Glossary
The vocabulary of LinkedIn selling and B2B content, defined plainly. Including the terms everyone uses and most people get wrong.
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Content Pillar
A content pillar is a recurring theme you post about because it's tied to a specific business outcome, not a topic bucket you fill to look consistent.
Creator Mode
Creator Mode was a LinkedIn profile setting that swapped the Connect button for Follow, unlocked newsletters and content analytics, and moved your posts above your job history. LinkedIn retired the toggle in March 2024, but the features it introduced are now part of the standard profile setup.
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Dark Social
Dark social is sharing and engagement that happens in channels your analytics can't see: DMs, Slack, email forwards, group chats. It's called dark because it's untracked, not because it's shady.
Demand Capture vs Demand Creation
Demand capture targets buyers already actively searching for a solution, while demand creation builds awareness and desire among people who aren't looking yet. Confusing the two is why most LinkedIn content gets judged by the wrong yardstick.
Dwell Time
Dwell time is the amount of time a viewer spends actually looking at a post or profile before scrolling past, regardless of whether they like, comment, or share. It's a passive attention signal, not an interaction signal.
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Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy is employees voluntarily sharing and creating content about their company or industry in their own voice, not reposting pre-approved messaging because a manager asked them to.
Employee-Generated Content (EGC)
EGC is content that employees create themselves, in their own words, about their actual work, rather than content the marketing team makes and hands to employees to post. It comes from the employee's own voice and experience, not the brand's.
Engagement Pod
A private group of LinkedIn users who agree to like, comment, and share each other's posts immediately after publishing, in order to trick the algorithm into treating the post as high-engagement and pushing it into more feeds.
Engagement Pod
A coordinated group of LinkedIn members who agree to like, comment, and share each other's posts within minutes of publishing, in order to trick the algorithm into treating the content as genuinely popular.
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Personal Brand
A personal brand is the market's shorthand for what you're reliably good at and whether they trust you to be right about it. It is a perception held by other people, not a posting habit or a tone of voice.
Pipeline Attribution
Pipeline attribution is the practice of tracing closed deals or open opportunities back to the marketing and sales touches that influenced them, including specific LinkedIn posts, comments, or DMs. In B2B, this is genuinely hard because deals involve multiple people and multiple touches over months, not one clean click path.
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Share of Voice
Share of voice is the percentage of a category's total visibility that belongs to your brand, measured against your named competitors, not against some abstract benchmark of your own past performance.
Social Selling Index
The Social Selling Index (SSI) is a LinkedIn-generated score from 0 to 100 that tracks how much you use the platform's own social selling features. It measures activity, not whether any of that activity closes a deal.