for my website, which does bring me an ROI. I really enjoyed it and I’m going to do it again for sure.
Dean: I think we agree on the AI comments in the sense that there is no problem using AI as an aid, but if you use it blind it doesn’t look great, it looks overly optimistic. AI is just too cheery for me.
Lilach: People just need to get smarter at it, and eventually you won’t be able to tell who is using it and who isn’t.
Dean: Something you said has really hit home, because it is something I say despite doing social selling and LinkedIn: you do not want to put your business in a place where you are relying on a tech company for success. Whether that is Facebook, LinkedIn, X or TikTok. You need to build your network or your email list outside of the social media bubble. I’ve got 60-odd thousand followers right now. LinkedIn might fall out of love with me and I get disappeared. I lose my account, or my reach, or I say something and get restricted. We see that happening to other people, and if that happened my business would be done. That is why I have never put myself in a place where I’m reliant on the platform, the content or the algorithm to generate business. From day one on LinkedIn, back in 2016 when I first took it seriously, I have built an email list, and we now have nearly 300,000 people on it.
Lilach: That is awesome. How have you got to 300,000?
Dean: Prolific lead magnets. I had the choice of scaling with ads or scaling with people, and I decided to scale with people. Your classic LinkedIn trainer is a solopreneur with ad campaigns running. I hired full-time people and said, grow your network and do what I do. So I have about 35 LinkedIn coaches working with me full-time, all growing the email list and all teaching the same methodology.
Lilach: That highlights what you said earlier, that the people who perform best are the ones teaching others how to do it.
Dean: But what we have not done is make content the primary thing, because we know how vulnerable the business model would be if it was taken away. You have a lot of followers, I have a lot of followers, and we know the algorithm doesn’t let us reach all of them. If my business relied on that, I could find, as people have found on Instagram and Facebook, that reach gets cut and cut until you cannot make the same gains you made with the same number of followers two years ago.
Lilach: That is why a lot of people are leaving Facebook, or still using it but not as much, and why LinkedIn is now so saturated: it is the only network, along with YouTube, that is still performing for people. I have said for years, create your own assets and control them. It is really important to have an email list. I’m also a huge fan of having a website, and my website saved me during COVID. You are at the mercy of the platforms and they are always changing. Just this week LinkedIn changed personal connection requests so you can’t send a note with them, you just click invite. Did you see that?
Dean: Yes, I got confused by it at first. They are limiting the number of personalised messages you can send without a subscription, which will push some free accounts to pay if they want to use the platform. All social media is going that way, because ad money will only go so far. It will get harder. And it will be about the quality of the relationships you forge going forward, not the volume. That levels the playing field a little. You could put anything on LinkedIn in 2017 or 2018 and it would blow up. It is tougher now.
Lilach: Because every day new people join and fight for space, and people tend to like and comment on the same people. All the top creators, people gravitate to them because they want the reach and to be seen. I experimented with it a few months ago, because people were saying if you want more followers, like and comment on the big creators. I did it for a week or two, and yes, I got more followers, but they were poor quality. They are not going to buy and they certainly are not liking and commenting on my stuff as a result. It is just a game. Do you want to play the game, or do you want to focus on growing your business?
Dean: So given your journey, you are still doing social media, but more as presence and relationship building than trying to go viral. What are you doing right now, and what do you see as the future?
Lilach: Great question. I’m still posting content and doing a lot of experimenting. I’ve been posting daily recently, and in the last week or so I have decided to drop that to maybe three or four times a week. At weekends I’m definitely seeing more engagement. Fewer people are on there, so I can post something and get the same engagement I would get in a week, without any liking or commenting or other effort. The key is to experiment. Every so often I’ll post carousels and invest time in them. They generate more reach, but they don’t generate any more people messaging my inbox, and quite frankly I would prefer to spend the time it takes to create a carousel on a blog post, because that is evergreen and I get better results from it. What do you think about LinkedIn groups? Are you getting anywhere with those, or are they dead as well?
Dean: Weirdly, in the last year I have had about 19 million impressions on content from LinkedIn groups. But they are like Facebook groups: hard to get going, hard to maintain, and the community spirit a group should have is hard to create, because the group owner features are so limited. If someone joins your group you should be able to message the members and say, we are doing this activity this week. They took all of that away to prevent spam. So it is almost like running another social media account.
Lilach: I don’t have a LinkedIn group. I do on Facebook, but it is pretty dormant. It was so much work and effort and I wasn’t getting enough ROI from it. I was paying a VA to help me manage it. And when the “at everyone” feature first came out, I got excited and used it every day for a week, and I lost a thousand members in a week, because people don’t want the notifications, they don’t want to be tagged. Groups are good for list building. But it boils down to the fact that so many people are selling and very few are buying, and you have to find the people who are buying, or build the relationships for when they are ready.
Dean: Here is an interesting trend. The head of Instagram said more content is now being shared in DMs than in the grid and feed. More conversations are happening than content. I think that is true of most social channels. Yes, there is a lot of spammy sales pitching, but there are more people sharing conversations and building relationships in the inboxes now than ever before.
Lilach: I’m not surprised. I’m also seeing a lot of people using stories more than posts. And it is an age thing. My daughter doesn’t use Facebook at all. In the next two or three years we are going to see massive changes, and a lot of pay to play. LinkedIn is putting structures in place, Elon Musk is talking about making X paid, and I think it is because people are not spending as much on ads. They are frustrated with the results.
Dean: We have gone through a period of steep growth in social media and it is slowing down, because you can’t have infinite growth in users or in ad sales. So ads get more expensive, which knocks some people out of the market. And Elon Musk opened the floodgates on paying to use social media; LinkedIn was there first with subscriptions, but he made it mainstream, and Facebook followed with verification. If you are a big tech company with millions of users who can’t afford not to be on the platform, of course you try to get a couple of pounds a month out of them and limit the functionality.
Lilach: I do think there are going to be big changes. People are getting very frustrated and disappointed. It is a real time suck and the results are not what they were. If you looked at it on a chart, each month you spend more time and make less as a result. I think things are going to go full circle. We are going to have new networks, or people will create their own smaller networks, because we talk about building relationships, but honestly, how many relationships can you build and how many do you remember? If you are speaking with a hundred people every week, which ones do you remember? And so many people are doing the same things, so who do you refer, who do you recommend? I think we will go back to smaller networks and communities, because part of the problem now is that it is too big.
Dean: Somebody said you can only sustain about 100 to 150 relationships at the top end. I have no idea how I would manage 150 relationships. And this is me and you sat here with thousands of people in our networks, so it is the pot calling the kettle black. But we do have to focus on the relationships we have built and deepen them. Your post the other day about checking in with people you have known for years, and how those relationships had cemented over time, some of them people you thought you were just emailing useful things to, I thought that was pretty cool.
Lilach: When I look at the relationships I have, they tend to be repeat people. If I have a one-to-one with someone I have never met, and we haven’t been engaging on each other’s content, the reality is that unless I nurture that relationship, which takes a huge amount of time when you have lots of people to talk to, I won’t remember their name or what they do. So the question is how you build meaningful relationships where you can refer or recommend each other, and that is the tough part, because every time we speak with someone there is a 99 percent chance they are not interested in our services unless they reached out asking. That is why I think we are going back full circle and will see big changes over the next five years. Social media, as much as I have used it for 14 or however many years, is struggling. It has reached capacity.
Dean: I was hopeful groups would divide things up so you could have a big network but be heavily networked inside a group, but the groups just don’t support that level of activity.
Lilach: And there are too many groups. I belong to probably about 500 groups on Facebook and I have to unfollow all of them or I get too many notifications. When they first started it was great, you were building nice relationships, but now there is too much noise. Out of my 500 groups there are probably three to five I go into for advice or support. The rest are purely selling.
Dean: Which highlights that we are in a selling business right now. Everybody is selling and not enough people are buying. And social media is one channel. We get a lot of enquiries from our website. I know your website is key to your strategy, it has been the driving force behind what you do. You have PR, you have email, all these different angles. It is dangerous to focus on just one. Focus on one for a period, get it working, then build another, but to have one channel as your primary way to sell is crazy.
Lilach: It is. Everyone says do one thing, master it, then move on to the next, but I do believe in having an omnichannel presence, and I strongly recommend that you create your own assets so you can control them as much as possible.
Dean: It has been great to catch up. Before we wrap up, what is the best way for people to get in touch with you if they want to pick your brains about building their presence, online or offline?
Lilach: I’m on LinkedIn, and my website is lilachbullock.com. I have a plethora of free trainings and resources on the website, as well as my newsletter. And people can just Google my name. There is only one Lilach Bullock in the world.
Dean: There are three of me, and one of them looks like me, which is scary. Lilach, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on. Maybe we could do another one of these in a little while about how you built your website into such a lucrative part of your business, not the technical side, the business side. I’d love to get the inside track and share that with people.
