As B2B creator marketing rises, engagement pods are on their way out.
Over the past year, brands have cranked up their influencer marketing spend on B2B platforms like LinkedIn, with platforms jockeying to introduce new creator tools and services to meet this growing demand. But as the ecosystem professionalizes, stakeholders across the B2B creator space are growing increasingly wary of an old creator marketing bogeyman: engagement pods.
Engagement pods are nothing new. Since the early days of influencer marketing on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, content creators have congregated in group chats and Slack channels for the express purpose of sharing content with each other and engaging with all other content shared in the group, thus boosting the performance metrics of all involved creators.
On traditional social media platforms, where brands have long relied on viewership and engagement metrics to measure performance, the surface-level engagement created by pods is not a particular issue for marketers. But on B2B platforms like LinkedIn, brands are increasingly measuring the performance of their creator marketing spend by the depth of engagement, rather than the scale — and advertisers are actively declaring their distaste for B2B creators who use engagement pods, according to four creators and influencer marketers with knowledge of the subject.
“It used to be, ‘how engaged was the post?’ as in how many likes, comments or shares,” said AJ Eckstein, the founder of the B2B creator marketing agency Creator Match, whose viral post about engagement pods last week sparked a discussion on the topic among prominent B2B creators, in an interview with GamesBeat. “But the brands I’ve noticed who have done campaign after campaign are going a bit deeper on sourcing, and they’re getting down to not just the creator level or the post level, but down to the comment level.”
LinkedIn creator Swati Rai said that she frequently gets requests from other creators to join engagement pods, but does not participate because she prefers to curate organic engagement with her posts, and because sponsors would not appreciate it.
“They are paying money to reach your audience,” Rai said in an interview with GamesBeat.
B2B content creators are also aware of messaging by LinkedIn executives indicating that the platform’s algorithm is intentionally depressing posts that show signs of engagement pod behavior. When reached for comment on the matter, a LinkedIn representative pointed to a September 2025 article by LinkedIn vice president of product Oscar Rodriguez that specifically flagged the company’s goals to “make engagement pods ineffective.”
“They want quality content and quality commenting,” said LinkedIn creator Mita Mallick in an interview with GamesBeat. “With the pods, there’s people liking — but that’s no longer enough.”
To some extent, it is natural behavior for a creator to share their posts with a group of peers who they believe will appreciate and engage with them. Based on this definition, almost all creators are involved in some sort of engagement pod — and advertisers are very familiar with the practice and its potential pitfalls.
“‘Post and ghost’ is a known watch-out for creators, as they know comments matter. 70% of people go straight to comments, and algorithms upweight comment-heavy content, so creator pods gaming the system are absolutely a challenge,” said Jessica Tamsedge, the chief executive officer of Dentsu Creative UK, in a written interview with GamesBeat. “With that said, as AI moves into social and the virtual influencer space, advertisers’ primary focus is identifying trusted voices to represent their brands. Pod posting is just one symptom of superficial engagement strategies and tend to be weeded out as part of rigorous, human led vetting processes.”
Engagement that comes across as low-quality, surface-level or pod-fueled is ultimately subjective — a matter of vibes, more than measurement. But as the B2B creator space matures, brands are growing more adept at detecting the difference.
“Creator Match technically has a pod, because we share our posts internally and our teams engage with it, but that’s our target audience,” said Creator Match chief operating officer Tara Knight in an interview with GamesBeat. “It makes sense if creators want to do that. It’s when they start to tricky tactics just to boost their reach — that’s where they actually hurt themselves.”