LinkedIn is still one of the best places to build an audience from scratch, and you can increase your LinkedIn followers there organically, with no paid ads, no follower buying, and no growth hacks.

When I went through 52 million posts across 10 platforms for our State of Social Media Engagement report, LinkedIn had the highest median engagement rate of any platform we looked at, at around 6.2%.

LinkedIn has also become the most-cited website in AI search for professional questions, according to Profound's tracking, and more of what gets cited is what people post. So what you share on LinkedIn can show up when someone asks ChatGPT about your field.

It's worked for me, too. I made my account in 2017 but only started posting in 2020, when I was looking for community after losing my job. I now have over 25,000 followers, and posting has led to brand partnerships and invites onto podcasts and YouTube channels, which I never would've thought possible when I started.

You don't need millions of followers, and you don't need to be the world's foremost expert in your niche. A smaller following that cares about what you have to say will do far more for you than a huge one that doesn't.

So if you really, really want to grow on LinkedIn, whether as a creator, a founder, a business owner, or someone starting from zero, this guide is for you. It pairs what's worked for me with Buffer's data on millions of LinkedIn posts, and there's a section for company pages too.

Key takeaways

• Switch your profile's main button from Connect to Follow. Connections are capped at 30,000 and need a yes from both sides, while followers have no cap, and everyone who connects with you follows you anyway.
• Stick to three to five topics. LinkedIn's feed now matches posts to people based on what they're about, so a clear focus helps it find your audience.
• Try carousels. In Buffer's analysis of 52 million posts, LinkedIn carousels had a median engagement rate of 21.77%, about three times video and nearly seven times text-only posts.
• Don't worry about posting too often. In Buffer's study of 2 million+ LinkedIn posts, accounts posting 11 or more times a week averaged nearly 17,000 more impressions per post.
• Reply to your comments. About 83% of LinkedIn profiles in Buffer's data performed better when they replied, the highest share of any platform.
• Keep your posts sounding like you. LinkedIn added a "Seems like AI slop" report option in July 2026, and flagged posts are seeing about 40% fewer views.
• Grow a company page through your team. Personal LinkedIn profiles get 57% higher engagement than company pages, according to Buffer's analysis of 20 million LinkedIn posts.

Optimize your LinkedIn profile to get more followers

Your LinkedIn profile is where most people decide whether to follow you. You can follow someone straight from the Follow button on their posts, but if most people are like me, they click through to the profile first to see who you are and what you post about. So the four changes below are about making that visit worth it, and together they should take about half an hour.

1. Switch your profile button from Connect to Follow

This is the first, easiest thing anyone can do to objectively “get more followers.”

By default, the big button on your LinkedIn profile says Connect. When you switch it to Follow, anyone can follow you in one tap instead of sending a request and waiting for you to accept it. Here's how followers and connections compare:

• Connections are capped at 30,000 and need a yes from both sides.
• Followers have no cap, and anyone can follow you without waiting on you.

And you won't lose anything by switching, since people can still send you a connection request from the More menu on your profile.

LinkedIn used to bundle this setting into Creator Mode, which it retired in March 2024, but the setting still exists on its own. To turn it on, go to Settings & Privacy → Visibility → Visibility of your LinkedIn activity → Followers, and turn on "Make follow primary."

2. Write a LinkedIn headline that says who you are and who you help

Your LinkedIn headline shows up next to your name everywhere: on your posts, in your comments, and in search results. Most people use it for their job title, but unless you work in a role like Chief Imagination Officer or you're the CEO of a Fortune 100 company, your title alone likely isn't enough reason for someone to follow you.

Mine is "senior content creator @ buffer | content about my creator career." That's the simplest formula: your role plus what you post about. The first half is about me, and the second half tells you what you'll get if you follow.

Here are a few other formulas I see on profiles I follow, and who they tend to work for:

• Your role + your credentials. Carmen Vicente leads with "Social Strategist in tech," then follows with LinkedIn Top Voice, 40k on TikTok, and B2B Social's Rising 30. Erifili Gounari does a longer version of the same thing.
• What you do for who + your credentials. Brandon Smithwrick's starts with "I teach content playbooks for marketers & creators" and then lists his newsletter, Forbes 30U30, and the companies he's worked for. You'll see "I help…" used the same way on a lot of consultant profiles.
• Your title + your brand. Sophie Miller's is just "creator + founder @prettylittlemarketer". At 242,000 followers, people already know the brand, so she doesn’t need to do much more explaining.

Whichever formula you use, put the most important part first. You get 220 characters, but only the first 60 to 70 show up in search results and comment sections. (Mine is 65 characters, so it just about fits.)

⚡ Pro tip: What would your ideal client or follower type into LinkedIn search? Those words should be in your headline. I wrote more about this in our guide to LinkedIn SEO.

3. Use your LinkedIn About section to get people invested in you

Your About section is the one place on your profile where you have real room to chat, with 2,600 characters to play with. I've seen many people use that space to paste what amounts to a CV, but anyone reading it has already seen your headline and job title, and your Experience section covers the rest.

What visitors don't know yet is who you (really) are. By the time someone reaches your About section, they've probably seen one of your posts and your headline, and they're deciding whether they want to keep seeing more. So this is the place to share some of your story, career-wise and content-wise, and give them a reason to care.

A few things worth including:

• How you got to where you are in your career/life, especially if it wasn't a straight line.
• What you make content about, and why it matters to you.
• What you'd like people to do next, whether that's follow you, subscribe to something, or get in touch.

And like your headline, put the important part first. Only about the first 300 characters show before "…see more," and plenty of people won't click it.

Here's how four people I follow handle theirs. Two are creators, one runs an agency, and one consults for brands, and they're all quite different:

• Carmen Vicente goes all in on who she is: two paragraphs about how she thinks and what she cares about, with no credentials and no call to action. Her headline already carries the Top Voice badge and follower counts, so her About can focus on personality.
• Brandon Smithwrick tells his story in short lines. He includes where he's worked, what he teaches now, his credentials in one "TLDR" paragraph, and then two arrows at the bottom, one to subscribe and one that says "Or just hit follow. I post playbooks here daily.”
• Annie-Mai Hodge uses arrows as bullets, split into a little about her ("an accidental b2b influencer") and a little about her agency and why she started it.
• Rachel Karten writes three plain paragraphs: who she is and her newsletter, who she's worked with and where, and "Want to work with me? Shoot an email over to…".

4. Put your best work in the Featured section

The Featured section sits just below your About section, so it's often the first place people see your actual content. You can pin posts, articles (including newsletter editions), links to things like your website, and media like PDFs or slides.

This is the one place on your profile where you decide what someone sees first, so choose what you'd most want them to see before they follow you. A few things worth putting in it:

• A post that explains what you do or who you help, so a new visitor gets the idea without scrolling through your activity.
• Your best-performing post, whatever the format. It's already shown that people like it.
• Your newsletter, lead magnet, or booking link, if you have one. It's the easiest place on your profile to turn a visitor into a subscriber or a client.

I tend to pin my latest brand partnership in my Featured section, so whoever clicks into my profile sees it first. I also keep resources I want to share with my audience in there.

It's worth swapping these out every few months, or whenever you publish a post or get featured in something you want to highlight.

📚 For more ways to improve your profile, here are 30+ LinkedIn profile tips.

Create LinkedIn content people follow you for

Once your profile is sorted, your content is what actually gets people to hit Follow, because it's how most people will find you in the first place. LinkedIn only shows your posts to people it thinks will engage with them, the same way your own feed only shows you posts it thinks you'll stop for. So everything in this section comes back to two things: helping LinkedIn work out who your posts are for, and making those posts worth stopping for.

🎥 If you'd rather watch, my colleague Kirsti Lang walks through the LinkedIn playbook that got her to 12K followers and 6 million impressions.

5. Understand what the LinkedIn algorithm looks for

LinkedIn's feed tries to predict two things about every post: whether people will stay on it, and whether they'll react to it. In a paper LinkedIn's engineers published in early 2026 about how the feed ranks posts, they call the first one "long dwell" (staying on a post past a certain point). The second is whether someone likes, comments on, or shares it.

LinkedIn also announced a rebuilt feed in March 2026 that uses AI to understand what a post is about, and updates its picture of what each person is interested in within minutes. If you've ever liked a couple of posts on a topic and then seen nothing but that topic for a week, that's what's going on.

LinkedIn doesn't publish how it weights any of this, so no one can tell you the exact number of seconds someone needs to spend on your post. But in practice, it's fairly simple:

• If you post about the same few things consistently, LinkedIn can more easily work out who to show your posts to.
• If every post is about something completely different, that's harder.
• And once a post reaches the right people, it has to hold their attention and give them a reason to react.

📚 For more on how LinkedIn decides what to show, including what the LinkedIn team told us directly, read our full breakdown of how the LinkedIn algorithm works.

6. Niche down to 3 to 5 topics you could talk about for hours

If LinkedIn's feed is trying to work out who to show your posts to, the easiest thing you can do is make that obvious by picking a small number of topics and sticking with them.

Now, as someone who rages against the niche machine, I understand if you immediately want to scroll past this tip. But WAIT! Give me a second.

If you've already found the overlap between what you want to make content about and what people want to learn from you, you can skip this one. But if you're still getting to know your audience or figuring out what you want to create (or both), starting niche and then going broad might work better for you.

You can probably name three topics you could spend hours talking about, and you don't have to be an expert in any of them.

If you're job searching, that's a topic. If you're running a business, what you're figuring out along the way (pricing, hiring, landing your first big client) is a topic. Learning a new skill counts too, because you'll see it differently than someone with 10 years of experience.

Then think about who you want to reach and where they get stuck. Your topics sit where that overlaps with what you know. If you're stuck, picture a podcast you'd get invited on and ask yourself what the host would want you to talk about.

The narrower you can get, the better. "Marketing" is too broad. "B2B SaaS marketing for early-stage founders" is a niche people will see themselves in and follow you for.

If I had to pick three pillars, I'd say mine are content creation, remote work, and the business of being online. You can see all three reflected in my About section, and most of what I post lands in one of them. (I do wander off into photography and lifestyle content now and then, but the core three don't change too much.)

My colleague Hailley Griffis, who leads communications at Buffer, works the same way with three pillars of her own: her career and work at Buffer, the systems she uses in work and life, and brand marketing. She grew her LinkedIn audience by 26% in the first half of 2025 with them.

A focused following can also go further than a bigger one. As LinkedIn consultant Melanie Goodman put it this year, "An account with 8,000 focused followers can outperform one with 80,000 unfocused ones."

7. Write LinkedIn hooks that make people click "See more”

Your hook is the opening of your post, and its job is to get people to click "…see more" (and, ideally, hit Follow while they're at it). You don't get much room to do it, either. Only the first line or two shows in the feed before the cutoff, so whatever makes someone stop has to be right at the top.

In AuthoredUp's analysis of nearly 310,000 LinkedIn posts from December 2025 to May 2026, four kinds of opening lines did best. Here they are, in order:

• Start in the middle of a story. "I got fired on a Tuesday. By Friday I had three job offers."
• Say the opposite of what people expect. "The best time to post on LinkedIn isn't first thing in the morning."
• Make a bold claim, but only if you have the data to back it up. "Posting more on LinkedIn doesn't hurt your reach. We checked 2 million posts."
• Lead with a number or a result. "My impressions went up 122% in seven days. Here's what changed."

You'll notice questions aren't on that list. They're the most common hook advice out there, but they came last in AuthoredUp's study, with a median engagement rate of 2.16% against 2.60% for story openers. That matches what I've seen on my own posts, though I'd take any single study on this with a pinch of salt.

Use this test on your next post: if you saw only the first two lines from a stranger, would you click "…see more"?

📚 I've written more about the anatomy of a great hook if you want to go deeper.

8. Post like a person (and be careful with AI)

Once someone's clicked "…see more," the post has to give them a reason to stay and a reason to react. The simplest way I've found is to post the way I'd talk to a friend or colleague about whatever I have going on.

I said in the intro that you don't need to be the world's foremost expert, and this is where that matters most. Looking back at my best posts from the last few months, most fall into two groups:

• Something you tried, and what actually happened. My 30 days of posting daily and my Build Week project both got written up this way, and the Build Week post is one of my most engaged recent posts.
• Something you're figuring out as it happens. My cousin asked me what my job actually involves, I wrote it out for her, and that one post turned into a series (Career Creator Couch) that's now some of my best-performing content.

None of these needed special expertise. I just paid attention to what was going on in my life and shared it in a way other people could relate to. It works the same way if you run a business: a decision you made, a client project that went sideways, something you're testing right now.

I know a lot of people use AI to write their LinkedIn posts now, and I've been there too. In November 2023, I published nothing but AI-written posts for a week, with only a quick proofread, and nobody noticed. My impressions were up 11%, and my engagement was up 75% compared with a typical week. At the time, I wrote that if you'd built up trust with your audience, letting AI take a swing "seems like a no-brainer."

I wouldn't run that experiment the same way today. In July 2026, LinkedIn added a "Seems like AI slop" option to the report menu on every post, and more than a million people used it in the first two weeks. Flagged content is seeing about 40% fewer views. LinkedIn also retired its own "Enhance your post" AI writing feature and replaced it with a plain proofreader.

Separately, Originality.AI found that about 81% of the long-form LinkedIn posts it sampled in July 2026 read as likely AI, up from about half in late 2024. Whatever you make of AI detectors, LinkedIn has clearly decided this is a problem, and so have readers.

So my position now is somewhere in the middle. I’ll still use AI to suggest hook variations, tidy a draft, and tell me what might be useful to add. But the post has to start from something rooted in my own experience, and it has to end up sounding like me.

⚡ Pro tip: If you want help with hook variations, Buffer's AI Assistant can suggest some for any post you draft, and you decide what stays. Get it for free →

9. Keep people on LinkedIn

You need to be making zero-click content. That's a post where all the context is in the post itself, so nobody has to click away to get it.

I know a lot of us are also trying to get people somewhere else, whether that's a newsletter, a YouTube video, or a company website, and the temptation to describe it and drop a link in is real.

LinkedIn says there's no penalty for links. Rishi Jobanputra, a senior director of product management at LinkedIn, said so in September 2025. But Buffer's own data says link posts do reach fewer people. We looked at a year of LinkedIn posts from more than 58,000 accounts that post through Buffer, comparing posts with and without links from the same account in the same month. Posts with a link preview got 28% fewer impressions and 44% fewer engagements than posts without a link. Posts with a URL in the text had a smaller drop: about 16% fewer impressions and 16% fewer engagements.

Because both of those numbers dropped by the same amount, the engagement rate on posts with a URL in the text didn't change. So people engaged with those posts as much as usual when they saw them. LinkedIn just showed them to fewer people.

⚡️ Link previews did get about 87% more clicks, as LinkedIn counts them, so if a click matters more than reach for a particular post, that trade can be worth it.

I think it comes back to the LinkedIn algorithm focus of “long dwell". A link sends people off LinkedIn, and the feed prefers posts people stay on, so link posts can lose reach without LinkedIn penalizing them on purpose.

So, what to do about it:

• Put the full value in the post. If the newsletter has three points, the post can have all three, and the link is for people who want the longer version.
• Or put it in the comment. In our data, posts where the account added the link in its own comment got about 15% more impressions than similar posts with no link at all. (That's only from accounts whose comments we can see through Buffer, so it's more a promising sign than proof.) If you use Buffer, you can schedule that first comment to go out with your post on paid plans.

📚 We've got a full guide to zero-click content if you want to go deeper.

10. Try different post formats, starting with carousels

LinkedIn gives you a handful of formats to post, and they perform very differently. When I went through 52 million posts for our State of Social Media Engagement report, here's how the main ones compared on LinkedIn:

Carousels are the standout, with a median engagement rate about three times video's and nearly seven times text-only posts'. A carousel on LinkedIn is a PDF you upload as a document post, which shows up as slides people swipe through. They work for anything with steps or a list: a process, a breakdown, a set of examples. (If you use Buffer, you can schedule PDF carousels to LinkedIn from the web app.)

Video sits at number two. My colleague Kirsti Lang, who dug into these numbers in our format study, put it well: "carousels for engagement and video for reach is a solid combination." Text-only posts come last on engagement, but they're the fastest to make, which is always a win in my book. And link posts are near the bottom for the reasons in the previous tip.

So it's worth knowing what you're getting from each format and trying a few. When I looked at my last three months, seven of my eight most-engaged posts were videos, and I hadn't posted a single carousel, which is a bit awkward given the table above (do as I say and such).

📚 If you're starting from a blank page, here are 11 LinkedIn carousel examples to work from.

11. Post consistently (and more often than you might think)

Posting more often doesn't hurt your reach on LinkedIn. When we looked at more than 2 million posts from over 94,000 LinkedIn accounts, posting two to five times a week got about 1,182 more impressions per post than posting once a week. Six to 10 posts a week got about 5,001 more, and 11 or more got nearly 17,000 more per post, plus about three times the engagements. That held whether an account had 500 followers or 50,000.

That doesn't mean you need to post every day. We recommend two posts a week while you're building the habit, and more once you know you can keep the quality up. I personally post around four times a week.

As for when to post, our analysis of 4.8 million posts found that weekdays between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. (in your local time) did best, with Wednesday at 4 p.m. the strongest single slot. Mornings, the old default, did worse than they used to.

You also don't need to sit by your phone for a "golden hour" after you post. LinkedIn has never confirmed one, though replying to early comments can definitely help keep a post going.

🎥 We made videos on both: how often to post on LinkedIn and the best time to post on LinkedIn.

📚 Or read the full studies on how often to post and the best time to post on LinkedIn.

12. Check your LinkedIn analytics every week

Everything in this section so far is a starting point. Your analytics show you what your audience actually responds to, which beats any blog post's advice (this one included).

Once a week or so, look at:

• Which posts got the most reactions, comments, and reposts, and what topic and format each one was.
• Which posts got the most impressions, and what their hooks were.
• Which posts got the most saves and sends. LinkedIn added both in September 2025, and they're a good sign that a post was useful enough to keep or pass on.
• Who your posts reached. Since June 2026, LinkedIn has been rolling out a breakdown of how much of your reach came from inside your network versus outside it, which is the closest thing you'll get to "how many potential new followers saw this." It also shows the top job titles, industries, and locations of the people who saw each post, which is handy if you're trying to reach a certain kind of client.
• Which posts brought in new followers.

Then post, let the results tell you what your audience wants, and make more of that.

📊 If you use Buffer, its analytics show engagement and follower growth for LinkedIn profiles and Pages, and you can sort your posts by what did best. You can also connect your Buffer data to an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT and ask it what's working.

Turn conversations into followers

Comments are one of the two things LinkedIn's algorithm is trying to predict (the other being whether someone stays on your post), so the conversations around your content matter almost as much as the content itself.

In my experience, this is also where a lot of growth actually happens: in your replies, in other people's comment sections, and in the people you team up with.

13. Reply to your comments

This is the tip with the clearest data behind it, so I'll start there. When we looked at nearly 2 million posts across six platforms, replying to comments lifted engagement on LinkedIn by about 30%. And about 83% of LinkedIn profiles did better when they replied, the highest share of any platform in the study. So it helps almost everyone who does it.

Every reply is another comment on the post, and comments are one of the things the feed is looking for. A post with a conversation under it also looks more alive than one with the same number of likes and no replies.

So set aside time to respond to every comment and DM that comes in on your posts. It's the single highest-leverage 20 minutes you can spend after publishing.

A few things that make the replies count for more:

• Reply with more than "Thanks!" Ask a question back, add a detail, or disagree if you do to keep the conversation going.
• Reply to the ones that clearly took effort first. If someone wrote three sentences, they've given you an opening to write three back.
• Don't automate it. In February 2026, LinkedIn started limiting automated comments, keeping them out of the default "Most relevant" view and restricting accounts that keep posting them. A scripted "Great post!" can now do more harm than no reply at all.

🗨️ Buffer's Community pulls your LinkedIn comments (and the ones from your other social media) into one place, so nothing slips through.

14. Comment where your future followers already are

Most of the people who'll follow you next haven't seen your profile yet. They're in the comments of accounts they already follow, and the easiest way to get in front of them is to be in those comments too.

This works in both directions. When you leave a comment on a bigger account's post, everyone reading that thread sees it, and a good one gets sorted toward the top under "Most relevant." At the same time, your own connections and followers may see that post in their feed with "[your name] commented on this" above it. So one thoughtful comment can put you in front of someone else's audience and remind your own that you exist, without you posting anything.

Start by finding the people whose audience overlaps with the one you want, whether that's other creators in your niche, leaders in your industry, or the kind of clients you'd love to work with. Then comment on their posts thoughtfully and often. The "thoughtfully" part matters more now, since LinkedIn's crackdown on automated comments means generic ones sink.

What tends to work:

• Add something: a related example, a number, a counterpoint. If your comment could be pasted under any post, it's not doing much.
• Ask a real question. It gives the author a reason to reply, which puts your name in the thread twice.
• Skip the pitch. Someone else's comment section isn't the place to mention your newsletter.

And when there's someone you'd like a real two-way relationship with, send them a connection request with a personal note. A message that's clearly written for them goes a long way.

15. Collaborate with other creators

Commenting gets you in front of someone else's audience for a moment. Collaborating gets you introduced to it.

Partnering with another creator on something (a post, a live, a newsletter swap, a series) puts your name in front of their followers with their endorsement attached, which is a very different thing from showing up in their comments. It's also, honestly, more fun than posting alone, and that tends to show in the content.

And in some very welcome news, LinkedIn now supports collaboration natively. In June 2026, LinkedIn added collaborative posts: you can invite another member or a company page to co-author a post, and everyone involved is listed at the top of it. The post shows up in both of your networks, and LinkedIn has been fairly open that member profiles carry more reach than pages, so this is also the cleanest way for a page to borrow some.

A few things that make a collaboration worth the effort:

• Pick people your audience would want to hear from, not people who do your job. Two content creators collaborating reach the same people twice. A content creator and, say, a founder who hires content creators reach two different rooms.
• Make it something neither of you would have posted alone. A conversation, a comparison, a "here's how we each do it." If either of you could have written it solo, the collaboration isn't adding anything.
• Keep the thread going afterward. Reply to each other's comments, tag each other when it's relevant, and do it again in a few months.

📚 Learn more about how collab posts work on LinkedIn.

16. Promote your LinkedIn profile everywhere else

Not everyone who'd follow you on LinkedIn is going to find you on LinkedIn. Some of them already follow you somewhere else, read your emails, or visit your website, and they just don't know you're posting here.

So put your LinkedIn URL in your email signature, link it from your website, and mention it on your other social channels. A few places that are easy to forget:

• Your bios on other platforms. If you're on Instagram, TikTok, or Substack, your link in bio is a natural place for LinkedIn, especially if LinkedIn is where you post most.
• Your newsletter footer, if you have one. Someone who reads you every week is exactly the kind of person who'd follow you.
• Anywhere you're introduced: podcast bios, speaker pages, guest post bylines. Give people your LinkedIn URL as well as your website.
• If you run a business, your website's About or team page, since that's where people go to see who's behind the company.

The crossover goes the other way too. One of my most-seen posts recently was about being surprised that someone had caught my TikTok video on their For You page and then found me on LinkedIn. Audiences overlap more than you'd think, and most of the time people just need to be told where else you are.

Use LinkedIn features to boost your growth

Everything up to this point runs through the feed: LinkedIn decides who sees your post, and you're working to make that decision go your way. Newsletters and LinkedIn Live are different, because they reach people through a notification or an email, which the feed doesn't control. Polls do go through the feed, but they're one of the easiest ways to get people interacting with you. So all three are worth a look, even if your regular posts are doing fine.

17. Start a LinkedIn newsletter

A LinkedIn newsletter is a series of articles people can subscribe to. When you publish a new edition, subscribers get a notification and, for many of them, an email, so it reaches people whether or not the feed shows it to them.

It's also easier to start one than it used to be. In August 2025, LinkedIn opened newsletter creation to every member, with no follower minimum (company pages still need more than 150 followers). At the time, LinkedIn said there were more than 184,000 newsletters on the platform, with 59% more people publishing them and 47% more engagement than the year before.

The follower-growth part works like this: when you publish your first edition, LinkedIn invites your connections and followers to subscribe. Everyone who does has opted in to hear from you regularly, which is a warmer relationship than a follow, and it doesn't depend on your next post landing.

Two caveats. First, not every subscriber gets the email. Goodman checked this in August 2026 and found only around 35% to 60% of subscribers received the email edition, so treat your subscriber count as an upper bound. Second, a newsletter is a commitment. If you can't see yourself publishing one at least every couple of weeks, a strong Featured section will probably do more for you than a newsletter that stops after four editions.

We have a couple of LinkedIn newsletters at Buffer:

• Buffer’s Bottom Line, a transparent look at our finances written by Kyle Allen on our Finance team, has 33.1K+ subscribers.
• Our Open blog newsletter where we cross-post already published articles with 13.7K+ subscribers

🌱 Here's how creator Jerrica Long grew her newsletter from 500 to more than 1,700 subscribers in 90 days while tripling her LinkedIn impressions with Buffer.

18. Host LinkedIn Live sessions and events

LinkedIn Live is the platform's livestreaming feature, and it's tied to events: you set up an event, people RSVP, and when you go live, they get a notification. That notification is what makes Live useful for growth. It reaches people who've already said they're interested, whether or not the feed would have shown them your post.

Since June 22, 2026, every LinkedIn Live has to be scheduled as an event first, so you can't just hit "go live" anymore. You can still go live on short notice by scheduling an event a few minutes ahead.

Creator Jayde I. Powell is a good example of this done well. She hosts a live series called "Creator Tea Talk" where she invites her audience to ask her anything, and because it's a recurring series with a name, people know when to show up.

If you're going to try it:

• Give it a name and a rhythm. A monthly "ask me anything" is easier to remember than a one-off. If you run a business, that might be a monthly customer Q&A or a product walkthrough.
• Post about it a few days before, then on the day. The event page does some of this for you, but a reminder in the feed catches people who didn't RSVP.
• Have a plan for the first two minutes. Lives fill up slowly, and early arrivals will leave if you're waiting for the room to fill.

19. Use LinkedIn polls to start conversations

A LinkedIn poll is one of the quickest posts you can make: a question and up to four answers. They're also rare. In Metricool's 2026 study of 673,658 LinkedIn posts, polls made up less than 1% of what company pages posted, but got the highest average impressions of any format on those pages.

The tradeoff is engagement. In Socialinsider's analysis of 1.3 million posts from business pages, polls averaged a 4.2% engagement rate, below the 5.2% average for LinkedIn as a whole.

So polls work best as a conversation starter. Ask something your audience actually has an opinion on, add your own answer in the comments, and turn the results into a follow-up post. A poll asking which of three topics people want you to cover next also tells you what to make.

Most of the poll data out there comes from company pages, so if you're posting from a personal profile, try a couple and check your own numbers.

How to grow LinkedIn company page followers

If you're here for your personal profile, you can skip this section (or stay).

If you also look after a company page (or you're the person who got handed the login), read on, because growing a page can be quite the journey.

Start by making sure the page itself is complete: a clear tagline, an About section that says who the company is for, and a custom button that points somewhere useful. Most of the content advice above applies to a page too. The numbers are just harder. Company page organic reach fell by 60% to 66% between 2024 and early 2026, according to Ordinal's roundup of the data, and in Metricool's 2026 study, only 7% of company pages grew enough to move up a follower tier.

So growing a page now mostly means getting it in front of people without relying on the feed.

20. Use your invite credits on the right people

LinkedIn gives company pages a monthly allowance of invite credits, which admins can use to invite their own connections to follow the page. In March 2026, LinkedIn cut that allowance from 250 credits a month to 50, while Premium Company Pages still get a higher allowance.

With only 50 a month, it's worth being picky. Each invite uses one credit, and you get the credit back if the person accepts, so the more relevant your invites, the more you can send. Start with the people most likely to say yes: customers, collaborators, and anyone who's engaged with the page's posts or with your own posts about the company.

You'll find your balance in your page's admin view, under Invite to follow in the left menu.

21. Put your team at the forefront of your page

Personal profiles get 63% higher engagement than company pages on average, according to Metricool's 2026 study. The same thing shows up in AI search: when my colleague Simon Heaton looked at how AI tools cite LinkedIn, he found they mostly cite posts written by people rather than company pages.

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So the most effective thing a page can do is let the people behind it do most of the posting, and be the place people go to find more. In practice, that looks like:

• Team members posting about their work in their own voice, and tagging the page when it's relevant.
• The page reposting or quoting team posts, so it becomes a curated feed of the people behind it.
• Team members co-authoring collaborative posts with the page, so a post carries a person's reach and the page's name at the same time. (One catch: pages added as collaborators can't see the post's engagement metrics, only their usual Page analytics.)
• Everyone listing the company in their Experience section, so they show up on the page's People tab, and mentioning the page in their About or Featured sections.

This is how we do it at Buffer. In 2025, we launched Team of Creators, which made posting part of the job for everyone at Buffer, including people outside marketing. There's a Slack channel where people share drafts and cheer each other on, a resource hub, and regular workshops for anyone who's stuck, and Buffer's own LinkedIn and Instagram reshare what teammates post. Nearly all of our team of 78 takes part, and by August 2025 that had added up to more than 4,100 posts reaching about 2.5 million people.

And if your team is just you, you're the team. Post from your own profile, tag the page when it fits, and reshare your best posts from the page. Your personal profile will usually reach more people than the page can, so that's where most of your effort should go.

If you're trying to get a team posting, what matters most is who goes first. Olga Andrienko, VP of Brand Marketing at Semrush, whose team added half a million in extra reach for the company within two months of employee posting, put it plainly in Kirsti's piece on employee personal brands: "When senior management shows it's OK to share thoughts, and it's OK to invest time in your personal brand, people start posting too."

📚 Sabreen Haziq, who runs the program, wrote up how Team of Creators works at Buffer, including the Slack channel, the workshops, and what we track. If you want to try this at your company, start there.

Increase your LinkedIn followers, starting today

Starting from zero is more doable than it sounds. When creator Sweta Sharma deleted her 7,000-follower account and started over in January 2025, she had more than 4,500 followers and 416,000 impressions within five months.

If I were starting from zero today, I'd do three things in the first week and nothing else: switch my profile button to Follow, write down the three topics I can talk about for hours, and post once about something I'm figuring out right now. Then I'd do the last one again the next week. Most of what's in this article is what happens after that, and none of it works if the posting stops.

That's the part people give up on, and I get it. I've been posting for six years, and there are still weeks where it's the last thing I want to do. What's kept me going is mostly boring: a schedule I don't have to think about, and a streak I don't want to break. Buffer's streak tracker is the feature I keep coming back to. Watching a number climb may seem a bit silly, but it works for me, and the scheduling means the posts go out whether I'm feeling it or not. It works for my colleague Sabreen Haziq too, who passed 356 days of posting in a row last year.

If you want a hand with the showing-up part, get started with Buffer for free.

More LinkedIn resources

• How Often Should You Post on LinkedIn? Data From 2 Million+ Posts
• The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn: 4.8 Million Posts Analyzed
• Replying to Your Comments on LinkedIn Boosts Engagement by 30%
• How to Schedule LinkedIn Posts (2 Easy Methods + Tips)

FAQ on how to increase LinkedIn followers

How can I increase my LinkedIn followers organically?

Start with your profile: switch your primary button from Connect to Follow, and write a headline that says who you help. Then post consistently about three to five topics, reply to every comment (about 83% of LinkedIn profiles in Buffer's data performed better when they did), and keep the full story in the post rather than linking out. Everything in this guide is organic, with no paid ads and no follower-buying.

How long does it take to grow LinkedIn followers?

Longer than most people expect, and it isn't linear. It took me about six years of consistent posting to reach 25,000 followers, and the first thousand was by far the hardest. Growth tends to pick up once you have a back catalog of posts on a clear set of topics and the feed knows who to show you to.

How many LinkedIn followers is a good number?

There's no benchmark that applies to everyone, and follower count matters less than it used to. Melanie Goodman's 2026 analysis found that an account with 8,000 focused followers can reach more people than one with 80,000 scattered ones, because the feed knows exactly who to show the smaller account to. A few thousand followers who care about your topics are enough to start getting inbound opportunities.

What's the difference between LinkedIn followers and connections?

Connections are mutual, need a yes from both sides, and are capped at 30,000. Followers are one-way, have no cap, and anyone can follow you without approval. Everyone who connects with you follows you automatically. Switching your profile's primary button to Follow (Settings & Privacy → Visibility → Followers → "Make follow primary") doesn't cost you connections — people can still connect with you via the More menu.

Is LinkedIn Creator Mode still a thing?

No. LinkedIn retired the Creator Mode toggle in early 2024. The features it bundled, like the Follow button, newsletters, and creator analytics, all still exist, they're just available to everyone without turning anything on.

Can I get LinkedIn followers without sending connection requests?

Yes, and it's the default for most creators now. Set Follow as your primary button so visitors can follow in one tap, comment thoughtfully on posts from bigger accounts in your niche so their audience sees you, and start a newsletter so people can subscribe. None of those need a connection request.

Do LinkedIn followers still affect reach?

Less than they did. LinkedIn rebuilt its feed in March 2026 to predict two things about each post: whether someone will stay on it and whether they'll react to it. Follower count isn't one of those signals directly, which is why a focused following now outperforms a large scattered one.

What's the LinkedIn algorithm looking for in 2026?

LinkedIn's engineers published a paper on the rebuilt feed in 2026, and it names two things the system tries to predict: whether someone will stay on your post past a certain point ("long dwell") and whether they'll like, comment on, or share it. It also reads what a post is about and matches it to people interested in that topic, which is why consistency on a few topics helps. LinkedIn has never confirmed a "golden hour" or any fixed time window after posting.

How often should I post on LinkedIn to gain followers?

Buffer's analysis of over 2 million LinkedIn posts found no penalty for posting more often. Two to five posts a week is a realistic sweet spot for most people, and accounts posting 11 or more times a week averaged nearly 17,000 more impressions per post. LinkedIn's own guidance is two to five posts a week. Consistency matters more than the exact number.

What type of content gets the most followers on LinkedIn?

In Buffer's analysis of 52 million posts, carousels (PDF document posts) had a median engagement rate of 21.77% on LinkedIn, roughly three times video and nearly seven times text-only posts. Beyond format, posts that share what you're learning, in your own voice, with a first line that makes people click "…see more," tend to bring in followers rather than just likes.

Why am I not getting followers on LinkedIn?

The usual causes, in the order I'd check them: your profile button says Connect instead of Follow, you're posting about too many different things for the feed to know who to show you to, your first lines aren't earning the "…see more" click, you're linking out in most posts, or you're not replying to the comments you do get. Fixing the first one takes 30 seconds.

Why did my LinkedIn followers drop?

Small drops are normal. LinkedIn removes fake and inactive accounts periodically, and people unfollow. A bigger drop usually follows a change in what you post about, since followers who came for one topic leave when it disappears. Check your analytics for the week the drop started and look at what you posted.

Do LinkedIn newsletters help grow your followers?

Yes. When you publish your first edition, LinkedIn prompts your connections and followers to subscribe, and each edition after that reaches subscribers by notification and email rather than depending on the feed. LinkedIn reported over 184,000 newsletters on the platform as of August 2025 and opened creation to all members that month. One caveat: not every subscriber receives the email, so treat the subscriber count as an upper bound.

Is buying LinkedIn followers safe?

No. It's against LinkedIn's policies, and it hurts you even if you don't get caught. Bought followers don't engage, which lowers your engagement rate, and the feed reads low engagement as a signal your posts aren't worth showing. You end up with a bigger number and less reach.

How do I grow a LinkedIn company page?

Mostly through the people who work there. Personal profiles get about 63% more engagement than company pages posting similar content (Metricool, 2026), so have team members post in their own voice and let the page repost and collaborate with them. Pages can also invite connections to follow, though LinkedIn cut the monthly limit from 250 to 50 in March 2026.

Is LinkedIn still worth it for growing a following in 2026?

Yes. LinkedIn has over 1.3 billion members and, in Buffer's analysis of 52 million posts, the highest median engagement rate of any platform we looked at, at around 6.2%. You don't need millions of followers or a big job title. Showing up consistently, sharing what you're learning, and building real connections still works, and it works better with a smaller focused audience than most people assume.

I spotted a post in my LinkedIn morning scroll from Austin Null — and it stopped me in my tracks because it had two names at the top instead of one.

So I commented: is that what I think it is? He said it was

Then Mya Shell, who I'd done a collab-style post for brand partnership the week before (ironically!), tagged me on LinkedIn's own announcement: Collaborative Posts are coming.

The short version: soon, two or more people, plus LinkedIn Pages (!), can share one post together, with every collaborator listed at the top. It's in beta with creators and brands now (I guess I missed my invite in the mail) and will roll out over the coming months.

As someone who has been using collab posts on Instagram forever and will get a lot of use out of this feature on LinkedIn, I figured I'd write up everything we know so far.

If you've used Instagram's collab posts, you know the shape. On LinkedIn, where your name next to a brand carries professional weight, the stakes are even higher.

Here's what they are, how they'll work, and why they matter most for the creator–brand relationship.

What is a LinkedIn Collaborative Post?

A LinkedIn Collaborative Post lets two or more accounts (people and pages) publish the same post together. Every collaborator's name sits at the top, and the post lands in all of their networks at once, not just the original author's.

Quick note: this isn't the same as LinkedIn's Collaborative Articles, the AI-prompted explainers you get invited to "add your perspective" to. Collaborative posts are about co-authoring one post with people you’re connected with.

This is also a step above tagging/mentioning. All participants get equal credit, and the post will appear in all their followers' feeds, giving the post way more mileage.

How LinkedIn Collaborative Posts work

LinkedIn has confirmed the basics in a help article. The setup is an invite-and-accept flow, much like Instagram. One account creates the post and invites collaborators, which can be personal profiles or pages. Until an invited account accepts, no one sees them listed on the post. Once they accept, every collaborator's name appears at the top, and the post shows up across all their networks.

Collaborating as a page works a little differently: a super admin has to be in the loop. They can allow members and other pages to collaborate with the page, and they get notified of invitations as long as collaboration notifications are switched on (Me → Settings → Notifications → Collaborations).

How to create a collab post on LinkedIn

Start a post as you normally would and look in the top bar for the option to add a collaborator. You can add up to 5 per post.

From your profile, go to Me → Settings → Notifications → Collaborations. If you run a page, make sure a super admin does this too, because a Page can't appear as a collaborator until someone accepts on its behalf.

A few things worth lining up before then:

• Know who you'd co-author with. Make a short list of the creators, brands, or Pages whose name you'd actually want next to yours.
• Tidy the front door. A collab post sends new people to your profile, so check that your headline, banner, and recent posts say what you want them to.
• Have a post worth sharing. The feature adds reach; it doesn't make the content good. Save your stronger ideas for the partnerships that matter.

💡You can plan and schedule your LinkedIn content in Buffer. Get started here →

Why this matters most for creators and brands

Collab posts are a credibility trade, and the value runs in both directions.

When a creator co-authors with a brand's page, each side gives the other something it can't easily buy on its own. The creator brings their voice and an audience that actually engages, instead of a logo posting into the void. The brand brings a co-sign: its name at the top of your post, next to yours, in front of everyone who sees it.

People underrate that second part. A tag is easy to ignore. Shared authorship reads as an endorsement, and on LinkedIn, that endorsement is professional currency. If you're early or mid-career, an established brand publicly attaching its name to your work can be worth even more than the extra impressions.

It also changes the dynamic. This isn't a brand 'renting' a creator's audience for a day, as they would in a regular sponsored post. Both names are at the top, so both audiences and both reputations are in it together.

The timing tracks, too. LinkedIn launched its first Creator Marketplace in June, built to connect brands with creators directly. Collaborative posts are part of what that connection looks like in the feed.

6 ways creators and brands can use LinkedIn collab posts

Most of these tips mirror what already works on Instagram, adjusted for how people show up on LinkedIn.

1. Brand partnerships. This is the obvious one. A creator and a brand page co-author a single post, so the partnership reaches both audiences and reads as a real collaboration instead of a paid mention.
2. Co-marketing with a peer. Two creators, or two brands with overlapping audiences, team up on a launch, a report, or a joint event. Both networks see it from someone they already follow.
3. Team amplification. Employees co-author with the company page. The post gets a human face at the top instead of a logo, and the company taps into the trust its people have built.
4. Event and Live recaps. This is what I first spotted on Austin's post: a recap of his LinkedIn Live, shared by everyone involved. Co-hosts and guests all carry it to their own networks.
5. Launches and announcements. Putting both the partner and the brand on a product or feature announcement shows the work was shared, rather than handed off.
6. Customer and community spotlights. Co-author with the person whose story you're telling. It lands better coming from both of you than from the brand alone.

What's next

If you don't have the feature yet, keep an eye on your notifications and start a short list of who you'd want at the top of a post with you. I'll be testing this feature very soon, now that I have my hands on it.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between LinkedIn Collaborative Posts and Collaborative Articles?

Collaborative articles are AI-prompted explainers that invite members to add a perspective to a shared piece. Collaborative posts are regular posts co-authored by people and pages you choose, with every collaborator credited at the top. Different feature, different purpose.

Can a LinkedIn Page collaborate with a creator on a post?

Yes. Members and pages can both create collab posts and be invited as collaborators. For a page, a super admin has to enable collaboration and accept the invite before the page appears on the post.

How many collaborators can one post have?

One post can have up to five collaborators, not including the original poster.

Do all collaborators see the post's analytics?

Yes, they do.

How is a collab post different from tagging someone?

A tag points at another account: only the original poster is the author, and by default only their followers see it. A collab post gives every participant equal credit and shares it across all their networks.

After digging into millions of posts sent through Buffer, we've pinpointed the best time to post on all major social platforms, LinkedIn included.

By "we," I mean Julian Winternheimer, our resident data scientist.

We've (OK, Julian has) been running these numbers for around two years now, and the 2026 LinkedIn findings surprised me a little: The best time to post on LinkedIn in 2026 is generally between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays, with Wednesday at 4 p.m. emerging as the strongest overall slot in our analysis of 4.8 million posts.

In 2025, peak engagement was almost entirely confined to working hours — things fell off pretty sharply once 5 p.m. hit. This year, we're seeing those peak windows shift later into the day, which mirrors what's been happening on Instagram and TikTok for a while now.

Late afternoon and evening hours are now pulling some of the strongest LinkedIn engagement numbers we've seen. People are still showing up for professional content; they're just doing it after they've closed their laptops for the day.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's get into the data.

Key takeaways

• Peak hours: Late afternoon and evening hours (3 p.m.–8 p.m.) now drive the highest engagement on LinkedIn, although some days have high-performing slots later in the evening.
• Top slots: Wednesday at 4 p.m., Friday at 3 p.m., and Friday at 4 p.m. are the highest-performing times.
• Best day: Wednesday is the best day to post, closely followed by Thursday and Friday.
• Early-week dip: Monday and Tuesday see the lowest engagement; save your best content for mid-to-late week.

Is there a best time to post on LinkedIn?

Yes, our data shows that when you post on LinkedIn can meaningfully impact how much engagement your content gets.

The best time to post on LinkedIn is generally 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays. Wednesday at 4 p.m. is the strongest overall time in our analysis, followed by Friday at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m.

That said, as even LinkedIn's own marketing blog points out, timing research isn't a black-and-white science, and every audience is a little different.

After analyzing more than 4.8 million LinkedIn posts sent through Buffer, we were able to pinpoint some clear posting windows when content tended to get higher engagement than others.

Your LinkedIn content is more likely to get engagement in these windows, whether you're looking to grow a LinkedIn Page for a brand or your own personal brand with a LinkedIn profile.

Engagement is a particularly useful benchmark when it comes to identifying the best time to post on LinkedIn. The platform’s algorithm uses interactions (reactions, comments, and reposts) as signals to help it decide which posts are valuable and should be shown to more people.

In other words, the more engagement your post receives, the more people will see your post. That's a simplification, as loads of factors go into how posts are ranked, but it's a solid rule of thumb. Strong engagement doesn't automatically guarantee more reach, but the two definitely influence each other.

This is why we consider time slots in which posts got the highest engagement to be the best time to post on LinkedIn.

But here's the thing — every audience is a little different.

My recommendation? Treat these times as a starting point, experiment with your own posting schedule as part of your LinkedIn marketing strategy, and dig into your social media analytics to find what works best for your specific audience and make the most of the LinkedIn algorithm.

The best time to post on LinkedIn for engagement

The best time to post on LinkedIn for high engagement is generally during late afternoon and evening hours on weekdays. The top-performing slots include:

• Peak window: 3 p.m. – 8 p.m.
• Top slot 1: Wednesday at 4 p.m.
• Top slot 2: Friday at 3 p.m.
• Top slot 3: Friday at 4 p.m.

You can see it all pretty clearly in the graph above. It breaks down the week into hourly chunks, where the darkest blocks are the time slots with the highest engagement (and the best time to post on LinkedIn), and the light to white blocks are the time slots with the lowest engagement.

The shift toward evening engagement on LinkedIn looks a little different from what we saw in 2025, when the best posting times were exclusively within working hours. What's interesting is that this late-day activity doesn't seem to be passive scrolling. Professionals winding down their workday are often reading thought leadership, exploring solutions, and engaging with peers more intentionally — which could mean higher-quality interactions for your content, too.

That doesn't mean midday is a dead zone, though. LinkedIn's own marketing blog notes that pockets of the workday (like the lunch break or mid-afternoon) are still moments when professionals pause to scroll. In our data, those midday hours perform decently; they're just no longer the clear peak the way they were in 2025.

As you'll see from the graph above, engagement picks up in the afternoon and remains strong through the evening hours. Unlike other social platforms where evening slots have always performed well, this represents a notable shift in LinkedIn behavior.

Posts shared in the morning hours (6 a.m.–11 a.m.) now tend to see lower engagement than afternoon and evening slots. If your current posting schedule is built entirely around morning windows, it might be worth testing some later time slots to see if your audience has shifted, too.

The best times to post on LinkedIn by day

🌍 Wait, what time zone? To make this data easier to understand, our data scientist has normalized posting times by local time zone. So if the recommended time is 4 p.m., you can treat that as 4 p.m. in the time zone you’re targeting. There’s no need to convert from a single reference time zone.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Monday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Monday is 10 p.m., as professionals catch up on content after their workday. If you're looking for more Monday slots to add to your posting schedule, LinkedIn posts shared at 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. also saw higher engagement than the rest of the day.

Monday overall tends to see lower engagement compared to midweek, so consider saving your highest-priority content for Wednesday through Friday.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Tuesday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Tuesday is 4 p.m., as users begin wrapping up their workday and checking their feeds. If you need more posting times to choose from, 5 p.m. is not far off in terms of engagement, as is 10 p.m.

Like Monday, Tuesday sees slightly lower overall engagement, so test these times with your audience before locking in a regular Tuesday schedule.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Wednesday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Wednesday is 4 p.m. This is actually one of the highest-engagement time slots of the entire week. Other top posting times for Wednesday are 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., giving you a solid afternoon-to-early-evening window.

Wednesday is your best day overall for LinkedIn engagement, so this is a great day to share your most important content.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Thursday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Thursday is 5 p.m. Posts shared during the late afternoon and evening hours tend to perform well, so this time is definitely worth adding to your content calendar. If you need more times on Thursday, 7 p.m. is also strong, and 9 p.m. is worth considering for reaching users who engage later in the evening.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Friday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Friday is 3 p.m., right as professionals are starting to wind down their week. Other strong contenders for your posting schedule are 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

Friday is one of your strongest days for engagement, and definitely worth keeping in your rotation.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Saturday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Saturday is 9 a.m. Posts shared on Saturday tend to see less engagement on the platform than most weekdays, so consider scheduling your content for a weekday instead. If you must post on Saturday, our data showed that 9 a.m. tends to get the highest engagement, followed by 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Sunday

The best time to post on LinkedIn on Sunday is 10 p.m. Still, content shared on Sundays sees lower engagement compared to weekdays, and this slot is definitely not your best option if you're hoping to boost post interactions. If Sunday works better for your schedule, late evening is your best bet. Other times to consider are 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.

The best day to post on LinkedIn

The best day of the week to post on LinkedIn is Wednesday. We found that posts shared on Wednesday tended to get the most engagement, closely followed by Thursday, then Friday.

Anecdotally, this mid-to-late-week pattern makes sense. By Wednesday, most people are fully in the swing of the week — focused, open to learning, but not yet counting down to Friday.

Monday and Tuesday, on the other hand, showed the lowest engagement in our data. Monday sees the weakest numbers of the week, with Tuesday not far behind.

It's worth noting that not all research agrees here. LinkedIn's marketing blog highlights studies where Tuesday is actually one of the most active days on the platform. This is a good reminder that results can vary depending on the dataset, audience, and industry, so it's worth testing early-week posts with your own followers before writing those days off entirely.

The heads-down work theory still holds, though: if your audience tends to be deep in tasks on Monday and Tuesday, mid-to-late week is likely your better bet.

Get the best times to post on LinkedIn right in Buffer

With Buffer, you can have your posting schedule automatically set to the best times. That goes for all the other channels that Buffer supports, too. They'll appear as posting slots in your queue and calendar, making it super easy for you to schedule posts at the best times.

It'll take you less than a minute to set up:

1. Select LinkedIn on your channels list on the left.
2. Click on the settings (gear) icon above the calendar.
3. Scroll to Posting Schedule and under Posting Slots, click the Generate New Posting Slots button.
4. Then Use Recommended Posting Slots.

The schedule will automatically update to include the best posting times for the week, based on our latest analysis of millions of LinkedIn posts.

The next time you schedule a post, you can click one of these high-engagement slots in your calendar or list view, or just hit Next available to add it to the next available slot.

How to find the best time to post on LinkedIn for your audience

The best times above are a great starting point if you're still figuring out your LinkedIn strategy. Still, they're no substitute for figuring out your own best time to post.

LinkedIn's native analytics show your top-performing posts over a set period (for both pages and profiles) so you can start spotting patterns and figure out your personal best time to post on LinkedIn.

However, you'll need a record of exactly when you posted a specific piece of content (like a social media management tool or social media content calendar) to refer back to.

LinkedIn Analytics won't show you detailed timings on published content after the fact. The best the LinkedIn timestamp will tell you is "3h" or "2d" (to indicate you posted the content three hours or two days ago, etc.)

This is where a tool like Buffer can help. When you schedule and publish your LinkedIn posts through Buffer, you get a clear record of exactly when each post went live, plus analytics that show you how each one performed. Over time, you'll start to spot patterns that reveal your unique best posting windows.

It's also worth noting that timing isn't the only variable to experiment with. The type of content you post can also affect how your audience responds at different times of day. So as you test different time slots, try mixing up your content formats, too.

Best time to post on LinkedIn FAQs

Here are some of the most commonly asked questions about when to post on LinkedIn.

Does the time you post on LinkedIn actually matter?

Our data, based on over 4.8 million LinkedIn posts, shows that yes, timing does make a difference. Posts shared during high-engagement windows (particularly late afternoon and evening hours on weekdays) consistently outperformed those posted at off-peak times.

Remember, timing isn't a magic fix. Posting at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday won't rescue a post that isn't relevant or valuable to your audience. Think of the top posting times as a helpful boost on top of a solid content strategy, not a substitute for one.

The good news? Acting on timing data is easier than ever. LinkedIn now lets you schedule posts directly within the platform, and tools like Buffer can automate your posting schedule based on high-engagement time slots so you don't have to remember to hit publish at exactly 4 p.m.

When is the worst time to post on LinkedIn?

Based on our data, the lowest-engagement windows are early in the week. Monday and Tuesday tend to underperform compared to mid-to-late week. Morning hours (before noon) also see weaker engagement now that late afternoon and evening have shifted to the top of the heatmap.

Weekends are generally quiet too, though Saturday at 9 a.m. and late Sunday evening can still see some activity. If you have a post you really want to perform, don't bury it on a Monday morning; save it for Wednesday through Friday instead.

What is the "golden hour" for LinkedIn posts?

The "golden hour" refers to the period right after a LinkedIn post goes live, when early engagement may help signal value to the algorithm and push the post to more people. LinkedIn hasn't confirmed an official 60- or 90-minute window, so treat it as a general concept rather than a hard rule.

That said, many creators try to be available to respond to comments shortly after posting. Engaging with early replies can keep the conversation going and may help maintain momentum during that initial window.

Is LinkedIn engagement higher in the morning or evening?

Our latest data shows that evening hours now outperform mornings on LinkedIn. Posts shared between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays consistently see higher engagement than those shared in the morning — a notable shift from what we saw in previous years, when traditional work hours dominated.

The theory? Professionals are increasingly catching up on LinkedIn content after work, during their commute home, or while unwinding in the evening. Our data can’t tell us why the change is happening, though, only that later posting times performed particularly well in this analysis.

What's the best time to post on LinkedIn on weekends?

Weekend engagement on LinkedIn drops off significantly compared to weekdays, so if you have the flexibility to schedule your posts for a weekday instead, that's likely the better move. If you do need to post on a weekend, Saturday at 9 a.m. is your best bet. Sunday late evening (around 10 p.m.) also shows some activity.

Do these posting times apply to my time zone?

Yes, our data scientist has crunched the numbers so that the recommended times are universally applicable. You don't need to convert anything. Whether you're posting from New York, London, or Mumbai, 4 p.m. means 4 p.m. in your local time zone.

How often should I post on LinkedIn?

Posting two to five times per week is where most creators and brands start to see results. Based on our data, accounts that post more consistently tend to see stronger impressions per post over time, and posting six to 10 times per week can push those numbers further still.

That said, consistency matters more than volume. It's better to post three times a week every week than to post daily for two weeks and then go quiet. Start with a schedule you can actually sustain, then build from there.

What type of content performs best on LinkedIn?

According to our data, carousel (document) posts generate up to 596% more engagement than text-only posts, making them the standout format on the platform right now. Beyond format, content that offers genuine insight, professional value, or a unique perspective tends to do well on LinkedIn. For a deeper look at what's working, check out our guide to the LinkedIn algorithm.

More LinkedIn resources

• How to Schedule LinkedIn Posts in 2026 (2 Easy Methods + Tips)
• Connected Apps on LinkedIn: What They Are + How to Get Buffer Capabilities
• Replying to Your Comments on LinkedIn Boosts Engagement by 30%
• LinkedIn Marketing in 2026: The Complete Guide for Businesses and Creators
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I try to post consistently on LinkedIn, but I confess that it’s not always top of my list when deadlines are looming, my toddler’s kept me up at night, and I simply can’t justify yet another cup of coffee to keep me going.

We all have those days, which is why it’s so helpful to batch your LinkedIn content creation and schedule your LinkedIn posts ahead of time. 

According to Buffer’s latest data, LinkedIn is now the strongest platform for organic engagement, with a median rate of 8%. This shows us that success on the platform isn’t about going viral once, but about building steady, predictable engagement over time.

So, if you have thought leadership to share (and I’m willing to bet you do), staying consistent by scheduling your posts on LinkedIn is a massive opportunity to reach more people and build a credible reputation out in the professional world.  

In this guide, I’ll walk you through two simple ways to schedule your LinkedIn posts on your company page and/or personal profile.

Key takeaways

• Two methods: You can schedule posts natively within LinkedIn or use a third-party tool like Buffer for more features and flexibility.
• Consistency is key: Regular posting can lead to over 5x more engagement.
• Native limits: LinkedIn's built-in scheduler allows planning up to three months in advance, but not groups and events.
• Optimal timing: Aim for weekdays between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., specifically Wednesdays and Fridays.

LinkedIn company page vs. personal LinkedIn profile

What’s the difference between a personal page and a company page on LinkedIn? Your personal profile is all about you: your skills, experience, and voice. It’s where you connect, build relationships, and share thought leadership in a more personal, authentic way.

A company page represents a business. It’s where companies showcase their brand, post updates, and build credibility at an organizational level.

Which type of LinkedIn profile should you use?

If you run a business and have the time and capacity to dedicate to a company page and your personal profile, you would ideally do both. 

If not, I recommend starting with your personal profile — people connect with people first. Then, support your efforts with a company page to establish your brand and give your audience a place to learn more about your business. Of course, this depends on your content strategy and goals. In my case, since I'm a freelancer and essentially the whole brand myself, I focus on my personal profile.

How to schedule a post on LinkedIn

You can schedule posts on LinkedIn using the built-in scheduling feature on both desktop and mobile devices. The steps to schedule a post natively on LinkedIn are the same for a personal profile and a company page. The only difference is where you start.

For a personal profile, you'll simply start from the LinkedIn homepage. For a company page, there's an extra step — making sure you choose your company page from the dropdown in the composer. From there, the scheduling steps are identical.

How to schedule a LinkedIn post from a personal profile

1. Start a post as you normally would from the LinkedIn homepage. 
2. Instead of hitting Post, click on the little clock icon.
3. You’ll be taken to a pop-up window where you can set the date and time you’d like your post to go live.
4. Hit Next, then the Schedule button. 

On mobile, the process is really similar: tap Post in the navigation bar, write your content, then tap the clock icon in the upper-right corner to pick your date and time. Tap Next, then Schedule.

How to schedule a LinkedIn post from a company page

There's one thing you'll need to do slightly differently here:

1. Start a post as you normally would from the LinkedIn homepage.
2. Click on the drop-down arrow next to your name to change to your company page.
3. Select the page you want to post from. 
4. Instead of hitting Post, click on the little clock icon.
5. You’ll be taken to a pop-up window where you can set the date and time you’d like your post to go live.
6. Hit Next, then the Schedule button. 

Easy peasy. Just note that there are a few limitations to be aware of:

• Time horizon: If you’re Type-A about planning your content in advance (and part superhero), you might be disappointed to learn you can only use LinkedIn's built-in scheduling tool to publish posts between 10 minutes and three months in advance.
• Restricted formats: You can't natively schedule posts for LinkedIn groups, events, jobs, or services. If you're scheduling for a company page, there are a few extra restrictions: polls, reshares, and multiple-photo posts can't be scheduled either.

Where do I see my scheduled LinkedIn posts?

Finding scheduled posts on LinkedIn isn’t super intuitive, and I remember having to Google how to do it a while back. (Maybe you did, and that’s how you landed here. Hi! 👋) 

Here’s how to go about it:

1. Start a post.

2. Click on the little clock icon to go to the scheduled posts section. 

3. Click on View all scheduled posts → to see what you’ve got in the pipeline.

How to schedule LinkedIn posts using Buffer as a scheduling tool 

If you're managing LinkedIn alongside other social channels — or you just want more flexibility with your scheduling — a tool like Buffer can simplify the process. Here’s how to schedule LinkedIn posts in just a few clicks:

1. Head to your Buffer Channels area to connect your LinkedIn Page or profile (or both).
2. Once your LinkedIn channel is connected, you can go ahead and click the green + New button on the top left of your Buffer dashboard. 
3. Create your post and select the channels you’d like to publish to.
4. Click the down arrow next to Schedule Post, and choose the best option for you: 'Next available,' 'Now,' or 'Set Date and Time.' 

You're all set! This process applies to both LinkedIn Pages and personal profiles.

What kind of posts can I schedule on LinkedIn?

Whether you're scheduling natively or through Buffer, you can schedule LinkedIn posts in these formats: text-only, image, GIF, PDF carousel, video, and link previews.

A few formats can't be scheduled on LinkedIn, though: events, jobs, services, and group posts. If you're posting from a company page, polls, reshares, and multi-photo posts are also off the table for scheduling.

How do I mention other LinkedIn Pages and profiles? 

• To mention a Page: Copy and paste the specific LinkedIn Page URL (e.g., https://www.linkedin.com/company/bufferapp/) directly into the composer.
• To mention a Profile: Type the @ symbol and search for the individual's name to tag them.

You can learn more about LinkedIn tagging here. 

Scheduling LinkedIn posts on Buffer vs. LinkedIn at a glance 

Why you should schedule your LinkedIn posts

• Reach more people: Post when your audience is most active to get more eyes on your content and boost engagement.
• Grow faster: Pages that post weekly see 5.6x more follower growth. For pages and individuals, showing up regularly signals relevance to both your audience and the LinkedIn algorithm.
• Save time and stress: Plan your LinkedIn posts ahead so you’re not scrambling to come up with something last minute.
• Work smarter: Batch-create posts to keep showing up and maintaining a professional presence, without cutting into your personal time.
• Stay on-brand: Align your LinkedIn posts with your bigger goals so you have more control over how you show up online.

Scheduling on LinkedIn works

I’ve been taking part in Buffer’s Creator Camp, which started on 16 June. I scheduled my posts in advance so that I could be more consistent, which resulted in 20% more impressions and 28% more engagement than the previous 28-day period.

Quick tips for scheduling LinkedIn posts

Try new content formats

LinkedIn has evolved well beyond text-heavy posts — and there's never been a better time to experiment with new formats. Video posts are having a moment on LinkedIn, and it's worth leaning in — even if the idea of hitting record feels a little daunting at first.

If you’re a bit hesitant like me, don’t worry, you don’t have to stand in front of your camera and deliver a TED Talk. Try a simple voiceover, a quick behind-the-scenes clip, or a little day-in-the-life montage. Even a peek at your chaotic desk can be oddly interesting (and relatable).

I loved this idea from my creative colleague, Kirsti Lang (bonus productivity hack too):

Be relevant; be you

People come to LinkedIn to learn something new or get inspired — and the algorithm knows it. LinkedIn posts that are helpful, insightful, or just genuinely useful tend to do better. Share what you know, keep it authentic, and the algorithm will reward you.

As an example, this post of mine did pretty well because I think it hit a nerve (and hopefully helped) my fellow freelancers: 

Find a system that works for you

Consistency beats perfection. If you’re always forgetting to post (we’ve been there), a scheduling tool like Buffer is your best friend. You can plan your posts when you’re feeling creative and let them go out while you’re filming yourself in max productivity mode à la Kirsti. 

Don’t burn yourself out

If posting five times a week makes you dread LinkedIn, you won’t stick with it. Pick a pace you can actually keep up with. Once a week is better than burning out and ghosting your audience for months.

Keep an eye on what’s working

Not every post will be a hit, and that’s fine. But take a peek at your LinkedIn stats (or Buffer’s Insights) to see what’s landing well. Tweak, test, repeat. 

Time it right

LinkedIn loves a weekday scroll. Generally, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays is prime time to post on LinkedIn, with a sweet spot around 4 p.m. on Wednesday and at 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. on Friday.

But don’t sweat the exact minute. Aim for when your audience is likely to be online and engaged — not late at night when attention is low.

Get scheduling

LinkedIn is one of the best places right now to share what you know, connect with the right people, and build a reputation that actually opens doors.

However, consistently sharing and showing up on LinkedIn doesn’t have to mean posting in a rush between meetings or scratching your head for something insightful at the last minute.

With a little planning and the right tools, you can batch your content, schedule posts for peak times, and focus your energy on creating work your audience actually values.

If you’re ready to make LinkedIn feel a little easier, you can start scheduling your posts with Buffer today. It’s free to get started — no trial, no catch — and a great way to build momentum and trust over time. It’s working for me, and I encourage you to give it a shot. Sign up for free, connect your LinkedIn channel, and start scheduling immediately.

More LinkedIn resources

• 26 LinkedIn Stats to Know
• I’ve Grown My LinkedIn Audience by 26% This Year Using This Simple System
• The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn: 1 Million Posts Analyzed
• I Posted to LinkedIn Consistently for 30 Days - Here's What I Learned
• How I Landed My First LinkedIn Brand Partnership (and How You Can Too)
• LinkedIn is my #1 Source of New Clients as a Consultant — Here's My Exact Process

FAQ on scheduling LinkedIn posts

Is there a way to schedule a LinkedIn post?

Yes, you can schedule posts directly on LinkedIn or use third-party tools like Buffer to plan and publish posts ahead of time (plus manage all your other channels in one place).

Can I schedule LinkedIn posts for free?

Yes. LinkedIn’s native scheduler is free to use. With Buffer’s Free plan, you can also schedule up to 10 LinkedIn posts at a time.

Why won't LinkedIn let me schedule posts?

If you're not seeing the scheduling option, it's likely because you're trying to schedule a post type that LinkedIn doesn't support for scheduling — such as events, jobs, services, or group posts. For company pages, polls, reshares, and multi-photo posts are also unsupported.

When this happens, LinkedIn will show an error message letting you know. You have two options: remove the unsupported content from the post, or clear the scheduled date and time and post it immediately instead.

Do scheduled posts on LinkedIn get less engagement?

There’s no evidence that scheduling LinkedIn posts hurts your reach or engagement. Good content is good content — whether you post it now or later. Just focus on creating something valuable for your audience.

Can you schedule LinkedIn posts in advance?

Yes — LinkedIn's native tool lets you pick a date and time for a post to go live, up to three months in advance. With Buffer, you can schedule posts for LinkedIn and your other social channels, manage them in a queue, and even schedule a first comment to go out at the same time.

How do I edit scheduled LinkedIn posts?

If you used LinkedIn's native tool, navigate to your scheduled posts list (open the post composer, click the clock icon, then View all scheduled posts). From there, click the More icon on the post you want to update and choose Edit post or Modify schedule.

If you used Buffer, head to your Queue, click on the post you want to tweak, make your changes, and hit Save.

Can you schedule LinkedIn posts on mobile?

Yes. LinkedIn's native scheduler works on both desktop and mobile. Tap Post in the navigation bar, write your post, then tap the clock icon in the upper-right corner to set a date and time. You can schedule posts up to three months in advance — but keep in mind that events, jobs, and services posts can't be scheduled natively on any device.

Why are my scheduled LinkedIn posts not going live?

A few things can cause this. If you used a third-party tool, your LinkedIn connection may have expired — reconnecting the account usually fixes it. Content that violates LinkedIn's policies may also be blocked before it publishes. If you're scheduling through LinkedIn's native tool, double-check that your post type is supported (events, jobs, and services can't be scheduled). If the problem persists, delete the scheduled post and reschedule it.

What is the 5-3-2 rule on LinkedIn?

The 5-3-2 rule is a simple content mix guideline: for every 10 posts you publish, five should share content from others in your industry, three should be your own original content, and two should be personal — something that shows the human behind the account. It's a useful framework for keeping your feed varied and your audience engaged without burning out on original content creation. When you're batch-scheduling posts in advance, it's a handy reference for building a balanced content calendar.

You know how to schedule a week of posts in one sitting, keep up with comments across five channels, and 'B2B, but make it fun’ is practically your middle name. Same!

The nod to ‘social media management’ on our LinkedIn profiles doesn’t quite cover all that, does it?

Allow me to introduce you to LinkedIn’s Connected Apps. As of June 2026, you can connect Buffer to your LinkedIn profile and have the work you actually do show up as a capability — validated by Buffer, based on your real activity.

Here's what that means, which capabilities you can add, and exactly how to put one on your profile.

What are LinkedIn Connected Apps?

LinkedIn’s Connected Apps are LinkedIn-approved tools you can connect to your profile, turning your real product usage into credible, visible expertise.

You may have seen the idea already — perhaps you’ve spotted how Duolingo users can add their score to their profile? It’s exactly like that. And now a host of other tools (including Buffer!) are one of those connected apps.

When you link your LinkedIn profile to Buffer, the work you're already doing (scheduling, replying, publishing, and building with the API) can appear on your profile as a capability statement like "Schedules and publishes posts across multiple social media accounts in Buffer."

You don’t need to apply or submit anything for approval to get yours. All you need to do is toggle the feature on in your Buffer settings, and Buffer will flesh it out for you. Pretty cool, right?

How Buffer Capabilities work

The whole thing runs on real activity. Here's the short version:

1. You use Buffer the way you normally would — scheduling posts, replying to comments, publishing across your channels.
2. Buffer recognizes it. When your Buffer usage matches a capability (say, publishing to two or more channels), Buffer picks that up and validates it.
3. You choose to display it. Nothing appears on your profile automatically. You opt in and pick the capability you want to show.
4. It shows up on LinkedIn, attributed to Buffer, with a link out so anyone viewing your profile can see what it represents.

This works on personal LinkedIn profiles only, not pages, and at launch, you can display one capability at a time. (More on the why behind that below.)

The capabilities you can add right now

Buffer is starting with four capabilities. Each maps to a specific kind of work in the product, so the only way to add one is to actually do the thing.

• Schedules and publishes posts across multiple social media accounts in Buffer — based on publishing posts to two or more connected channels.
• Responds to comments and tracks mentions across multiple social channels in Buffer — based on engaging with comments, replies, and mentions across your connected channels.
• Publishes social content across Instagram and LinkedIn in Buffer for B2B and consumer audiences — based on publishing to both Instagram and LinkedIn through Buffer.
• Uses the Buffer API to build applications that automate social publishing and scheduling workflows — based on building an API client or shipping a Buffer integration.

The first three will fit most people managing social media day to day. The fourth is for the developers and vibecoders in the community — if you've built on the Buffer API, you can feature this on your profile, too!

How to add a Buffer capability to your LinkedIn profile

This will only take a few minutes:

Step 1: Connect LinkedIn OR refresh your connection

1. If you haven’t already, connect your LinkedIn profile to Buffer by clicking New > Channel > LinkedIn and signing in.
2. If you've already got a LinkedIn profile connected, you'll need to refresh the connection to unlock the feature. To do that, click on your name on the bottom left > Channels. From there, click on the gear icon next to your LinkedIn Profile (not page) and click Refresh Connection.

Step 2: Turn on capabilities

1. Click on LinkedIn from your channels list on the left, then the gear icon at the top of the window (near your name).
2. If you’ve already been using LinkedIn with Buffer for a while, you may already have some capabilities to choose from. Select the one you want to display on your LinkedIn Profile
3. Check your LinkedIn profile. The capability appears, attributed to Buffer, with a "Learn more" link for anyone who wants the details.

Click on General and scroll down to Show your Buffer Capabilities on LinkedIn. Toggle the button on.

Step 3: No capabilities showing yet? Give it time!

Keep using LinkedIn with Buffer to trigger your capabilities! If you have been doing this for a while and you don't see anything straight away, give it a day and make sure you've refreshed your LinkedIn connection in Buffer.

Here’s how it looks on my profile:

Why this matters for your profile

Social media work can sometimes feel a little intangible. You can grow an account into the thousands or run a multi-workflow content engine for a dozen clients, and still have very little on paper. A capability validated through a connected app is something you can actually point to when you're talking to a new client, applying for a role, or pitching for a project.

It pairs well with the profile work you're probably already doing. If you're optimizing your LinkedIn profile to stand out or building a personal brand on the platform, a validated capability adds a layer of proof that endorsements never could.

And for the freelancers and consultants in the community, it's one more credible signal when you're trying to source new clients on LinkedIn.

Similarly, it’s super handy for hiring managers looking for experience in a specific tool.

Ready to add yours? Connect your LinkedIn profile to Buffer and turn the work you're already doing into proof on your profile.

More LinkedIn

• How to Get More Followers on LinkedIn — Exactly What I Did to Get to 22K
• Why LinkedIn Is the Most-Cited Source in AI Search (and What Your Business Should Do Next)
• How LinkedIn’s Algorithm Works in 2026, According to the LinkedIn Team
• LinkedIn Marketing in 2026: The Complete Guide for Businesses and Creators

As Director of Growth at Buffer, I spend a lot of my time observing SEO and now AEO trends, which mostly means paying attention to where AI search engines pull their answers from.

And the biggest shift I've seen in the last few months is LinkedIn. In just three months, it jumped from outside the top 20 to #5 on ChatGPT for professional queries, according to recent research from Profound, a platform that tracks how brands and domains get cited across LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Across all the major AI search platforms, it's now the #1 most-cited domain. If you're building a business in B2B or tech, your future customers are already forming first impressions there, but most businesses haven't realized it.

More of the questions that used to start with a Google search now start with an AI prompt, and the answers those tools give shape which businesses make the algorithm’s shortlist of who or what to highlight.

What's driving that #1 ranking matters even more than the ranking itself. The businesses publishing on LinkedIn now are the ones AI engines are learning to cite, which means there's a compounding advantage here for whoever moves early. The good news is, this trend is still in the early stages, and we’ll be covering how you can benefit in this article.

Jump to a section

The short answer

LinkedIn just became the #1 most-cited domain in AI search for professional queries, and what's getting cited has shifted from profiles toward what people actually publish — posts, articles, and comments from real people. So when your customers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews about your industry, LinkedIn is increasingly where those answers come from. For B2B and tech businesses especially, that makes a deliberate LinkedIn strategy one of the highest-leverage moves available right now.

The catch: the version AI engines reward isn't brand broadcasting. It's real people from your team publishing consistently, in their own voice, and engaging in the comments. Some companies call this employee advocacy. At Buffer, we have a different approach, dubbed a "team of creators." Company pages, press releases, and AI-generated slop don't get cited. The first move is simple: publish one honest post about your work this week. Buffer just makes doing it consistently a lot easier.

What's driving the citations

If LinkedIn isn't already one of your top channels, the data from Profound’s study should change that.

And it’s not just how often LinkedIn gets cited. What's getting cited has also changed. According to Profound, the mix has shifted hard, away from profiles and toward what people actually publish:

In plain English: AI engines are pulling posts from people, not from brand pages, which is now driving visibility.

We're seeing the same shift in our own data. Over the past year, Buffer's LinkedIn channel connections (people connecting their LinkedIn to Buffer) grew 36%, with connections to personal profiles outpacing company pages by 25%. Our own customers are already moving in this direction.

AEO is still a nascent space, so things shift and evolve all the time; even though LinkedIn is big now, it might not always be. But that's exactly the case for building an organic social presence today. The content you publish now is teaching AI engines to cite you, and starting early gives it time to compound, both as a footprint inside LinkedIn and as a source those engines keep returning to.

My theory for why LinkedIn became the source AI engines trust

The version of LinkedIn that AI engines are pulling from looks more like a professional version of Reddit than a digital resume site. It's become a place where people share grounded opinions about their work, tools, and industries, and where other professionals actually listen.

Profound's research backs this up. As they put it: "AI search engines are finding and weighting more of LinkedIn's published content layer over time." Translation: the more LinkedIn becomes a space for genuine professional opinion, the more AI engines treat it as a trusted source.

Now, this is my own hypothesis, but the pattern looks similar to what happened with Reddit. For a while now, Reddit has been one of the top-cited sources in AI search because LLMs learned that real humans giving real opinions in community threads were a more useful signal than polished marketing copy. LinkedIn is now playing that same role for professional questions: which tool to use, which company to work with, which expert to follow.

When people are looking for trustworthy professional answers, they want to hear from other people, and AI engines have figured that out. LinkedIn is where those professionals are.

Most businesses haven't caught up to that yet, and the way they're showing up on LinkedIn is only making the gap worse.

5 reasons your LinkedIn might not be cited

If "posting on LinkedIn" at your company means a product release or a job opening, you're invisible to the part of LinkedIn that matters now. Here's where most businesses get stuck.

1. Treating LinkedIn as an afterthought. I see this most with B2B and software companies: the ones who should be all over LinkedIn but still treat it like the channel they'll "do something about eventually." That's been true for a while. The shift in AI citations just makes the cost of waiting a lot higher.
2. Posting brand-first instead of people-first. LinkedIn's algorithm has been quietly shifting to favor personal profiles over company pages, and the reach gap is widening. People want to hear from people, not from a logo. If you haven't encouraged your team to share their work in their own voice (what we'd call employee advocacy), you're forfeiting the most-cited content layer on the platform. And the copy-paste version, templates with your team's faces on them, performs about as well as a brand page: badly.
3. Posting too infrequently. Consistency beats polish on LinkedIn (and most social platforms). Too many businesses save up for one well-produced post a month or a quarter, when showing up regularly, even when the posts aren't perfect, does far more to build community around your profile.
4. Being too polished to be human. LinkedIn is still a professional network, but the people on it are still people. Raw, genuine content tends to outperform buttoned-up brand content. You can share real stories, real takes, even humor.
5. The AI slop trap. Every major platform has felt the flood of AI-generated posts and comments since LLMs arrived, and LinkedIn is no exception. AI-written posts are obvious to readers, other professionals call them out in the comments, and engagement shows it. If you're using AI tools, use them to refine and polish a draft you wrote, not to generate posts from scratch.

None of these mistakes is fatal on its own, but together they make for a LinkedIn that won’t lead to the results you’re after. The version that does get cited looks different, and it's worth knowing why.

What showing up on LinkedIn looks like in 2026

The version of LinkedIn that AI engines cite is built by humans, not brands. People from your team show up consistently, in their own voice, in real conversations with their peers. That's the model. Everything else is execution.

It starts with who's posting. The brand page can stay, but the engine has to be your team. We call this "team of creators" at Buffer: employee advocacy without the corporate template. People share what they're actually working on, in their own voice, with their own takes. Your business shifts from a single brand voice to a network of real voices, which is exactly what LinkedIn (and AI search) is rewarding right now.

The team-of-creators approach works best when there's something real to talk about. At Buffer, that's "build in public": sharing what we're working on, why, and what we're learning along the way. That transparency creates content worth engaging with because it's grounded in real experience, not marketing. Press releases and product launches just don't carry the same weight in the feed anymore.

⚡ Want to go deeper here? Read Empowering Employees to Build Their Personal Brands on LinkedIn (+ Why You Should).

Showing up consistently matters more than showing up polished. A few thoughtful posts a week from real people will outperform one highly produced post a quarter, every time. And you can be human about it: LinkedIn is still a professional network, but the people on it are still people. I'll share memes about professional topics every so often, and they do well, because there's a human on the other end of the screen, not a brand.

LinkedIn also isn't a broadcast channel anymore. The businesses showing up best are showing up in the comments, responding to questions, and building rapport with the people interacting with their work. That's where community actually forms, and it's where the algorithm decides which content to push further.

A note for founders, especially: your personal LinkedIn is now business infrastructure. It's where investors, future hires, customers, and journalists are forming opinions about your company. Most founders I see are still treating X as their primary channel for this. Worth reconsidering.

You can see this playing out in the LinkedIn presences that have built real reach over the past few years. Justin Welsh has been running the founder-led playbook for years. Alex Hormozi shares opinionated takes from his own work. freeCodeCamp is a brand page done right, leaning on community and useful content rather than corporate broadcasts. Different scales, same operating principle.

This all looks easy on paper, but applying is the hard part. That's where the system you use to manage your LinkedIn presence starts to matter.

How I use Buffer for LinkedIn

You don't need a stitched-together stack of five tools to run a LinkedIn-first content strategy. I plan, publish, and review all of my LinkedIn content through Buffer. You can take my word for it: I've grown my LinkedIn following to 14,573 followers, up 176% over the past year. Here's my setup.

• For ideation, Buffer's Create space holds my running list of ideas as I work through the week. When I see something worth posting about, it goes there first. By the time I'm ready to publish, I have a stocked queue rather than a blank page, which is what makes consistency possible in the first place.
• For publishing: I can refine and post to LinkedIn (profiles and pages) in a few clicks, or schedule for later. The friction of switching contexts to log into LinkedIn natively is gone. That sounds small, but it's why I actually post on a regular schedule instead of letting weeks lapse.
• To know what's working: Buffer's Insights for LinkedIn (currently in beta) shows me what's actually resonating without leaving the tool. I can see my top-performing content over the last week, month, or quarter at a glance.
• For figuring out which themes compound: I tag my content by theme, like Buffer's growth story, AEO, humor, and personal takes, so I can see which thematic pillars are pulling weight. That helps me invest in the content patterns that work rather than guessing.
• For AI power users: Buffer's MCP lets you ideate, draft, and schedule LinkedIn posts without leaving your LLM. Important caveat, and one I want to land carefully: this isn't permission to have AI write your posts for you. The whole reason LinkedIn is getting cited is that AI engines can tell who's actually speaking on the platform. Use the MCP to refine, edit, and schedule. Use your own voice for the first draft.

Note: None of these features matter if you don't start. Tooling is the easy part, but you still need to show up.

You have the info, now start

Here's the single first move I'd recommend, whether you’re an employee or a founder: publish one authentic, transparent post about your work this week. Skip the product update, the job posting, the polished thought leadership essay. Share what you or your team are actually working on, in your own voice.

It doesn't need to be polished or read like a LinkedIn influencer post. Bring your community along as you're building, and show up with useful advice or information. And if three people leave thoughtful comments on your post, reply to all. That's how community gets built, and it's also how the algorithm decides whether to push your next post further.

More LinkedIn resources

• LinkedIn Marketing in 2026: The Complete Guide
• How to Use LinkedIn for Business: The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Company Pages
• LinkedIn Learnings: Advice for Growing Your Audience from the Buffer Team
• We Published 400+ LinkedIn Page Posts in the Past Year — Here's What We Learned

Shivani Shah runs her freelance business the way she runs her Mac: keyboard-first and automated wherever possible.

Hazel, a Mac folder-automation tool, sorts her invoices into the right folders the moment they hit Downloads. Alfred, her keyboard-driven launcher, pulls up any file by keyword so she never has to open Finder. A custom Shortcut creates her entire annual folder structure in one click, all 14 folders named for the financial year, because doing it by hand every April was painful and full of mistakes. She's also the kind of person who builds a swim tracker app because the existing ones felt too goal-oriented and not fun enough.

So when she saw the Buffer team posting on LinkedIn about what people were building with the API, she thought: "I can do this. It may not be easy, but I can do it."

She'd never built with an API before.

A Friday morning accountability partner

Shivani's goal is to post on LinkedIn twice a week. She takes it seriously — it's where a lot of her freelance clients find her. She wanted something that would check in with her every Friday morning, so she didn't have to open any other tool to figure out how her week went. And she wanted it in Slack, where she already spends most of her workday talking to clients.

The idea came from a habit she picked up working in-house on a content team. Every Friday, the team would post in Slack: "Here's what I worked on this week," and "Here's what's on the agenda for next week." It kept everyone on the same page and made it easy to help each other out. Shivani wanted to recreate that for her freelance life, except she didn't want to type it out every week or manually grab the numbers from Buffer or LinkedIn herself. She wanted the API to assemble the recap for her.

She opened Claude, pasted in the API documentation ("here's the API, scrape it, read it"), and asked: " Can I build a Slack workflow that recaps my week?"

Claude said yes, so they built it together, step by step.

The result is a Slack message that arrives every Friday at 10:30 a.m. It shows how many LinkedIn posts she's published that week, whether she's hit her two-post goal, and what's scheduled for the rest of the week and the week after. Each post shows a short preview with a direct link back to the post in Buffer. If her queue for next week is empty, the message tells her and drops in a link to her Create Space so she can fix that before the weekend.

The goal tracking pulls from Buffer's own backend calculations. If she's posted once and has another scheduled, she's on track. Is the queue dry, the status flips to "at risk."

Shivani has scheduled this message for the same time every week, and she still gets a little thrill every Friday when it appears. "I get excited every time I see a new message in Slack," she says. "I've completely forgotten that it's the automation."

A personal command centre for LinkedIn

The Slack bot helps her stay accountable. But Shivani also wanted a way to look back across everything she'd posted, search it, find patterns, and pull ideas backed by her actual post history and performance.

She'd been on LinkedIn for years, and her create space was full of half-formed ideas. (Her words: "Sometimes it's just one sentence that I have to look at later and be like, there was a thought. There was definitely a thought. What was it?")

So she built that too.

Using Lovable, she created what she calls the LinkedIn Content Library & Analyzer. ("There's no official name. It's clunky, I know.") When she first set it up, she pulled in her last 100 posts from Buffer's API. Then she asked Lovable to backfill 50 older posts on top of that, so the library now goes all the way back to 2023. Every time she opens the app, new posts sync automatically.

The app lets her search across posts and notes by keyword, filter by tags and date ranges, and add her own comments to any post. The search alone solves the original problem of not being able to find anything she's written. But the part that's become most valuable is the AI chat. She can select specific posts and ask questions about them ("what topics do I post about most?" or "are there any gaps in my content?") and the AI analyzes just those posts. Chat history saves, so she can pick up old threads anytime.

She considered other approaches before landing on Lovable. Zapier piping into Notion was an option, but it couldn't pull in historical posts, which meant starting from zero. Claude Code was another thought, but she couldn't connect to the API through her VS Code extension at the time. Lovable let her bring in that backlog of posts and gave her a full interface to work with.

"The library solves my problem of not being able to search for my own posts," Shivani says. "But the chat has become much more valuable than I expected."

No code, just conversation

The Slack bot and the Lovable app were both built by someone who'd never touched an API before. Shivani's process was really straightforward: open Claude, paste in the Buffer API docs, describe what you want. Claude walked her through it. Go here, do this, go here, do that. She iterated on the Slack message format, eventually moved into Slack's Block Kit Builder for layout, and wired everything together without writing code from scratch.

"Claude literally walked me through everything," she says. "It really wasn't that hard."

Lovable was a similar story, just with the coding done for her. "I'd call it more AI coding or vibe coding than no-code," Shivani says. "I didn't have to write any code or use a WYSIWYG editor. I just chatted with Lovable, told it what I wanted, and it made a plan, built it, and iterated."

Shivani's a freelancer, not a software developer. She loves automation, and she's good at thinking through how tools should connect, but she'd never read API documentation before this. AI assistants were enough to get her from "I've never done this" to two working products she uses every week.

How the app keeps growing

Since the first version, Shivani has kept adding to the Lovable app. Analytics is in there now, alongside the posts and the chat. It's not fully automated yet — she uploads CSV files of her LinkedIn data and pastes saves, sends, reposts, and follower counts into the notes for each post — but the chat picks up all of that during its analysis and now serves up ideas inspired by her top-performing posts.

She's also added a save-to-Buffer feature, so when the chat surfaces an idea worth running with, it goes straight into her create space queue.

What's still on her wishlist: automating the analytics part if the API ever supports it, so she can stop with the CSV uploads and manual pasting. She also wants to pull ideas from specific columns in her Buffer Create space in the Friday Slack message, so she doesn't even have to leave Slack to start thinking about what to post next.

And she'd love to make the app available to other people. Right now, it's just for her, but she can see it being useful for anyone who wants a searchable archive of their own content.

"I would have loved to make this app available to people," Shivani says. "That would be pretty cool."

Try it yourself

Shivani didn't learn to code or hire a developer. She used AI to talk through the technical parts and to build the interface. If you've ever wanted to extend Buffer to fit exactly how you work, this is how you do it.

Buffer's API is now available. You can start building today.

LinkedIn carousels punch above their weight. The algorithm pushes them, and according to Buffer's State of Social Engagement report, an analysis of 52+ million posts across 200,000+ accounts, LinkedIn carousels have the highest engagement rate on the platform, performing 585% better than text posts.

They tend to be one of my top-performing formats, which is a win for my personal branding efforts. Much like Instagram carousels, they break up the feed and reward a reader who actually swipes.

I'll be the first to admit they can be a pain to make if your design skills are limited (mine are). Thanks to tools like Canva and Buffer's handy guide to creating and scheduling this format, the design hurdle is lower than it used to be. The bigger problem is usually idea generation.

Below, you'll find 11 LinkedIn carousel examples from real creators, plus a section on LinkedIn carousel ads and the best practices that hold the whole format together at the end.

Key takeaways

• LinkedIn carousels have the highest engagement rate on the platform (Buffer's State of Social Engagement report, 52M+ posts analysed across 200,000+ accounts).
• The 11 carousel formats that keep working in 2026 include: industry news, company culture, step-by-step guides, facts and trivia, data visualization, product showcases, zero-click content, collaborations, thought leadership, community highlights, and micro interviews.
• The best carousels share four traits: digestible formatting, consistent visual branding, synthesized sourcing, and a clear narrative arc.
• LinkedIn carousel ads (sponsored, paid placement) have different rules from organic carousels: max 10 cards, a call to action (CTA) button, and audience targeting through Campaign Manager.

11 LinkedIn carousel ideas at a glance

1. Share industry news in a carousel post

Industry news carousels summarize recent updates, platform changes, or trends in your niche across swipeable slides, positioning the author as a current, in-the-know source.

Keeping your audience informed about what's changing in your space does double work: you become a reliable filter for them, and you get the reach that comes with being early to a topic.

Two creators do this especially well.

Girl Power Marketing uses a distinct tone of voice and consistent visual branding to share important social media updates — the kind of update that lands partly because the LinkedIn algorithm rewards posts that get saved.

The clever bit: the visuals are recognizable from the cover slide alone, so the brand benefits even from a feed skim.

Pretty Little Marketer highlights their social media playbook for the year in a visually striking carousel, picking key trends and practices and explaining why each worked.

What I'd steal: A summary slide at the end that wraps up all the key points.

2. Spotlight company culture and employees

Company culture carousels feature employees, behind-the-scenes moments, or values, humanizing the brand and supporting employer branding.

Behind-the-scenes carousels build brand awareness, soften a corporate identity, and tend to attract good candidates as a side effect.

Here at Buffer, we use LinkedIn carousels to highlight new members to the team.

The clever bit: putting a single employee front and centre makes a large company feel like a place where individuals feel welcome and appreciated.

3. Build a step-by-step carousel tutorial

Step-by-step carousels break a process into one action per slide, making them ideal for tutorials, frameworks, or how-to guides.

The format naturally structures the content: one step per swipe keeps things easy to follow.

Jay Clouse shares a guide to posting over the holiday season. He provides a step-by-step approach to repurposing content and scheduling posts.

Alex Smith shares seven memorable phrases about strategy. He breaks down complex concepts into easily digestible points.

What I'd steal: The numbered list inside a carousel works because it sets reader expectations from slide one. You know there are seven things, and you swipe through to collect them.

4. Share interesting facts and stats

Fact-based carousels share surprising statistics, trivia, or research findings to drive saves and shares.

A good fact does most of the work — your job is to package it so it travels.

Mad Over Marketing shares an interesting story about how Movado has created a new collection inspired by their first square watch from 1917.

The clever bit: An unexpected story about a well-known brand. These types of posts are highly shareable and often get saved for later.

5. Turn complex data into digestible frames

Data visualization carousels translate dense statistics or frameworks into one digestible idea per slide.

Complex topics are where carousels earn their keep. A 500-word post on the same idea would lose most readers by paragraph two; the carousel makes them swipe instead.

We presented our data on the best time to post on every platform in an easy-to-scan carousel format.

What I'd steal: The discipline of one idea per frame. It's the part most people get wrong when they try to copy this format.

6. Showcase your products or services

Product carousels walk through a feature, use case, or customer story, effectively a mini case study in the feed.

The trick is one feature per slide. If you try to fit the whole pitch onto every frame, no one swipes.

Jens Joseph Mannanal, Co-founder & COO at Passionfroot, shares a case study of how Superhuman, one of the biggest and fastest-growing AI newsletters globally, leverages Passionfroot to streamline their workflow and sponsorship process.

What I'd steal: The case-study arc: problem → solution → result, one slide per beat, with a quote from the customer in the middle. Carousels are made for this shape.

7. Create zero-click content from existing media

Zero-click carousels deliver complete value inside the post itself, with no external link required for the reader to learn something.

You don't have to write every carousel from scratch. Repurposing is half the battle won.

Jay Clouse uses content from his podcast to create carousels that stand alone, but also encourage people to listen to the podcast for more on the topic.

8. Run a collaborative LinkedIn carousel

Collaborative carousels co-create content with another expert or brand, sharing distribution and audience between collaborators.

Collaboration is one of LinkedIn's unsung growth levers. Both creators end up in front of an audience they wouldn't have reached alone.

Ryan Musselman collaborates with Richard van der Blom to share insights on how to design a LinkedIn banner that positions you as an expert and attracts your ideal customers. The post is a step-by-step guide with examples and ideas for incorporating social proof.

The clever bit: it ends with a soft handoff: Ryan invites his audience to follow Richard. Both creators end up in front of an audience they wouldn't have reached alone.

9. Share thought leadership and how-to content

Thought leadership carousels share original frameworks, opinions, or expert advice to build authority in a niche.

The key here isn’t controversy; it's specificity. A named framework or repeatable structure beats a generic opinion every time.

Sam Browne's inbound lead generation how-to uses a contrarian statement, "what everyone gets wrong," sets up the right way to go about it.

Eddie Shleyner shares regular micro lessons related to copywriting.

The clever bit: He shares the word countdown to keep people engaged, and includes call to actions to more of his content at the end.

10. Highlight members of your audience or community

Highlighting members of your audience or community is a powerful strategy to foster engagement and build a sense of belonging. 

Passionfroot showcases real client stories of people using their product.

What I'd steal: the implicit promise. Featuring actual customers publicly says, "we see you."

Klaviyo has built a thriving community where users and partners can learn, grow, and share tips on enhancing their ecommerce businesses. They highlight their Klaviyo Champions:

The clever bit: This approach not only fosters a sense of community but also positions Klaviyo as a valuable resource hub. It encourages peer-to-peer learning and engagement, which can lead to increased customer loyalty and brand advocacy.

11. Share micro interviews

Micro interview carousels are short Q&A posts with one expert.

The format respects how busy the feed is. Users get interview highlights or even a full interview without leaving LinkedIn.

MOI Global interviewed Dave Harland, Founder of Copy or Die, about what good writing still needs to do. They include highlights from the interview, along with a call to action encouraging readers to watch the full version.

Bonus: LinkedIn carousel ad examples (sponsored posts)

Everything above covers organic carousels — the ones you post for free from your own profile or page. LinkedIn carousel ads are different: they're sponsored posts you run through Campaign Manager, with a few format rules that organic posts don't have.

Here's what changes when you move from organic to paid:

• Card limit: Carousel ads max out at 10 cards.
• CTA buttons: Each card can have its own CTA button (Learn more, Sign up, Download, etc.), whereas organic carousels rely on the post copy and final slide for the call to action.
• Audience targeting: Carousel ads target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and skills via Campaign Manager.
• Format spec: 1080×1080 px cards, with each card acting as a standalone unit (no swipe-to-reveal payoffs).

⚡ Pro tip: If you're running carousel ads for the first time, treat each card like a single-slide post that has to earn the next swipe. The CTA button helps, but the swipe is still the test.

LinkedIn carousel best practices and design tips for 2026

Carousels that stand out come down to a mix of structure, story, and visual consistency.

Structure your carousel for easy consumption. Keep the slide count at around six to nine slides. Don't make slides too content-heavy; keep it digestible enough to read in one swipe-through.

Tell a story. Use the carousel to take the reader on a journey: an insight, a case study, or a concept unpacked. Story is what makes a carousel memorable instead of skimmable. Tease at the start, provide value at the end.

Include a clear call to action. What do you want the reader to do after the last slide? Visit your site, sign up, download something — make it obvious and make it specific.

Maintain consistent visual branding. Carousels with the same colours, fonts, and layout week over week build recognition. People should be able to tell it's yours from the cover slide.

Optimize for mobile. Most LinkedIn users are on their phones. Text needs to be readable on a 6-inch screen, not just a 27-inch monitor.

Before we wrap, three threads ran through every example above:

• They had a clear single takeaway you could summarize in one sentence.
• They used the cover slide to make a promise and then actually delivered it.
• They were designed to be screenshotted, not just swiped.

And the most successful LinkedIn carousels overall:

• Distill information into a format that's quick to read and fun to scroll through.
• Stick to consistent branding and visuals week over week.
• Do the work for the reader by pulling from multiple sources into one tight piece.
• Turn complex data into frames anyone can follow.

If you only take one thing from this list, take this: pick one idea, copy the format closely the first time, and make it your own by the third post. That's how every creator above got good at carousels.

⚡ Pro tip: Once you've designed your carousel, you can schedule it directly to LinkedIn from your dashboard.

Ready to post your first carousel?

You've got the ideas, now you just need the carousel. Create a post in Buffer to design, preview, and schedule your LinkedIn carousel in one place, or get started for free if you're new to Buffer.

FAQs about LinkedIn carousels

What is a LinkedIn carousel post?

A LinkedIn carousel is a multi-slide PDF post that lets you share several frames of content in a single swipeable update. Most carousels are PDF documents uploaded through the Add a document option in the post composer, though you can also create image-based carousels by uploading several images at once.

What's the difference between a LinkedIn carousel post and a LinkedIn carousel ad?

A LinkedIn carousel post is organic content you share from your profile or company page for free. A LinkedIn carousel ad is a sponsored post run through Campaign Manager. It has a 10-card maximum, supports per-card CTA buttons, and uses LinkedIn's targeting tools (job title, seniority, industry) to reach a specific audience. Both formats use 1080×1080 cards.

What size should a LinkedIn carousel be?

For image-based carousels, LinkedIn supports 1080×1080 (square) or 1080×1350 (portrait) at a minimum. For document/PDF carousels (the most common organic format), design each page as either 1080×1080 or 1920×1080 (landscape) and upload the file as a PDF for the cleanest result.

More LinkedIn resources

• The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn: 4.8 Million Posts Analyzed
• How to Get More Followers on LinkedIn — Exactly What I Did to Get to 22K
• How LinkedIn’s Algorithm Works, According to the LinkedIn Team
• LinkedIn Marketing: The Complete Guide for Businesses and Creators
• Replying to Your Comments on LinkedIn Boosts Engagement by 30%

LinkedIn’s algorithm has always been a bit of a mystery — until now. 

The LinkedIn team has been pulling back the curtain on the algorithm in interviews with Entrepreneur, talking about how it works and why going viral isn't the goal. We've looked at two:

• On the website, with Editor-in-Chief and VP of Content Development, Dan Roth, and Alice Xiong, Director of Product Management.
• On the podcast, with Senior Director and Executive Editor at LinkedIn News Laura Lorenzetti.

In this article, we’ll highlight the key points from the team’s interviews about the LinkedIn algorithm and share practical tips for applying this knowledge to your content.

How the LinkedIn algorithm works

Unlike YouTube and Instagram, which have different spaces on the platforms to discover content, LinkedIn primarily serves users content on the Feed: what someone lands on when they open the app or visit the website. The real magic is how it picks what users see.

The system looks at their connections, the topics they care about, and the conversations they’re most likely to join. That’s how LinkedIn keeps people engaged with people and ideas that matter to them.

With over 1 billion members and millions (some say billions) of updates posted every day, LinkedIn relies on signals like relevance, timeliness, and authenticity to decide what users see. It’s about meaningful engagement and genuine connections count more than numbers on the social media platform.

Here’s what that means for brands and creators: when you create quality content that’s relevant to a specific audience, those people are more likely to see your posts. The reverse is true for your audience of LinkedIn users: what they engage with is what they’ll see.

If they always engage with B2B marketing content, they’ll see more of that on their Feed. If you always post about B2B marketing, your target audience will inevitably see more of your content. And the more niche your approach is, the better the algorithm can direct your content to the top of the right Feeds.

With this context in mind, all the updates are in service of getting the right content in front of the right audience.

Virality no longer drives the algorithm

LinkedIn used to prioritize whatever got the most engagement. You know, the viral stuff. Now, it’s more about meaningful connections and relevant conversations. That shift means users will likely see fewer random viral posts and more content that aligns with their interests or professional goals.

Focusing on viral content isn't the best strategy now as it's unlikely to lead to real growth in the long run.

Connections and followers now see your posts first

LinkedIn made this change because people kept asking for it. Turns out, most of us find posts from our existing connections way more valuable than posts from strangers. It also means that the quality of your network is more critical than ever. If you want engagement, the people you connect with need to see value in your content.

This doesn't mean that your posts will live in a bubble, and that people outside your connections won't ever see them. LinkedIn's algorithm rewards knowledge-rich posts by extending their reach beyond the creator’s immediate network. Even non-connected users who might find your content valuable could see your posts if they provide value and gain meaningful engagement.

LinkedIn prioritizes expert content

LinkedIn wants to surface more of the knowledge and advice that experts are sharing. The algorithm determines what expertise is relevant to a user by identifying their interests based on their profile info and activity.

For creators, LinkedIn pays attention to who you are and how much engagement and sharing your content gets, then it decides how broadly to distribute your posts. That means each like, in-depth comment, or share can expand your audience — so encouraging authentic interaction is key.

Key metrics for LinkedIn success

The LinkedIn algorithm uses ranking signals to evaluate content: Relevance, Expertise, and Engagement. Together, they decide if your post reaches just a few people, or many more.

• Relevance: How closely your post matches the interests of a defined audience
• Expertise: Whether you demonstrate subject matter knowledge in your post
• Engagement: If your post sparks meaningful comments from people who typically interact with this topic

As a creator, you should aim to design content that not only appeals to a specific audience, but also underscores your expertise and encourages genuine engagement. Here’s how.

How creators can work with the LinkedIn algorithm

Whether you consider yourself a creator, an influencer, or just someone building their personal brand on LinkedIn, my advice is the same: Treat LinkedIn like you would a work conference. You’re there to:

• Give a keynote presentation (share high-quality content built off your hard-won expertise) and
• Network with people (engage and make new connections)

With that conference mindset, your posts should:

• Be relevant to the conference and its attendees (your niche and audience)
• Pack as much value as possible into those crucial first few seconds before someone keeps scrolling
• Contain some fun personal stories or anecdotes to entertain as well as educate

This helps the LinkedIn Feed ranking algorithm accurately categorize your content and match it with the audiences most likely to value it. To help LinkedIn categorize your posts, you should:

• Share a unique perspective on a popular topic
• Show off your expertise with practical examples and advice
• Format it so that it's easy to read
• Encourage responses with CTAs (“comment below if...”)
• Use three or fewer relevant hashtags
• Avoid engagement bait — posts that ask for likes, shares, or comments in a spammy way can hurt your reach.
• Incorporate relevant keywords from the topic niche (check out tools for finding these keywords here)
• Tag people when it's relevant. Remember to be respectful of how you’re bringing people in the conversation and referencing them, says Laura Lorenzetti. "[Tagging people] is a great thing to do to make sure people are connecting with you and are tagged into what is relevant to them," she says.

Beyond the specific post elements, here are some bigger-picture things to keep in mind.

Focus on sharing knowledge and advice

LinkedIn’s algorithm brings the platform back to its professional roots, rewarding content that sparks real conversations. If you can help others learn or grow, you’ll see better results over time.

"Think about what kind of knowledge you have to offer to help people,” says Alice Xiong. “That is the kind of thing that will likely get you to reach the right audience as well.”

Prioritize relevance over virality

Your content should share insights that can resonate with a specific professional audience instead of trying to appeal to a mass audience. If your passion is kitchens in Middle Eastern architecture and that’s what you choose to write about, the algorithm will make sure the right people see it.

Your followers matter more than ever, but in quality over quantity

In the simplest terms, if you post about a topic, the people who will see it are those who follow you, then anyone interested in that topic. So, your LinkedIn network needs to be filled with people who are most likely interested in what you share and will engage.

7 LinkedIn tips for better content performance

Beyond creating high-quality content that is relevant and useful to your audience, here’s a checklist to maximize your chances of LinkedIn success.

1. Optimize your LinkedIn profile

Make sure you leave no stone unturned in completing your LinkedIn profile.

Gaetano DiNardi created this handy guide of 30+ LinkedIn profile tips that’s definitely worth checking out. Here’s a summary if you’re short on time:

1. Choose a unique profile picture and banner
2. Write a catchy headline and summary — don’t be afraid to include emojis to stand out in people’s feeds
3. Write a detailed experience section — include bullet points of achievements in your role
4. Add skills, endorsements, and recommendations
5. Showcase licenses and certifications

Laura Lorenzetti says your headline is something you should really pay attention to, because people will see it not only on your profile but also on your posts in their feed.

“If people don’t know you, they’ll look at your name and headline, and they’ll match that to what you’re saying,” says Laura. “They’re trying to understand your credibility and expertise, so the more thoughtful you are of how that headline reflects that credibility and expertise and what you want to speak to the better.”

2. Post at the best times

With social networks having ditched chronological newsfeeds many moons ago, timing your posts perfectly is a lot less crucial than it once was.

However, considering the best time to post on LinkedIn for your audience may help give your post reach a little boost.

But when works? To figure out the best times to post on LinkedIn, we assessed the engagement rates of millions of LinkedIn posts sent through Buffer to pinpoint the sweet spot for engagement — and the results won’t surprise you.

The best time to post on LinkedIn for high engagement is generally during late afternoon and evening hours, between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. on weekdays — so if you’re wondering when to post, these times might be your best bet. Of course, every audience is different, so it never hurts to experiment outside those hours, too.

3. Post consistently

The more you share, the better LinkedIn will understand who you are, what you do, and who wants to see your posts, so publish frequently.

We've got the data here, too. Buffer's analysis of more than 2 million LinkedIn posts shows that posting 2 to 5 times a week helps improve both impressions and engagement.

You could absolutely post more often if you want to — our data found that the more often you post, the better your LinkedIn performance. But if that doesn't feel sustainable without burning out, aim to stay within this range.

Quality is still more important than quantity on LinkedIn, so a few well-crafted, valuable posts will be a lot better for your content than aiming for a numbers game.

Creating a content calendar is a great way to make this manageable and scale your output, especially if you’re posting on other social media platforms, too.

4. Experiment with content formats

Gone are the days of basic text posts. LinkedIn’s functionality allows for a host of different types of posts these days — think images, carousels, videos, text posts, newsletters, and polls.

Through Buffer's analysis of the best content formats for different social media platforms, we found what works best — for LinkedIn, that's PDF carousels.

Of more than 1 million LinkedIn posts analyzed, our data found that carousels greatly outperform other post formats. They earn:

• nearly 3x more engagement than videos
• 3x more engagement than images
• nearly 6x more engagement than text-only posts

You can use PDF carousels to create new content, but they're also a brilliant, visual way to repurpose something you may already have shared in a text post on LinkedIn. Here are 11 LinkedIn carousel ideas to get you started.

Videos are the next best performing posts. If you’re already creating videos for other platforms, consider repurposing your content — just make sure they fit what your LinkedIn audience actually wants to see. If you're starting fresh with LinkedIn video, check out the platform's Create Video newsletter for practical tips to get you going.

With so many content formats to choose from, it’s worth experimenting to see which resonates the most with your audience.

5. Share links strategically

As you can see from the graph above, posts with links generally don’t get as much engagement as other types of content — but that doesn’t mean links are off-limits in your LinkedIn digital marketing strategy.

When you share links, says Laura Lorenzetti, make sure the accompanying post also shares value. "Our algorithm is really focusing on the value and content that’s being shared in the post," says Laura. "And what we've found from talking to creators is that if you're writing great knowledge in that post, people are also more likely to be interested in what more they can get if they go to that link."

Add links to your content calendar for the most essential external resources you want to share with your audience. Just make sure the post itself delivers just as much value as the page you're linking to.

You could also share these resources in the comments. Sharing links this way does not appear to have a negative impact on post performance.

6. Pay attention to the hook

If you want people to read your post instead of scrolling by, you need to nail the hook. That's the first couple of lines they see while scrolling — and it's your shot to make them stop and pay attention.

Instead of starting with an introduction or preamble, get right to the heart of the matter. "What’s the most interesting part of your post? Put it at the top," suggests Laura Lorenzetti. "Hook the people, tell them the payoff, and then get them into it."

7. Reply to comments

Here's something worth knowing: Buffer analyzed 72,000 LinkedIn posts and found that replying to comments can boost your engagement by 30%.

The comments section matters just as much as what you post. Stick around to respond to people who take the time to comment. Make it easy for them to engage in the first place by ending your posts with thoughtful questions that invite real conversation. The payoff will be more engagement and a community that actually feels like one.

If you're struggling to keep up with all your LinkedIn notifications and comments, Buffer can help. With the Community feature, you can reply to comments on your LinkedIn posts without ever leaving Buffer.

Great news — your niche interests and knowledge are in demand

The updates to LinkedIn’s algorithm mean great things for creators with niche interests and expertise. You don’t need to try to beat it or game it — just go with its flow.

Since the algorithm cares more about getting your content in front of the right people, you can be assured that you’ll grow as long as you optimize your posts and keep up your engagement through comments and replies.

In other great news, scheduling content isn’t penalized — only abandoning your scheduled content. So get a head start on drafting a bunch of new, relevant content for your audience on LinkedIn through Buffer.

Schedule a LinkedIn post→

Frequently asked questions about the LinkedIn algorithm

1. Can I trick the LinkedIn algorithm?

You really can’t “trick” the LinkedIn algorithm, and you shouldn't aim to. LinkedIn’s algorithm focuses on long-term engagement and genuine connections, so quick-fix hacks generally fall flat.

2. Does posting more often always help?

Posting more often does help boost your reach, but quality, relevance, and genuine engagement will always matter more than just posting frequently. Jumping from 1 to 5 posts a week is where you'll see the biggest difference. Posting more often can still give you a lift, but the improvements are smaller, so only push for it if it feels sustainable.

3. Are hashtags still important?

Hashtags can help members when they're looking for things, but overusing them can look spammy. As Laura Lorenzetti says, they're “a nice to have, not a need to have.” Stick to a few relevant ones. "Don’t use too many, and it’s ok if you don’t use them," she says.

4. Will LinkedIn penalize external links?

No, LinkedIn won't penalize external links — as long as your post itself delivers real value. If you're sharing a link, make sure the post is just as helpful as the resource you're pointing people to. Give context, share insights, and make it worth their time to engage with your content first.

5. Should I boost a post?

Boosting can expand your reach when done strategically, but strong organic engagement usually drives the best long-term results.

More LinkedIn resources

• How Often Should You Post on LinkedIn in 2025? Data From 2 Million+ Posts
• How to Make Your LinkedIn Profile Stand Out: 30+ Tips
• I Started Over on LinkedIn After Deleting 7,000 Followers — and Grew Faster Than Before

LinkedIn used to be the place you'd dust off your resume and hunt for your next job. Today, that’s just a sliver of how people are using the social platform.

A quick scroll now throws up founders building in public, creators sharing their wins, and hot takes on everything from positioning to pricing to — of course — AI. 

And while businesses are still hiring on LinkedIn, many are also pulling back the curtain to show what life inside their company really looks like.

This evolution has opened up serious opportunities for both brands and creators. With over 1 billion users, LinkedIn has grown into a place where B2B professionals, creators, and businesses alike can grow their presence, find new opportunities, and connect with people who care about their work.

In this guide, I’ll cover:

• why LinkedIn has become the platform for B2B creators and businesses
• how both businesses and creators can use LinkedIn effectively
• what content actually gets engagement on the platform, and 
• six practical steps to build your LinkedIn marketing strategy.

Ready? Let’s begin.

What is LinkedIn marketing?

LinkedIn marketing is the practice of using LinkedIn to build your brand, cultivate relationships with potential customers or collaborators, attract talent, and create opportunities for your business or career.

The platform gives both creators and businesses plenty of tools to make this happen.

If you're a creator, you can set up a profile that showcases your expertise, share posts that get people talking, start a newsletter to build a regular audience, and publish longer-form articles when you have something more in-depth to say.

Businesses can do the same through posts, newsletters, and articles — plus other tools specifically for brands, like company pages, events, ads, and job listings.

Is LinkedIn marketing right for your business or brand?

LinkedIn calls itself “the world's largest professional network on the internet,” and this captures why it feels different from every other social network: It’s more than another feed to scroll through. 

LinkedIn is where people go to talk shop, share ideas with others in their field, and build relationships that move their careers or businesses forward.

B2B brands

LinkedIn is where most of the B2B players are already paying attention. In a 2025 global survey from Social Media Examiner, 87% of B2B marketers said they use LinkedIn for marketing, and more than half said it’s the single most important social platform for their business. 

If you're selling to other businesses, LinkedIn puts you in front of decision-makers when they're already in a professional mindset.

B2C companies

LinkedIn hasn’t been the go-to platform for B2C brands in the past, but that’s changing. More consumer brands today are using LinkedIn as a brand awareness channel to share what they stand for and stay visible.

It’s not the strongest channel for direct consumer sales — unless your target audience is professionals, or your product fits into how they work — but it is becoming a powerful place to attract talent, highlight partnerships or find new ones, and show your impact to potential collaborators or investors.

B2B creators

For creators who work in B2B industries, LinkedIn can be the launchpad for new opportunities. By sharing your expertise on the platform, you open doors to prospective clients, recruiters, collaborations, and speaking opportunities that might never have found you otherwise. 

And because LinkedIn is global, your networking opportunities with brands, peers, and industry leaders extend far beyond your local circle.

Sophie Miller, founder of Pretty Little Marketing, sees LinkedIn becoming a big stage for B2B creators. “We're about to see B2B creators absolutely explode on LinkedIn in ways we haven't seen before!” says Sophie. “Brands are finally realizing that people connect with people, not logos.”

Getting started with LinkedIn marketing

If LinkedIn is where you’d like to build your personal brand or business, you’ll need the right kind of presence. Businesses can set up a LinkedIn Company Page, while creators start with a personal profile.

Let’s take a closer look at both.

Company Pages for businesses

A LinkedIn Company Page acts as your brand’s headquarters on the platform.

Every post, comment, and reaction from a company page is on behalf of the business — not an individual — which means the voice and values you share reflect your brand as a whole.

With 40% of users engaging with a LinkedIn Page every week, keeping yours active is a great way to help your brand stay visible and relevant. If someone wants to know what your business does, what your workplace is really like, who works at your company, and what principles drive your decisions, your company page is where they’ll go to get these details.

How to optimize your LinkedIn Company Page

It’s worth it to take the time to get your LinkedIn Page set up right. A complete, well-optimized LinkedIn presence allows your target audience to easily find you on and off LinkedIn (meaning on search engines like Google). 

This should be your first port of call when it comes to LinkedIn best practices.

1. Add a clear profile picture and cover image

Use your logo as the profile picture so visitors can connect the dots between your LinkedIn presence and your business website, store signage, other social media accounts, or anywhere else they can find you. 

The cover image gives you more flexibility — it could show your team, your product, campaign artwork, event photo, or something else that reflects what your company does.

2. Complete your business information

LinkedIn requires you to fill in some parts of your company page — like the overview, industry, and company size — before the page can go live. Others, like your tagline, services, specialties, and contact details are optional, and filling them in gives visitors extra ways to understand what you do.  

LinkedIn Pages with complete information get 30% more weekly views, so filling out every section helps more potential customers, partners, or future employees discover your business.

3. Use SEO keywords

LinkedIn also recommends using search phrases and keywords in your page to help people find you. This practice, known as LinkedIn SEO (search engine optimization), helps your page rank higher in search results on the platform.

There are two places on your LinkedIn Page where you can insert keywords: your company description and specialties. You can find these by navigating to your Company Page > Edit Page > Details.

Pro tip: Add a link to your LinkedIn Page from your website. LinkedIn calls this “an easy win” to help boost search ranking on the platform. On the Buffer website, we link to all our social media profiles, including our LinkedIn Company Page.

4. Set up call-to-action (CTA) buttons and forms

You can customize your page with CTAs that invite users to take the next step. LinkedIn offers different options to fit different goals.

• Invite allows people to invite their connections to follow your page.
• Message lets people send you a DM on the platform.
• Visit website, Visit portfolio, Sign up, Register, Visit More, Contact us, and Learn more all let you send people to a URL of your choice.

You can also add a form to collect leads directly from your LinkedIn Page for a sale, demo, free trial, or to get started with your product or service.

5. Share your company’s hiring policies

If you use LinkedIn for recruitment, the Workplace module and Commitments section can help future employees understand what it’s like to work at your company.

The Workplace module highlights where and how your team works — on-site, hybrid, or fully remote — along with the benefits that support each setup. 

The Commitments section focuses on what your company values most, like career growth, learning opportunities, sustainability, or work-life balance, and the perks that go with them.

Personal profiles for creators

A LinkedIn personal profile acts as your professional identity, showing your experience, achievements, and what you post.

For Callie Schweitzer, Head of Premium Content and Community Strategy at LinkedIn, personal branding starts here. “You have full control over that on your LinkedIn profile and how you really want to show up authentically,” she says.

Your LinkedIn profile is also where new opportunities start, from recruiters reaching out to clients discovering your work. For some creators, having an active LinkedIn presence can even lead to unexpected opportunities beyond the platform. 

“One thing that’s been surprising is how much LinkedIn has opened doors outside of LinkedIn,” says Tami Oladipo, Senior Content Writer at Buffer. 

“My posts there have led to speaking gigs, podcast invites, and brand partnerships — not (always) because I was chasing those things directly, but because showing up consistently made me discoverable.”

I asked creators on LinkedIn why they post, and three themes stood out: building a personal brand, networking and community, and marketing their business or services. 

Having a strong profile is where all of that begins.

How to optimize your LinkedIn profile

Your profile is often the first place people look before they reach out. “Whether it’s thinking about a hiring manager or a brand manager looking at your profile, that’s your digital resume, that’s where people are going,” says Callie. 

Staying optimized also means you’ll show up in more searches and make it easier for LinkedIn users to find you.

Here’s what LinkedIn recommends people do.

• Build out every section of your profile and continue to optimize it regularly.
• Update your profile with new projects, skills, and milestones so it reflects what you’re doing right now.
• Let your personality come through alongside your experience.

1. Use a standout profile image, banner, and headline

First impressions on LinkedIn start with your photos and headline.

A clear, high-quality headshot is always a good place to start for your profile photo. Some industries — like finance or law — often expect a photo on the formal end of the spectrum. If you work in a creative or laid-back field, you have more room to be relaxed and show more of your personality. Either way, choose a photo that represents how you show up at work.

Your banner is another chance to show personality and context. It could feature your work, contact details, a snapshot of you speaking at an event, or a short line that sums up what you do — there’s plenty of room to get creative. 

Freelance writer Stephanie Trovato uses hers for social proof, showcasing client logos to highlight who she’s worked with.

Your headline tells people what you do, who you help, and the skills you bring. It also follows you on LinkedIn, appearing below your name when someone sees a post or comment. Laura Lorenzetti, Senior Director and Executive Editor at LinkedIn News, says this is one part of your profile you should really pay attention to. 

“If people don’t know you, they’ll look at your name and headline, and they’ll match that to what you’re saying,” says Laura. “They’re trying to understand your credibility and expertise, so the more thoughtful you are of how that headline reflects that credibility and expertise and what you want to speak to the better.”

You’ve got 220 characters to work with, so make them count. Laura recommends being descriptive about your value and expertise — instead of just listing your title — to give people context that makes them trust you.

You should also try to include keywords people may search for when they’re looking for someone with your skills or experience. 

2. Add keywords to your profile

Your headline, job title, About section, and even your LinkedIn URL are all searchable. Using the right keywords — whether it’s your specialty, industry, or target clients — gives your profile a better chance to show up in search results.

Freelance designer Franziska Böttcher nails this: her headline and About section both feature high-impact keywords that make her easier to discover. 

⚡ Pro tip: To change your URL, visit https://www.linkedin.com/public-profile/settings and then click on Edit your custom URL on the right. Remember to update it wherever it’s saved, such as your website, resume, or other social media.

3. Share your best work

The Featured section is prime space to spotlight the wins, moments, and projects that make up your professional highlights. Think of it as a curated mini-portfolio: new visitors see your achievements right up top, without having to dig. 

Here’s what you can add to the Featured section:

• Published LinkedIn posts, newsletters, or articles
• Links to any URL off LinkedIn, like a landing page, blog post you wrote, or article that featured you
• Media including images, graphics, and PDFs

There’s no hard limit for what you can add here, but less is more. This is your greatest hits, not the whole back catalog.

4. Add important details to your Experience section

The Experience section of your LinkedIn profile is your online resume that people scan to get a sense of your work history and experiences. Treat it like a real resume — instead of focusing on responsibilities, show the impact you’ve had in different roles.

Keywords belong here, too. Add them to job titles, skills, tools, and industry terms to help your profile show up in more searches and make it clearer how your background fits what people are looking for.

5. Showcase licenses and certifications

The certifications you’ve earned add weight to your profile and show that you’ve invested in your skills. You can add any formal credentials and specialized training to the Licenses and Certifications section on your LinkedIn profile.

You can also add supporting media if you’d like to share the work you created as part of that certification, like a website you built, a final project, or a video presentation. 

Plus, many programs let you link directly to an online certificate, which helps others verify your achievement.

⚡Pro tip: Keep an eye on expiration dates. Some certifications need to be renewed, so review your profile periodically to remove expired credentials or retake the exam to keep them current.

What are the best performing content formats on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn offers you many ways to get your message out there, whether you’re posting from a Page as a business or your profile as a creator.

Text posts work well when you want to share a quick update or tell a longer story. Images and graphics catch someone’s eye as they scroll. Videos let people see your face and hear your voice, which helps build a connection. 

So how do you choose the right format for your audience? “It’s all about experimenting,” says Callie Schweitzer. “The perfect balance of a LinkedIn presence is a mix of formats and what your audience wants to see.”

Let’s look at the options available.

Carousels

Carousels consistently rank among the top-performing post types on LinkedIn. Buffer’s data shows that they get a massive 278% more engagement than video posts, 303% more than image posts, and 596% more than text-only posts.

Carousels invite people to stop, swipe, and spend more time with your LinkedIn content. They’re visual, meaning they catch the eye as users scroll, and they’re flexible. You can use them to:

• Turn a long post into bite-sized slides
• Highlight key takeaways from an article or report
• Walk through a tutorial or step-by-step guide
• Showcase before-and-after results or client projects

Pretty Little Marketer regularly uses carousels to make it easier for people to digest how social media works.

If you’re looking for more ideas and examples of how to put carousels to work, this guide walks through 11 different ways to use them.

Video

Video takes the second spot for engagement on LinkedIn. Video posts earn 7% more interaction than image posts and 84% more than text-only posts — and the format is still gaining momentum. 

Lakshman Somasundaram, Senior Director of Product at LinkedIn, shared that video is growing 1.6x faster than all other types of content combined. Creators who use video see up to 3x growth in followers, which means more visibility and more opportunities to build personal connections.

There are two main kinds of videos on LinkedIn: short-form and LinkedIn Live.

Short-form video 

Short-form videos are designed to grab attention quickly and deliver value fast. LinkedIn recommends keeping them concise at around 60 to 90 seconds. That gives you enough time to deliver something useful without losing someone’s attention. 

Brands can use short-form videos to share snippets from longer content like podcast episodes, demo new features, walk through tutorials, or showcase video testimonials from customers. 

For creators, it’s also a chance to make content that feels personal and relatable. Kirsti Lang, Senior Content Writer at Buffer, regularly shares videos about remote work and life at Buffer that give people a behind-the-scenes look at her professional life.

Lakshman shared a few quick tips to help short-form videos perform better. 

• Open with a short on-screen text hook that tells people what they’re about to watch — something that grabs attention in the first second or two. 
• Add captions so that people who are watching on mute can follow along instead of scrolling past. Eighty-five percent of LinkedIn videos are viewed without sound, so captions can make a big difference. 
• Use visual and audio elements like sound effects, B-roll, and graphics to keep the video dynamic.

LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn Live allows you to broadcast in real time to your followers and network. These sessions are public and automatically saved to your profile or Page once the stream ends, so people can rewatch them later.

Live video tends to get a lot more people reacting and commenting than short-form video — 7x more reactions and 24x more comments. They’re ideal for product launches, Q&As, panels, fireside chats, and other moments where real-time interaction adds value.

To go live on LinkedIn, you’ll need:

• A profile or page with at least 150 followers or connections.
• A record of following LinkedIn’s Professional Community Policies.
• An account or page that’s at least 30 days old.

Images

Image posts come in third for LinkedIn engagement — they get about 72% more interactions than text-only posts. Posts with images see twice as many comments, so if you're looking to start conversations, images can help get that going.

Both businesses and creators can use images to bring work to life: product photos, behind-the-scenes moments, announcements, or previews of what’s coming next. 

The Women in Tech SEO community often shares screenshots from its newsletter to highlight articles written by its members. It’s a simple way to give non-subscribers a peek at the kind of content they’ll find inside while celebrating the voices within its community.

For creators, those behind-the-scenes glimpses can include everyday life as well as work, helping followers see the person behind the posts.

To keep your visuals looking their best, use LinkedIn’s recommended image sizes: between 1080 x 1350 pixels (vertical image) and 1080 x 360 pixels (horizontal image). If your text or main visual is centered, most sizes will display without awkward cropping.

Text posts

Text posts work well for almost any kind of idea you want to share on LinkedIn. They can be short and conversational — a quick thought, lesson, or question for your audience — or dive deeper into something you’ve been reflecting on. 

If you have something you’d like to go really in-depth into, you can always expand a post into a full LinkedIn article.

They’re a good fit for sharing career tips, personal reflections, or lessons from your work. You can also use them to weigh in on industry news, walk people through your process, or share moments from your day-to-day that others might relate to.

Text posts are my go-to LinkedIn content format as a creator. The things I post about — freelancing, content creation, and the processes that make both easier — lend themselves to stories, and writing is still the best way I know to tell them.

LinkedIn newsletters

Newsletters are LinkedIn’s way of letting you share long-form content with an audience that subscribes to hear from you. Subscribers get in-app and email notifications about each new edition, helping you stay top of mind while building credibility and trust over time.

Newsletters can also work beyond LinkedIn — they show up in Google search results, giving you another opportunity to use SEO keywords to get noticed.

If you write long-form content on other platforms — say your company blog or creator Substack — newsletters give you a way to share it with your LinkedIn audience without doubling your workload. You can simply repurpose what you’ve already written and link back to the original source to bring people over.

Any creator can start a LinkedIn newsletter, but businesses need to meet a few requirements before they can publish through their page:

• Have more than 150 followers
• A track record of creating original content on LinkedIn, like posts, videos, or articles
• A page and admin (person managing the page) in good standing with LinkedIn’s community policies

You can have up to five LinkedIn newsletters. Buffer currently runs two. Bottom Line is a monthly look at the company’s key financial metrics and trends, and Open Blog shares lessons from trying new approaches to work, growth, and company culture.

Polls

Polls are a simple way to learn from your audience. They take only a couple of minutes to set up and can reveal what your community’s interested in or needs help with.

You can ask people what topics they want to hear more about, which format they prefer for content, or what challenges they’re dealing with right now. The answers can shape what products you build, what blog posts you write, or what you talk about in your next video.

They’re also a low-lift way to encourage engagement. Staffing and recruiting company Hays got nearly 6,000 votes and 50 comments on their poll asking about the role of soft skills in landing a job.

What are the different types of content to post on LinkedIn?

Once your profile or Page is ready, it’s time to start sharing. LinkedIn content helps brands and creators build authority, form authentic connections, and open doors for new customers or partnerships.

Here’s something worth knowing as you think about what to post: LinkedIn doesn’t reward virality, it rewards value. So if you’ve noticed older posts resurfacing in your feed weeks later, that’s intentional. 

Gyanda Sachdeva, LinkedIn’s VP of Product Management, explained to Business Insider that they’ve adjusted the algorithm to prioritize relevance.

“Our goal is to strike that balance of always showing you the most relevant updates from your network and from the people who can help you grow,” Gyanda says, “even if we have to tweak the recency algorithm every now and then.”

What does that mean for businesses and creators? Focus on creating content that teaches, informs, or inspires — something that offers a clear takeaway. “When planning your content, always share a key insight or a key takeaway,” says Callie Schweitzer. “Think about what that value add is for your audience, because that’s what people are expecting on LinkedIn.”

Rishi Jobanputra, Senior Director of Product Management at LinkedIn, shared a few types of content that perform especially well on the platform.

• Insights: Share your experience or perspective. Posts that show how you think, not just what you know, help your audience see your expertise in action.
• News: Talk about what’s happening in your industry, and explain why it matters. Adding your context turns it from a news bulletin to a unique point of view.
• Day in the life: Offer a behind-the-scenes look at your work — what a typical day involves, what tools you rely on, or what problems you’re solving.

Let’s dig into these and more.

Thought leadership

Scroll through LinkedIn for a bit and you’ll see people share their take on a trend, weigh in on a news story, or explain how they approach challenges at work. That’s thought leadership, and it tends to get noticed, earning 6x more engagement than job posts.

Its value also goes deeper than likes or comments. According to Edelman, 73% of decision-makers say they trust an organization’s thought leadership content more than its marketing materials when they’re trying to understand if the company can solve their problem. 

And more than 75% said that a single thought leadership content led them to explore a product or service they hadn’t considered before. 

Sharing what you know — and how you think — can open doors that pure promotion can’t. 

LinkedIn has also been pretty direct about what works on the platform. “While it can be tempting to sell your audience on the benefits of your product or service, ‘salesy’ content doesn’t generally perform well on LinkedIn,” the company notes. “If there’s one thing LinkedIn members find engaging, it’s a fresh idea.”

Educational content

Educational content on LinkedIn is the how-to guides, the tips, the problem-solving posts that give people clear, practical takeaways they can apply right away. 

If you’re a business, this is the perfect kind of content to show people how to achieve something using your product. 

Glide, a no-code app building platform, shares tutorials that show how to do specific things in the app. But here’s where they do something interesting — they don’t just post their own tutorials. They also share videos created by experts in their community, which gives people an outside perspective on how to make the most of the tool without it feeling like a sales pitch.

For creators, this kind of content can show your process in action. Walk people through how you do something — oversee a project, organize your workflow, use a specific tool — instead of how to do it.

AMAs (Ask Me Anything)

AMAs are a content format I haven’t seen much on LinkedIn, and they present a real opportunity for engaging your audience and generating ideas. 

You post that you’re opening the floor for questions — about your work or product, a project or launch, or a specific topic — people ask what’s on their mind, and you answer. 

Replying to comments helps keep the conversation going and engagement numbers high: Buffer’s analysis of 72,000 LinkedIn posts found that posts where the creator replies to comments saw an average of 30% higher engagement!

If keeping up with comments feels like it’ll be overwhelming, tools like Buffer’s Community feature help make it easier. You can reply to your audience from within Buffer itself without wondering if you missed a conversation.

You could even turn their questions into separate posts, like music executive Olivier Robert-Murphy does. This gives you fresh content to share and keeps the conversation going beyond that original thread. A win-win! 

They’re also a smart way to highlight the people behind your business. If you have team members or employees with interesting roles or perspectives, hand them the mic to share their expertise, talk about what they’re working on, or connect with others in their field. It gives people a chance to connect with the humans behind the company. 

AMAs are interactive by design, so they tend to drive more engagement than a standard post. And because they don’t get used much on LinkedIn, they’re a great way to stand out and connect with your community.

Behind-the-scenes and story-driven content

People connect with people, not logos. Behind-the-scenes content shows the humans behind the work — whether that’s your team, your process, or what a project looks like from the inside. 

“Company Pages can leverage organic CEO, executive, or employee content to tell the story of what’s happening at the company,” says Callie Schweitzer. 

“Activating your employees beyond just the C-suite and having them share an experience or the project they’re working on — we’re starting to see so much more of that [behind-the-scenes content], and that’s an opportunity for companies to say, ‘come along with one of our employees’.”

The team behind podcast marketing agency B2B Better puts this into practice. They post about what the day-to-day of building an agency and producing podcasts looks like, giving followers a glimpse into what that really involves.

For creators, it’s an opportunity to show what goes into your work, or the messy middle before something comes together. You could share how you landed a client, what your creative setup looks like, or what a typical day looks like. 

These moments help people see the real person behind your brand and your content, and that’s what makes them stick around.

User-generated content, memes, and trends

LinkedIn isn’t all serious business talk. You can post user-generated content (UGC), memes, GIFs, and ride pop culture trends doing the rounds across different social media platforms — if you’re selective about when and how you do it. 

Not every meme or viral moment will align with your target audience or message, and forcing it can make your content feel out of touch instead of relevant. If you’re unsure of whether it may work for your audience or not, let your brand tone and style guide you.

“Understand who you are to your audience first, then decide if the trend fits that role,” says Sophie Miller. “Are you the trusted adviser? The industry disruptor? The relatable expert? Your content needs to match those expectations, even when you’re jumping on trends.” 

If a meme or trend aligns with how your audience sees you, go for it. If it doesn’t, it’s better to skip it and wait for something that does. When used thoughtfully — like Gong did with the Destiny’s Child reunion — memes and trends can make your content relatable.

There’s also user-generated content as a way to bring your customers into the conversation. You can share posts or videos they’ve made on their own, or team up to create something together. It makes your audience part of what you’re building instead of people watching from the sidelines.

Buffer often teams up with community members to create content for LinkedIn and other platforms. It gives us an opportunity to share content that speaks to and sounds like our audience — because it comes from them.

Testimonials and case studies

You know how people connect with people, not logos? People also trust people — and social proof works just as well on LinkedIn as it does anywhere else.

Sharing a graphic with a quote from a happy customer, or a video testimonial like Todoist did, gives people a reason to trust what you’re offering. It shows your impact through someone else’s words, not your own.

The same idea applies for creators. You can highlight a client win, a collaboration that turned out great, or feedback from someone who’s used your work. You don’t need a full-fledged video case study. Even a screenshot of a Slack message shows the impact of your work in a way that’s more convincing than you listing your accomplishments.

Roundups

Roundups work well on LinkedIn when you want to keep people in the loop without them having to hunt for information. You can pull together industry news, interesting reads, tool updates, or job openings that your community would want to know about. They show that you’re paying attention, not just to your own work, but to what’s useful for your audience. 

Two Buffer teammates post weekly job roundups every week. Brandon Lucas Greene, Staff Product Manager, shares remote product jobs. Simon Heaton, Director of Growth Marketing, shares remote marketing jobs. 

Simon shares these roles every week because he wants his posts to be helpful to his audience, not just visible. “I believe deeply that remote work works, and I want to help people access great roles at forward-thinking companies,” he says. “LinkedIn is still, in many ways, a job marketplace layered with a social network. Sharing roles where people already look for opportunities just makes sense. 

“This also gives me a recurring series that helps me grow reach, build relationships, and deliver consistent value without turning content into noise.”

If you post your roundups on the same day each week, people will come to know when to expect them. That regular cadence means they don’t have to scroll through multiple feeds or newsletters to find what they need. And when people know they can count on you to deliver valuable content, they’ll keep coming back for it.

How to create your LinkedIn marketing strategy

Now that you know the types of content you can post — and how each one performs — the next step is to turn that knowledge into a plan. 

A LinkedIn marketing strategy brings together three things: 

• your goals
• your audience
• your content

When those pieces line up, you can build a repeatable process that helps you stay consistent, use your time well, and actually see what’s working.

Think of your LinkedIn strategy as a roadmap for showing up with purpose. It’s how you decide what to post, who it’s for, and how you’ll measure success so that your content moves you closer to your goals.

 1. Define your goals

Every successful LinkedIn marketing strategy starts with clear goals: What do you actually want to achieve on the platform? Your answer will shape everything that follows, from the topics you post about to the kind of conversations you join.

Companies may want to use LinkedIn marketing to recruit new talent, generate leads, build brand awareness, or increase brand visibility. Your LinkedIn marketing goals should align with your business objectives.

For creators, the goals look a little different — they often center on visibility and opportunities like landing clients, growing a personal brand, or getting a new job. 

Once your goals are clear, every post has direction and it becomes much easier to see what’s moving you forward.

 2. Identify your target audience and content pillars

If you’re a business owner or social media marketer, you probably already have a clear picture of your target audience from your ideal customer profile (ICP). If that’s not locked in yet, our guide to marketing personas can help you get there. For creators building a personal brand on LinkedIn, our personal brand framework walks through the same process from a different angle.

Once you know who you’re talking to, your LinkedIn content should focus on creating value for them. In my experience, this starts with understanding their pain points and tapping into your expertise to help solve them. 

This applies whether you’re a business with a team of specialists or a creator working on your own. And you don't need a corporate job or a fancy title to have expertise worth sharing. 

“A lot of people would often ask me, ‘I’ve never had a corporate job, what should I be posting?’” says Callie Schweitzer. “You are an expert in your life experience. We’ve seen so many creators on the platform embrace that and recognize that the word ‘professional’ means so many different things right now.”

Laura Lorenzetti also recommends looking at what other people in your industry or niche are talking about and building on ideas. 

“Everyone’s starting a conversation, and it’s great when communities come and continue to build on that conversation,” she says. “We shouldn’t be afraid of [doing] that. Reference it, give that person credit, build on that idea, and add your examples.

3. Create a content calendar

A social media content calendar is what keeps your LinkedIn marketing strategy organized. It gives you a clear view of your week (or month) so you can see how your posts connect and keep everyone on the same page.

Here’s why you need one:

• It keeps your content organized: You’ll always know what’s coming up and what still needs to be created.
• It makes it easier to plan campaigns: Campaigns make more sense when you can see how posts connect over time. You'll spot where something doesn’t line up, when a post needs to move, and how the whole thing flows before it goes live.
• It helps you plan ahead: With a view of what’s coming over the next few weeks, you can create posts in advance and save time.
• It keeps your posting consistent: A calendar helps you stick to a regular rhythm on LinkedIn. That consistency builds momentum and keeps you visible to your target audience.

How often should you post on LinkedIn?

A calendar packed with posts might feel like progress, but remember to be realistic with what you can actually keep up with. 

“If you’ve never posted or have posted zero times in the last month, don’t set a New Year's resolution that you're going to post every day,” says Callie. “That’s unrealistic, and it’s going to feel forced. Think about what’s reasonable for you and take it from there.”

If once a week is all you can manage, that’s better than not posting at all. But if you can post more, LinkedIn rewards it. More posts mean more chances for your content to surface, and the effect compounds over time.

Here’s what Buffer’s data shows from an analysis of more than 2 million posts.

• Posting 2 to 5 times per week gives you an extra 1,182 impressions per post on average, with engagement rates climbing 0.23 percentage points.
• Posting 6 to 10 times per week brings 5,001 additional impressions per post and a 0.76 percentage point lift in engagement.
• Posting 11 or more times per week delivers massive gains: 16,946 extra impressions per post, engagement up 1.40 percentage points, and 3x more engagements overall.

Your follower count doesn’t change how this works. Whether you have 500 people following you or 50,000, posting more often makes each individual post perform better. 

How often you post from your LinkedIn Page also impacts follower growth. Companies that post weekly grow followers 7x faster than those that post monthly. Post daily, and you can grow followers 8x faster than posting weekly.

That said, frequency alone won’t carry you. Watch how people engage with your posts and let that guide how often you show up.

“Daily posting is optimal to maintain consistent engagement with your audience, but be sure not to overdo it and avoid overwhelming your audience,” Hien Mai, Product Marketing Manager, Creator Growth at LinkedIn, told Buffer. 

“If your comments and engagement on a post remains consistent, that’s a good sign that your content is engaging.”

What you need to set up your content calendar

Once you know how often you’ll post, the next step is setting up a system to plan and organize it all.

• Topics or types of content: Map out what you’ll post: industry or company news, educational posts, behind-the-scenes stories, evergreen tips, Q&As — whatever fits your LinkedIn strategy. Add placeholders for upcoming campaigns, launches, or events so nothing gets missed.
• Posting frequency and schedule: Plan when you’ll post — the specific days or times of the week. We’ll cover how to find the best posting times a little later.
• Social media platforms you’ll post on: Even though this guide focuses on LinkedIn, your calendar should ideally show the full picture across all the social platforms you use. This allows you to easily see your entire social media marketing strategy in play, not just your LinkedIn marketing efforts. You can do that using a social media management tool like Buffer.
• Content calendar tool: You can build your calendar in a spreadsheet, a diary or planner, a project management tool, or a social media management tool. 

You can set up your content calendar directly in Buffer. Connect your channels, invite your team, and you’re already on the way. You can capture ideas, draft posts, add media, get approvals, and publish to multiple channels without switching tools, all from within Buffer.

4. Schedule your LinkedIn posts

Scheduling your content is one of the easiest ways to stay consistent without needing to stop what you’re doing every time a post needs to go live. With a social media management tool like Buffer, you can plan and queue content ahead of time so it goes live exactly when you want, whether you’re in a meeting, on vacation, or just offline for the day.

It’s worth noting that scheduling doesn’t hurt your reach. You may have seen claims that using third-party tools limits visibility, but let’s clear that up: it’s a myth. LinkedIn itself recommends scheduling posts with tools like Buffer as a best practice for sharing content.

If you’re wondering when to post for the best results, there’s data to guide you. Buffer analyzed more than a million LinkedIn posts and found weekdays generally perform best, with Thursday taking the top spot, followed closely by Wednesday and Tuesday. On those days, engagement tends to peak at 10 a.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, and 3 p.m. on Wednesday. 

These times make a great starting point if you’re still testing your LinkedIn strategy. Once you’ve been posting for a while, you’ll want to refine your timing based on what works for your specific audience. 

LinkedIn’s native analytics don’t show you exactly when you posted something — neither the date nor the time — and a tool like Buffer can help fill that gap. Here’s what you can learn from Buffer's Insights:

• LinkedIn Pages: Buffer shows you which day of the week your posts get the most engagement. This data comes directly from how your audience interacts with your content, so it’s specific to you.
• LinkedIn profiles: You can see metrics for each individual post from the scheduler — data like impressions, reach, and engagement, plus both the date and time the post went live. We also help you look for patterns in this data to figure out when your audience is most likely to engage.

5. Track your content’s performance

Setting up a social media content calendar for LinkedIn isn’t a one-and-done job. It’s an ongoing process where you’ll check in on your LinkedIn analytics regularly to double down on what’s working and tweak what’s not.

LinkedIn profile analytics

Creators have access to a detailed set of LinkedIn analytics that can help guide what to post next. To find them, click on Me in the top menu, go to View profile, and scroll to Analytics. Then select Show all analytics.

You’ll find data on four main social media metrics:

• Post impressions: How many times your posts showed up on someone’s screen. 
• Followers: How many people currently follow you, whether they’re connections or not. 
• Profile viewers: How many people stopped by your profile. 
• Search appearances: How often your profile appeared in LinkedIn search results. 

Each metric offers a deeper view if you click through. Rishi Jobanputra shared a few ways to use these insights:

• Comments: The best way to tell if your content is connecting is to look at the conversations it starts. “Conversations are a great way to understand if your content is working and if our members are finding it helpful,” he says. “Are people adding their own insights or asking questions in the comments? Are people messaging you directly to learn more?”
• Who's viewing your profile: Look at what industries your viewers are in and the seniority levels they hold. “Knowing who is seeing your content can help you better tailor future posts to your audience's interests,” he says.
• Profile viewers and new followers from a post: Rishi adds that steady growth here is a good signal. “If the number of people viewing your profile and following you is increasing each time you post, that signals that your content is heading in the right direction,” he says.

The specific metrics you focus on will depend on your goals. “Engagement is a huge success metric for me,” says Tami Oladipo. “Do people like the content? Going a step further, do they say things about it? 

“I have a pretty clear idea of who my audience is, so I try to get in their shoes and mindset with each piece of content I make. So if they like and respond to it, that means I've done my job.”

LinkedIn profile analytics with Buffer

While LinkedIn’s profile analytics show your core metrics, Buffer adds post-level details like the exact date and time alongside impressions, reach, and engagement, so it’s easier to spot timing patterns and compare performance over any window.

Sabreen Haziq, Senior Brand and Community Manager at Buffer, uses analytics to spot patterns in what performs best. 

“Some of the posts that travel the farthest for me are the simplest, quick thoughts that start real conversation — not the polished pieces I expect to shine,” says Sabreen. “The data helps cut through assumptions and gives me the confidence to keep showing up.”

LinkedIn Page analytics

Besides measuring your LinkedIn marketing performance, your LinkedIn analytics works as feedback from your audience: what’s working, what people are responding to, and where to tweak. You’ll find them by heading to your Page and selecting Analytics from the left-hand menu.

Here’s what you’ll see:

• Content: How all your posts perform, which you can filter by impressions, unique impressions, clicks, reactions, comments, reposts, and engagement rate.
• Visitors: How many people are viewing your page, which can be filtered by both page views and unique visitors.
• Followers: An overview of your total and new followers in the past 30 days, plus insights into follower demographics.
• Leads: Details on potential customers gathered through LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms.
• Competitors: Track and benchmark competitor performance on LinkedIn. You’ll see an overview of their follower metrics, organic content performance, and trending posts. You can add one competitor if you have a free Company Page, and up to nine if you have Premium.
• Employee advocacy: Gauge trends in employee and member engagement with content recommended to employees on the My Company tab.

I get it: this is a lot of data, and it may be overwhelming if you’re new to LinkedIn marketing. Start by focusing on two areas:

Understand what content performs best

To find out what LinkedIn content your followers like, go to Analytics > Content and scroll to the engagement table. Look for posts with much higher (or lower) impressions and clicks than the rest. 

Use those insights to experiment. If the post fell flat, try to pinpoint why. Was it a bad time to post, or was the format something that didn’t resonate with your audience? Do the same for your top performers and experiment with replicating different elements in new posts to see if you can nail down why the post was such a success. 

Learn about your followers and visitors

Under Analytics > Followers, explore demographics like location, job function, company size, industry, and seniority. You can also see similar data for people visiting your Page but not following yet under the Visitors section.

This data can be immensely helpful in creating new content that speaks to a large chunk of your audience.

At Buffer, we use this information to shape what we share. We tailor our posts for the right audience by sharing content relevant to their job functions. This could include content on marketing (which we write a lot about), startups, and technology.

LinkedIn Page analytics with Buffer

When you manage your LinkedIn Page through Buffer, you get detailed analytics on how your content is performing and how your audience is growing. 

To access it, log into your Buffer account and click on the Insights tab and select your LinkedIn Page from the list of connected channels.

You can track key metrics like posts published, impressions, clicks, reactions, comments, shares, total followers, and follower growth. You can also compare your LinkedIn performance alongside your other social channels, giving you a complete picture of your social media strategy in one place.

Rather than leaving you to interpret charts yourself, Insights includes AI-powered Takeaways that analyze your performance and highlight what's working, what isn't, and what you could try next.

When it's time to share results, you can export polished PDF or CSV reports, making it easy to update clients, teammates, or stakeholders on your LinkedIn performance.

5. Engage with your audience

Whether you manage a LinkedIn Company Page or a personal profile, this advice applies. The LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes engagement — likes, comments, and reposts — so the more interaction your posts get, the more the algorithm learns who else might find them valuable.

And if you need another reason to engage, LinkedIn has given us a clear signal that it values conversations by displaying comment impressions.

Here’s how to thoughtfully engage with your audience on LinkedIn.

Create compelling content that invites engagement

Sophie Miller says the biggest shift she’s seen on LinkedIn is that audiences don’t just want to consume content anymore — they want to participate in it. 

“So instead of asking ‘What should I say?’ start asking ‘What conversation am I trying to start?’ and most importantly ‘How do I make it easy for people to join in?’” she says. “Create content that invites real responses rather than just collecting likes.”

This doesn't mean every post needs to be a deep thought leadership piece. Sophie also loves creating what she calls ‘thin content’ — posts that don’t sell or educate heavily, but give people something easy to engage with first, she says.

“Simple calls to action like ‘drop a 👋 if you’ve been there’ or sharing a relatable struggle that makes people think ‘can she see inside my brain?’,” says Sophie. 

“The goal isn’t deep engagement immediately. It’s building the habit of interaction. Once people get comfortable engaging with your content in small ways, they’ll start trusting you with bigger conversations.”

Keep the momentum going by responding to comments

Make some time to respond to comments on your posts. It pays off. In Buffer’s analysis, posts where creators replied to comments outperformed their usual engagement, with roughly 83% of profiles seeing higher engagement when they turned comments into conversations. 

Brands that treat LinkedIn marketing like a one-way street often struggle to see results. The fix is simple, says Sophie: start talking back. “Get involved in comment sections, reply to people, start conversations,” she says. “Spend as much time engaging with other people’s content as you do creating your own.”

Take it further by commenting on other people’s posts

It helps to look beyond your own content and get involved in conversations happening across your network. Many creators find their follower count grows faster when they actively comment on other people’s posts and take part in meaningful discussions.  

“Focus on the compounding actions that make your content stronger over time,” says Sabreen. “That means engaging with other creators in your niche, taking the time to respond thoughtfully to people who follow you, giving shoutouts, and making it a habit to connect with more folks in your industry each week. 

“It’s those small, interlocking actions that widen your network, build community, and ultimately lift your content performance.”

A quick note for businesses: While this makes sense for creators building their personal brands on LinkedIn, it might be a little tricky with LinkedIn Company Pages. Jumping into the thread as a brand might come across as pushy or sales-y. 

On the other hand, if someone has mentioned your brand in their post, don’t leave them hanging! LinkedIn offers you an easy way to keep up with mentions, too. Just head over to your page, click Activity on the left-hand side, then choose Mentions. 

6. Support employee advocacy

If you run a LinkedIn Page, one of the best groups of people who can help with your LinkedIn marketing is your colleagues or employees. When they engage with your company’s content and build their own presence on LinkedIn, they amplify your reach in ways that ads never could.

“We’re in a new era where people want to hear from people,” says Laura Lorenzetti. “The faces behind a business are the business. And that’s what people care about and [who] they want to hear from.”

The numbers back this up. Dave Yang, Head of APAC – SMB and Mid Market at LinkedIn, shared data that shows the impact of employee voices:

• 87% of buyers trust content from real buyers over ads
• Employee posts get 12x more reach than brand pages 
• Execs get 7x more engagement than brand pages
• Three out of four decision makers say thought leadership is more valuable than traditional marketing

Here at Buffer, we’re putting programs in place to empower the whole team to become creators (on any platform/s), and many of the team are regular LinkedIn creators. 

“The point of building creators is to build people up and help them grow their own voice and perspective,” says Sabreen. “When that happens, any time they do talk about the company organically, the impact stretches much farther than scripted marketing ever could.”

How to help your team help you:

• Encourage them to engage with your posts: Make it easy for your colleagues to engage with the content. Send them links every time you post or when important updates go live. Sometimes, a quick message asking for engagement is all it takes.
• Encourage them to fill out their LinkedIn profiles: LinkedIn explains how your team’s individual LinkedIn profiles influence your brand: “Keeping your profile up to date is one of the most impactful ways to improve your contact rate. People do business with other people, so profiles matter.” Besides that, it’s just a wonderfully simple way to spread brand awareness. If you have a company of 50 people, that’s 50 profiles with your company’s name and a quick link to your Page. According to LinkedIn, this makes your company more visible in search results both on and off the platform. 
• Help them build their personal brand on LinkedIn: This one takes a bit more effort, but you’ll see the return on investment in spades. Plus, creating company thought leaders is a win for both the business and the employee: LinkedIn says that content posted by employees has a click-through rate twice as high as brand accounts. 

There's another benefit worth mentioning: employee advocacy builds internal team engagement, not just external reach. When your team is active on LinkedIn, they become more invested in the company's direction. According to LinkedIn, these employees are 27% more likely to feel optimistic about where the company is headed and 15% more likely to feel connected to colleagues outside their immediate team.

Empower employees to build their personal brands

Employee advocacy works best when it starts from the top, and getting clear leadership buy-in is the first step. “Personal brand building has to be a core company initiative, not just a bonus project,” says Sabreen. 

“It won't take off if it’s treated as reactive or ‘just another idea’ — it has to be reinforced by the CEO, founders, and managers, with a clear connection to long-term growth and company-wide impact.”

So, where should you start? We’ve got a thorough guide to empowering your employees to build their personal brands on LinkedIn, but here’s a quick summary:

• Help them find their niche: Help your team find topics they’re passionate about and know well. Our guide on how to find your niche can help. 
• Provide guidelines: Share best practices for LinkedIn posts, focusing on content that fits your brand without putting their voice in a box.
• Support them where possible: Whether that’s an in-depth personal branding course or occasional guidance, both go a long way!
• Celebrate their wins: Give a shoutout to your team for their achievements, whether that’s sharing valuable insights, reaching follower milestones, or just consistently showing up on LinkedIn.
• Lead by example: If company leadership also creates and shares content, it might feel more accessible to them. 
• Give them the time and tools they need: Building a presence on LinkedIn takes time and effort. Encourage your team to engage during their working hours. Tools like Buffer make it easier to plan, post, and stay consistent.

Tips and tools for staying consistent on LinkedIn

If there’s one thing our data makes clear, it’s this: consistency wins. 

Whether you post once a week or several times, staying consistent week after week can help grow your LinkedIn profile or page.

We’ve run the numbers on consistency, and the results show exactly how much it matters.

Buffer users who showed up highly consistently saw around five times more engagement per post than those who posted inconsistently. Meanwhile, consistent users still saw more than triple the engagement of the inconsistent group.

And behind every data point, there’s a real story. 

Sabreen posted every day for a year and grew her audience by 684%. Buffer teammates Tami and Hailley Griffis, and creators Aarushi Singh and Sweta Sharma have all seen consistency turn into growth — not because they followed the same formula, but because they found a cadence they could stick with.

According to Tami, the real barrier is the unrealistic expectations creators often set around consistency. 

“Consistency is one of those unglamorous truths that growth is built on, but people often overcomplicate it,” she says. “They imagine it means posting daily at the same time with a content calendar planned six months out. 

“What I’ve learned, and what Buffer’s data confirms, is that consistency just means setting a cadence you can sustain and sticking with it.”

Let’s look at a few systems and tools that can help you stay consistent — and keep ideas flowing without burning out.

1. Capture content ideas

Ideas don’t stick to a content creation schedule. They often show up at the most inconvenient times, like when you’re in line for coffee or halfway through another task. The easiest way to hold on to them is to capture them right when they happen.

I use Buffer’s Create space to do this. I’ll record a quick voice note to jot down the idea instead of typing, and Superwhisper pastes the transcript directly into Buffer. There are many AI dictation tools that can get the job done, or you can use your phone’s built-in transcription tool if you’re using the mobile app. And if speaking (or thinking) aloud isn’t for you, you can also type them into the Create space or your notes app.

Once the idea is saved, it sits in a bank of content ready to add to my calendar whenever I need it. If you’re strapped for ideas, you can tap into your community and add those insights to your Create Space.

Sabreen uses AI to build on posts that have already performed well. “One of my favorite uses of AI is idea extension,” she says. 

“If a post performs well, I ask what else I can write to build on the theme, or what natural sequel might deepen the conversation. That curiosity loop helps me create momentum at scale without reinventing the wheel.”

2. Set aside time to batch create your content

It’s no secret that creating content takes time and focus. And when you’re juggling everything else that comes with managing social media, it’s easy to get sidetracked and lose momentum.

There’s a solution: create content in batches. Put it on your calendar — no plans or meetings to derail you! — and you have focused blocks of time to work without distractions.

Every social media manager and content creator works differently, and your content calendar will probably look different from week to week too. This means there’s no single formula for how to do it.

Shooting and editing a single video might take as long as drafting a few text posts. You might want to knock out several carousels in one go or spread them across a few sessions.

The goal is to block time that feels realistic — a focused afternoon, a few hours each week, or short sessions spread across your calendar — and helps you stay consistent without burning out.

This is where the work you did earlier pays off. “Having a bank of ideas makes batching so much easier, because there's already good material to work with,” says Sabreen. “When I've built up a pool of ideas in my Buffer Create space, I’ll set aside time to polish them, add depth, and bulk create.”

You can bring AI tools into that process, too. Sabreen uses ChatGPT for brainstorming, while I use Descript to edit video and Gamma to design carousels. They help speed up production once your ideas are ready to go.

And like everything else in social media, it’s fine to stay flexible. “When time is tight, I’ll post on the fly,” she says. “I just make sure to flesh out the narrative before hitting publish.”

3. Repurpose content

You don't have to start from scratch every time you’re posting content on LinkedIn. Many of your followers haven’t seen your older posts — and new connections definitely haven’t — so repurposing content gives your best work a second life without requiring you to create something entirely new.

An even bigger bonus: it’s a good idea because it brings consistency in what you talk about, says Laura.

“The more you’re associated with an idea and expertise the better,” says Laura. “You can go deeper into that. I wouldn’t be afraid of repeating [myself], because people don’t see every single post. But they still get value out of another way of phrasing it or a new context or example that adds on to that expertise.”

Pull your best performing posts and share them again in new ways. You can:

• Try a new format: Turn a thread into a carousel, or a text post into a video.
• Shift the focus: Approach the same idea from a different angle or expand on a point you only mentioned before. The way Sabreen uses AI for idea extension can work well here too.
• Experiment with timing: Posting at a different day or time can help you reach new segments of your target audience. If it’s been a while since you last shared this post, check your Page data in Buffer analytics to see what’s working best for your audience right now.

Repurposing content means you don't have to constantly chase new ideas, because you’re building on what’s already performed well. 

“There’s knowledge, examples, and learning that are evergreen, but when they’re rephrased, refreshed, or new in your feed, people can engage with that again,” says Laura. 

“They can have a new conversation, make new connections, and bring that to the forefront of the ‘now,’ because there are learnings that become more resonant over time.”

It’s also great for visibility. You give your evergreen content an extra SEO boost and another shot at ranking on Google to send people to your profile.

Pro tip: You’re not limited to repurposing from older LinkedIn posts. Pull highlights from your blog, newsletter, podcast, past interviews, or even a research paper, and turn them into LinkedIn content. That way, each piece of content keeps working harder for you across multiple platforms.

I’ve done this myself, taking one of my best-performing X/Twitter posts and re-sharing it on LinkedIn (twice, two years apart). The post reached a completely different audience on LinkedIn than it did on Twitter. And the second time, it saw a higher engagement rate than the original repurposing.

You can also set up automations to make repurposing easier. When you publish something new — like a blog post or podcast — create an automation that reminds you to turn it into a LinkedIn post a few weeks later. It keeps your content loop running smoothly without adding too much work to your plate.

Monetizing your LinkedIn presence

If you’re a creator, partnering with brands can turn your LinkedIn presence into a revenue stream. 

The brands that work best are the ones that align with your niche and share your values, so your audience sees the partnership as a natural fit rather than a forced promotion.

Here’s how to start:

• Get clear on your niche: Brands want to work with creators who have a defined audience. It’s fine if you cover multiple topics, but be specific about who you reach and what you talk about. This makes it easier for potential partners to see the overlap between your audience and theirs.
• Post about brands you already love: Don’t wait for a brand to reach out. When you share posts about tools or products you genuinely use, it shows both your expertise and credibility — and sometimes gets you noticed by the brands themselves.
• Be as professional as you would in your day job: LinkedIn is a professional platform, and the way you present yourself matters. Keep communication clear, meet deadlines, and deliver what you promised. This shows the brand you take the relationship seriously, and it could even lead to future collaborations, like it did with Buffer’s Senior Content Writer (and nano-creator) Kirsti Lang.
• Try a creator marketplace: Platforms that connect creators with brands can simplify the whole process. They handle the matching, contracts, and briefs so you can focus on creating content.

If you’re a business, working with creators gives you access to audiences you might not reach through your own Company Page. It may seem obvious for B2B brands, but this is one area of LinkedIn marketing where B2C brands can also shine with authentic sponsored content instead of traditional LinkedIn ads.

“Cookie company Sweet Loren’s is sending people actual cookies and positioning them as part of a treat or pick-me-up in someone’s day,” says Sophie Miller. 

“They’re not just talking about their product. They’re literally placing it into people’s real moments and letting creators share how it fits into their daily routine. 

“It’s so good because it feels natural and genuine rather than like a forced product placement.”

With the right tools, steady LinkedIn marketing becomes second nature

LinkedIn marketing isn’t about quick wins. Growth compounds when you show up regularly, share posts, engage with others, and stay part of meaningful conversations. 

Over time, that steady activity builds visibility, brand awareness, and real connections that translate into lasting results.

Tools like Buffer make it easier to stay consistent. You can plan your LinkedIn content in advance, schedule posts across Linked (and other platforms you’re on), and track performance all in one place. 

Sign up for Buffer today for free and stay on top of your LinkedIn marketing efforts.

Remember when social media content was limited to Facebook statuses and, er, “pokes?” Even a few years later, cutting-edge content was limited to a blurry photo with an oversaturated filter on Instagram.

It seems bizarre now, given how much you can do with social media today. With the ever-growing list of platforms releasing new features daily, it's an exciting time to build a following online — but it's not an easy one. 

With the plethora of social media content options available every time you open your favorite app, it can be difficult to know what type of content your audience most wants to see. Short-form video? A carousel? A good old-fashioned selfie?

Well, that all depends on you and your audience. The right mix of content will be the sweet spot between what your audience most wants to see and what is easiest for you to create consistently.  

To pinpoint what works best for you, I'd encourage you to start with a social media content strategy and, from there, experiment with different types of content in your social media content calendar.

Use the ideas in this article as a springboard to help you figure out what kind of content is most likely to resonate with your followers.

With all that in mind, let’s dig in: Here are the various types of social media content, plus some ideas to spark your next post:

• Text-based posts
• Short-form videos
• Photo posts
• Photo carousels
• Graphic carousels
• Long-form video
• URLs or links

Text-based posts

Text-only posts have survived from the early days of social media, and with good reason — they’re still the bread and butter of many a social media marketing strategy. 

With the rise of the LinkedIn personal brand, decentralized networks, the launch of Threads, and even long-form posts on X, the power of text-based posts on social media platforms shouldn’t be overlooked. 

Not convinced yet? Even Instagram allows for text-based posts (in the form of Instagram Notes and ‘Create-mode’ Instagram Stories), and TikTok introduced its own text-based post style in 2024. 

In summary: text posts aren’t going anywhere. 

Perhaps the best thing about this social media content type is how easy it is to create — as opposed to, say, video. This is a crucial consideration if you’re looking to get more followers on LinkedIn, X, Threads, and other platforms that allow for text-based posts. 

Consistent activity on the platform is far more important than busting your gut to create high-effort videos. If all you have time for is, say, a quick tweet or Threads post, do that, rather than sit on your hands. 

Buffer CEO Joel Gascoigne recently summarized this in a (text-based) post across platforms:

Text-based post ideas

1. Chop up long-form content into threads

Written a great blog post or newsletter? Platform character limits don’t mean lengthier posts like this are off the table. In fact, thread functionality on platforms like X, Threads, and Bluesky (if you post with Buffer) really lends itself to summaries of long-form content.

Here's a thread example from Buffer guest post contributor Gaetano DiNardi, which surprised him by going viral on X — his explainer shows that repurposed social media content can surprise you when you give it life on a new platform. 

2. Share industry news

A round-up of all the latest goings-on in your industry can be incredibly helpful for your followers and positions you as a first-in-the-know thought leader.

Here’s a great example of Girl Power Marketing’s weekly social media round-up. Notice how she makes it super easy to digest with short, snappy sentences and emojis as bullet points.

3. Embrace thought leadership

Speaking of thought leadership: building yourself up as a thought leader on platforms like LinkedIn, X, Threads, and beyond is an excellent way to future-proof your career. 

Sharing your unique insights, experiences, and expertise can help establish your credibility and attract others in your area (and prospective clients or hiring managers).

Consider discussing industry trends, offering career advice, or sharing lessons learned from your own journey. These posts can spark meaningful conversations and might even open the door to your next big opportunity.

Buffer's Director of Growth Marketing, Simon Heaton, regularly shares posts that detail how the Buffer marketing team works, like this one:

4. Ask engaging questions

Engaging your target audience with thought-provoking questions is a clever, lightweight way to boost engagement and gather useful information for your content, work, or life.

You could share your thoughts on current events and ask others to weigh in. You could also go the more personal route and gather advice from other folks in similar industries or situations. The latter is a particularly great strategy on Threads, where niche communities are often ready to lend a hand.

Here’s a great example from Buffer’s Head of Content and Communications, Hailley Griffis:

These types of posts can also spark social media content ideas. In fact, leveraging YouTube Community Posts to gather new video ideas or feedback is a successful YouTuber staple.

Ali Abdaal uses this tactic often, using responses to spark a whole new video series. Here’s an example:

5. Share behind-the-scenes stories

Audiences love to connect with brands (business or personal) on a deeper level. Sharing a relatable story that will make a viewer think, “Hey, I totally get that,” or, “They’re just like me,” can be an excellent way to strengthen their support of your work.

The more authentic, the better.

6. Create polls to spark discussion

Polls are a staple feature on most social platforms. Almost all of them have some sort of ‘poll’ post type that you can use to gather feedback and prompt discussion.

They're a great way to generate engagement and even spark ideas for new content you can share.

If your preferred social media platform doesn’t have a poll functionality, you could ask folks to react or comment with a certain emoji to choose a specific option. The easier it is for them to engage, the more likely they are to do so.

Pro tip: Offer your target audience a way to share an answer not in your poll by creating an ‘Other’ option and asking them to comment with more context.

Short-form videos

Short-form video is known by many names across platforms — ’Shorts’ on YouTube, ‘Reels’ on Instagram and Facebook Reels, and ‘TikToks’ on well, TikTok. Videos can also be shared on LinkedIn, Threads, Twitter/X, Mastodon, and more.

Whatever your platform preference, short-form video — usually clips that are 90 seconds or under — is one of the most powerful types of social media content you can invest in.

According to Buffer data, videos are the content format most likely to get engagement across most major social platforms. It makes sense — short-form videos are tailored to mobile devices, where you'll find most social media users consuming content these days.

So if you have the resources to create short-form videos, they’re well worth investing in.

Short-form video ideas

7. Chop up long-form video content

Waste not, want not. When it comes to creating enough content to maintain a strong social media presence on any platform, repurposing is your best friend. Cutting key moments out of longer YouTube videos is the best example here (resized for that all-important 9:16 ratio, of course), but don’t sleep on other videos, either.

If you're hosting a webinar or speaking at professional events, be sure to get the recording — even a 30-minute session can yield several different one-minute clips for your social media platform of choice. 

Here's a highlight snippet from a podcast recording I did with Simon, which I chopped up into shorter clips for Instagram and TikTok:

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A post shared by kirsti lang (@itsmekirsti)

8. Tap into trending audio

Trending audio and music tend to rear their heads on TikTok first, then pop up on Instagram and Facebook Reels — so you'll be ahead of the curve if you keep an eye on TikTok.

Here's our guide to finding trending sounds on TikTok and trending audio on Instagram that you can leverage here.

Tiffany Morris, Owner of Luxe Gather, does a great job of keeping on top of these trending sounds and applying them to Instagram Reels to promote her business. (Here’s her clever system for creating these videos).

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A post shared by Buffer (@buffer)

9. Record ‘stock footage' 

My Buffer teammate Mitra Mehvar put me on to this, and it's genius — she keeps an album of ‘stock footage’ she can use for short-form videos with a simple text overlay.

This could be anything: working at your desk, going about your day, putting the finishing touches on a new product, or even some beautiful scenery you happen to pass by. Here's a guide to creating social media stock footage of your own.

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10. Add text to videos

Wondering how you can convert your clever text posts into content for video-focused social media channels? Put your message in the medium.

This idea is particularly well-paired with idea no. 9 above — rather than saving your text for a caption, you could add some thoughts as text over your stock footage with a simple video editing tool CapCut. 

@tripleotami

hashtag remote work struggles

♬ Éphémère - Tony Anderson

11. Try a ‘spend a day with me’

Whether you’re a creator, a business owner, or a marketer, this versatile trend can work. These videos, which give your target audience a fly-on-the-wall view of a day in your life, are actually relatively easy to make.

They simply involve grabbing some clips of a couple of key moments in your day and stringing them together in your editing app of choice. You can choose to add a voiceover contextualizing things, add a trending song, or just use the ambient noise from the clips (hello, #asmr).

The key here is to approach your day from an interesting angle — what about your life might be interesting or relatable? So rather than ‘Spend a day with me,' opt for ‘Spend a day with me as a business owner in Toronto,’ or ‘Spend day 5 of my 4-day workweek with me,’ as I did below.

@itsmekirsti My company has a 4-day work week! Here’s how I spend my Fridays. ✨ @Buffer #4dayworkweek #remotework #spendthedaywithme #adayinmylife #dayinmylife ♬ Autumn Leaves - Timothy Cole

Creating the video for your business? Be sure to tie it back to the brand in some way: ‘Spend a day with me as host a founder event', or ‘Spend a product launch day with me,’ could offer a behind-the-scenes look and humanize the brand for your customers.

12. Crosspost Instagram Reels and TikToks

It's nearly impossible to predict what social media content will perform best where — so don't shy away from sharing the videos you create on other platforms.

As creators or social media managers, we often fall into the trap of thinking everyone in our audience has seen everything, but in reality, only a small fraction of our audience will follow us on multiple social media channels. 

X, Threads, and LinkedIn all support video. LinkedIn, in particular, is doubling down on short-form video content with an in-feed ‘Videos for You’ segment that has seen video reach on the platform skyrocketing.

That 'spend a day with me,' video I shared above? It was one I created with TikTok in mind as part of my 30-day TikTok experiment, and I shared it on LinkedIn on a whim.

On TikTok, the video had a solid 6.8K views. On LinkedIn, it had well over 50K.

13. Encourage user-generated content

If you’re a business, partnering with other video creators and users in your audience on UGC (user-generated content) who align with your brand can help you boost credibility, reward brand ambassadors, and reach audiences beyond your own.

Creators who use your product or services (and talk about it) are like social media gold dust, but don’t underestimate the power of social media content created by regular users, either.

Use Instagram’s Remix or TikTok’s Duet or Stitch features to put your own spin on their social posts — but I’d recommend asking for permission first. If they’re excited about your brand, there’s no doubt they’ll be happy to be featured on your feed.

Photo posts

Classic social media photo posts can still garner a healthy reach on platforms — and aren’t exclusively for Instagram.

X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn both support image posts, and even Facebook still sees engagement with visual content.

Photo post ideas

14. Don't shy away from the selfie

Putting a face to a post — preferably yours — can make or break it. This is something I can personally attest to. Some of my top-performing posts as a creator on LinkedIn have all featured my face.

15. Share a product sneak peek

If you're preparing to launch a new physical product, a sharing simple sneak peek image — either a blurred-out photo, or only a small piece of the item —is a great way to whet your customer's appetites and drum up excitement for the launch.

You could even turn the post into some sort of guessing game and giveaway in the comments, and offer the first user to get it right a prize.

16. Create a collage

Social media tools like Canva and Instagram's Layout make editing together a selection of images a breeze. Tell a visual story by juxtaposing several elements in one image, the way Buffer content writer Tami Oladipo did in this clever Threads post.

Photo carousels

Take all of what I mentioned above and multiply that by 10 (or 35 and 20, in the case of TikTok and Instagram, respectively.)

Carousels are a fun way to offer a window into your world or share behind-the-scenes content both as a brand or creator. The best part about photo carousels (if an aesthetic feed is important to you) is that they don’t all need to be picture-perfect.

Edit the first image to stay on brand, and the rest can be a little more raw and authentic. In fact, a level of authenticity is par for the course in this post style (thanks, Gen Z).

17. Try a weekly 'photo dump'

Out: Perfectly polished feeds on Instagram. In: Messy, authentic, candid snaps. This trend lends itself perfectly to carousel-style posts, where all you need are some recent snaps from your camera roll.

Fitness creator Meggan Grubb shares ‘photo dumps' like this every week, and her followers can't get enough of them: 

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A post shared by Meggan Kirkland (@meggangrubb)

18. Add text to your images

Another option could be to include short sentences on each photo in a carousel for more context.

This carousel style became popular on TikTok, but now Instagram has added the ability to add text into your images natively, too. On other platforms, apps like InShot, Canva, or CapCut will get the job done even better.

The trick is to keep your text simple to make it easy to digest — no more than a line or two per image.

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A post shared by Max - Mindfulness & Mindset Mentor (@sugarfreesundays)

Graphic carousels

Not to be confused with their simpler sibling, photo carousels, graphic carousels are images or PDFs (on LinkedIn) that your audience can swipe or click through like a slide show.

Created in tools like Canva or Visme, they’re usually visually appealing and feature short, snappy, helpful information. They work particularly well on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Threads — and they’re also great for engagement.

We have a guide to creating LinkedIn carousels and a comprehensive list of LinkedIn Carousel ideas here (which can be adapted for Instagram and other platforms). Here’s a few of the latter.

Graphic carousel ideas

19. Give step-by-step instructions and advice

Carousels are a great way to share step-by-step instructions or guides. This can be useful for sharing how-to content, tutorials, or tips. For example, you could create a carousel that walks users through setting up a specific software or tool.

20. Round up new features or industry trends

Carousels offer a way to share bite-size snippets with your users, customers, or followers that they will actually digest. The Instagram @Creator account is a brilliant example of this.

They regularly share new platform updates in a simple carousel format like the example below:

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A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

They also use this format to showcase social media trends that creators can tap into, as in this post:

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A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

21. Spotlight your customers or followers

With their permission, a feature on your feed will go a long way to show how much you value your biggest supporters.

Here’s a recent example of how Buffer shined the spotlight on one of our users on Instagram:

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A post shared by Buffer (@buffer)

Long-form videos

Long-form video content remains a powerful tool for engaging audiences across various platforms.

Longer videos allow for in-depth storytelling, detailed explanations, and comprehensive tutorials. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and now even TikTok are great for this format.

On platforms that function as social search engines like YouTube and TikTok, these videos also tend to have more longevity than their short-form counterparts. On YouTube especially, a solid YouTube SEO strategy could mean your videos continue to get views for years after posting.

But in the world of short-form video focus, keeping your audience engaged for anything longer than 30 seconds can be tough.

There are plenty of ways to do this (as we unpack in our guide to growing your subscribers on YouTube), but in broad strokes:

• make sure your video is high-value and delivers on its promise
• use creative stock footage or subtle animations and sound effects
• segment longer videos into titled chapters to help your viewers find what they’re looking for.

Long-form video ideas

22. How-tos or tutorials

These types of videos are perfect for demonstrating complex processes or techniques — and building report with your viewers while you do it.

For example, a makeup artist could create a detailed tutorial on achieving a specific look, or a software company could produce a comprehensive guide on using their product.

Here's a great example from Todoist:

23. Behind-the-scenes content

Give your audience a peek into your world. This could be a day-in-the-life video, a tour of your workspace, or a look at how your products are made.

24. Video podcast

The age of the podcast has evolved to the age of the ‘vodcast’ — that is, a podcast recorded with video as well as audio. This podcast style has become a staple for both podcasters and YouTubers, with many of them even setting up beautiful studios in which to sit down with their guests.

Here are some great examples from marketing podcast Nudge and YouTubers Colin and Samir:

Of course, you absolutely don’t need a high-tech set-up to tap into this format. Even a high-quality video call recording, if you host your podcast virtually, will do the trick.

Bonus: You’ll be spoilt for choice when it comes to video content to use on other platforms.

25. Interviews with experts

Another great way to spotlight leaders in your industry or expert customers is to invite them into your studio (virtual or otherwise) for a chat. There are plenty of benefits to creating social media content in this way:

• it provides valuable, expert-led content for your audience
• allows you to tap into the audience of your guests (if they have one)
• it’s another way to spotlight and build relationships with expert customers or thought leaders.

The best part? As I touched on above, you really don’t need any fancy equipment to make this happen. A video call and a decent set of headphones is a great starting point.

26. Repurpose webinars and events

I’ll say it again: waste not, want not. If you’re hosting events as a brand or business, do hit that record button. Value-led sessions like these are an easy win for long-form video content and, if structured well, require little to no editing.

Here’s a recent example from a webinar the Buffer team hosted with Threads:

URLs or link posts

This is an interesting social media content type in that social media posts that contain links often don’t perform as well. While most social media platforms don’t advertise the fact, it’s widely believed that link-only posts are not looked kindly upon by the algorithms.

The idea is that the platforms want the experience to be immersive for users, and don’t necessary want them clicking or tapping off to another destination.

That said, there is a time and place (and platform) for link-only posts.

Link post ideas

27. Stick to Pinterest

There’s no platform quite like Pinterest for sharing links, particularly if you or your brand fit into lifestyle niches.

Pinterest was built for external links. The idea of the platform is to save these external destinations so that users can visit them again later — think recipes, design ideas, workouts, and the like.

If your brand doesn’t quite fit into the most Pinterest-y niches, don’t discount the platform just yet. See our Pinterest how-to guide for a step-by-step explainer and ideas.

28. Use the first comment or last thread to share a link

If you're sharing a link on platforms like LinkedIn, consider placing it in the first comment or as the last item in a thread.

This approach allows you to share helpful external content without potentially triggering algorithm penalties for link-heavy posts. You can use link-shortening services (like Buffer!) to create cleaner, more visually appealing URLs.

When sharing links, always provide context and explain why the content is valuable to your audience.

29. Try Facebook to drive clicks

According to Buffer data, of all the major platforms that support link-only posts (Facebook, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter), Facebook links tend to get five times more clicks than those posted on LinkedIn and four times more than those posted on X. 

30. Leverage a link-in-bio tool

While this is not strictly a social media post idea, it’s worth noting here that it’s poor social media practice to include links in posts on TikTok and Instagram. The links won’t be clickable, and your viewers won't be able to copy and paste them into a browser.

If you’re looking to direct folks elsewhere on these platforms (or any really) it’s a great idea to add the CTA (call to action) ‘Find the link in my bio’ or ‘Tap the link in bio to read more’. This will send viewers over to your profile where it will be easy for them to click on a link.

Of course, if the site you want to send them to is not front and center, you’ll need a link-in-bio tool you can easily curate to show the most important information first. Buffer’s Start Page is a great (free!) alternative.

I use it to curate a list of my top home office products, something I get asked for often as a creator. Rather than including links to 15 different items in each post (honestly, who has the time?), I simply direct people to my Start Page link.

Experiment to figure out what social media content works best for your audience

Not all of the social media content ideas on this list will be a roaring success for you, and that's OK. While a solid social media marketing strategy will help you theorize what might be the best fit, there's no substitute for throwing the proverbial spaghetti to see what sticks.

And if you do find something that sends your follower count and audience engagement skyrocketing, great! But don't be tempted to post one single social media content type until the end of time. Your audience will quickly tire of seeing the same social media posts over and over, so it's worth coming up with several content types to mix and match in your social media calendar.

Your social media marketing should be an iterative, flexible plan that you refine and tweak as your social media accounts grow.

Happy experimenting!

Ever noticed how, if you’re really on top of replying to your LinkedIn comments, your posts seem to perform better?

I certainly have — and now I have some seriously impressive data to back my anecdotal evidence. Replying to comments on your LinkedIn posts can boost engagement by around 30%, according to a massive analysis by Buffer's data scientist, Julian Winternheimer.

Julian analyzed 72,000 LinkedIn posts from nearly 25,000 accounts, and the pattern was clear: When creators engage back in their comments, their posts perform significantly better relative to their own baseline.

This is one of my favorite data analyses we’ve done at Buffer, because it’s hard evidence that giving back goes a long way. The simple act of responding to people who took the time to engage with you correlates with better performance.

Kind of lovely, isn’t it?

Let's dig into how Julian analyzed the data and what it means for your LinkedIn strategy.

The analysis

Julian used what's called a fixed-effects regression model to analyze the data. (Stay with me — I promise this is the most technical this article gets.)

Instead of comparing one account's engagement to another's (which would be unfair, since larger accounts naturally get more engagement), he compared each account to itself over time. The model also controlled for factors like account size, location, and niche.

Basically, Julian asked: "When this same account replies to comments, how does its engagement change compared to when it doesn't?"

He also used Z-score analyses as a second check to measure how each post performed relative to the account's typical engagement. The consistency across both methods makes the finding pretty hard to ignore.

A few caveats before we get into the numbers:

• We can't perfectly measure cause and effect. It's possible that high-performing posts attract more replies (and therefore more engagement) rather than the other way around.
• The direction of effect is consistent with what Julian found across other platforms — replying to comments boosts engagement by 5-42% across six major social networks.
• These results show directional evidence, not definitive truths. But the consistency is striking.

How replying to comments impacts LinkedIn engagement

Posts where creators replied to comments saw about 30% higher engagement on average — even after controlling for whether the post had comments at all.

Julian's fixed-effects model compared more than 72,000 LinkedIn posts across nearly 25,000 profiles and found this pattern held consistently: When creators reply to comments on their posts, those posts perform better.

The Z-score analysis backed this up. Posts with replied-to comments tended to score above an account's usual engagement level, while those without replies sat slightly below. Around 83% of profiles showed positive effects when they replied. That's a pretty significant majority.

Source: LinkedIn: Engagement and Replies — Julian Winternheimer, Buffer Data Blog, October 2025

Why this works on LinkedIn specifically

LinkedIn is a professional network, but it's still fundamentally about connection. The LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes posts that spark genuine conversation, rather than just passive likes.

When you reply to comments, you're doing a few things algorithmically:

1. Extending the conversation: More comments signal to LinkedIn that your post is engaging, which can push it to more feeds. Even your own replies can help here.
2. Building relationships: People who take the time to comment are often your most engaged audience. Responding builds trust with them.
3. Encouraging more engagement: A thoughtful reply goes a long way. When you take the time to reply, the original commenter will likely respond again. Plus, when people see you actively responding to others, they're more likely to join the conversation themselves.

The professional context matters here, too. Unlike more casual platforms, LinkedIn users often comment with thoughtful takes or questions. Responding shows that you value discussion, debate, and learning.

Makes sense, for a platform built around professional networking!

How to make comment engagement sustainable

This advice sounds great in practice, I know. Replying to all your comments as you grow can be really time-consuming — particularly if you're actively creating across multiple platforms (same!).

A few strategies that have helped me:

Set aside dedicated time: Rather than checking LinkedIn sporadically throughout the day, block out 10-15 minutes once or twice daily specifically for responding to comments. I like to add this task to my daily planner when I have a LinkedIn post scheduled.

Prioritize thoughtful replies: A meaningful response goes a long way! You don’t need to write essays in reply to every comment you receive; it’s really worthwhile to connect with what the commenter has taken the time to share. Acknowledge their effort!

Use Buffer's Community feature: OK, I’m definitely biased here, but genuinely — Community pulls all your comments across platforms into a single dashboard, so you can reply directly from there. It's free for up to 3 social platforms, and it's saved me so much tab-switching (and even more getting lost in the scroll).

The feature also includes a Comment Score, which tracks your consistency and speed over time. It's basically a habit-building tool to help you make engagement a ritual rather than an afterthought.

Putting the ‘social’ back in social

Across Julian's analysis of nearly 2 million posts on six platforms, the signal is pretty darn clear: Replying to your comments is strongly associated with higher engagement.

LinkedIn showed one of the strongest effects at 30%, second only to Threads at 42%.

This isn't about gaming the algorithm. It's less about optimization and more about being… social? The simple act of responding to those who took the time to engage with you matters — and the data backs that up.

✨ Get access to Community, along with all of Buffer's planning and scheduling features, for free for up to 3 social platforms. Get started in under 1 min →

I deleted my 7K LinkedIn account and five months later, I was back to 4.5K followers and 416K impressions.

Deleting an account I’d spent months building felt reckless, but it ended up being the reset I didn’t know I needed.

In January 2025, I started from zero. Five months later, my new account had multiple viral posts, over nearly half a million impressions, and a growing network that finally felt aligned with the kind of work I wanted to do.

This is the story of how I rebuilt my presence from scratch — and the systems that helped me grow faster, with more clarity, the second time around.

Let’s go!

My first LinkedIn account and why I deleted it

I joined LinkedIn during the pandemic, and like most beginners, I went all in without a plan.

I connected with anyone who accepted my connection request without thinking about whether they aligned with my professional goals. Then, as my full-time job became demanding, I disappeared from the platform altogether.

By 2023, I was burned out from my corporate role. The constant toxicity had drained my energy and motivation. I wanted a clean slate to rebuild my career on my own terms.

So, I left that job, and six months later, I rediscovered LinkedIn through a video by creator Shruti Rajput, who’d grown her account to 1,000 followers in 30 days. It reminded me that I already had a platform waiting to build my personal brand, I just wasn’t using it intentionally.

I returned to LinkedIn in mid-2024, posting about Pinterest, writing, AI, and lessons from my career.

Over six months, I grew to 7,000 followers. But even with the numbers, something felt off. My posts weren’t reaching the right people — the audience I’d built before had nothing in common with the one I wanted now.

To fix it, I started removing inactive or irrelevant connections. My plan was to remove 100 people a day. But as soon as I did that, LinkedIn flagged the activity as suspicious and suspended my account. I tried again — slower this time — and got suspended again.

That’s when I had a decision to make: keep chasing engagement from the wrong audience or start over with intention.

I chose to start over.

After confirming with LinkedIn that it was possible, I deleted my 7K-follower account — six months of work gone in seconds. But this time, it felt different. I was clearing space for what came next.

Restarting from zero wasn’t smooth sailing

When I created my new LinkedIn account in January 2025, I felt ready for a clean slate. But within 24 hours, I was suspended before I’d even posted a single thing.

The verification process became its own mini-saga. First, I had to confirm my identity through Persona. My account was approved, and I even shared a post.

Then, days later, LinkedIn flagged me again, this time asking for Aadhaar, a unique identification number issued by the Government of India, because my old account was still tied to my ID. It took weeks of emails with support and government offices to sort it all out.

Finally, after jumping through more hoops than a circus performer, I got verified, and my account was fully functional.

The system that helped me grow to 4.5k in five months

“You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” — James Clear

The six months that I invested in growing my previous LinkedIn account taught me one thing: I can’t grow on any social platform without putting the right systems in place. So, I began creating systems that worked for me, not against me.

I mainly focused on four things: a clear strategy, a consistent approach, a cohesive brand, and a scheduling tool (this one was added later on).

I built a clear strategy

My first account grew quickly, but without any real direction. This time, I wanted to do it with clarity, so I turned to Grok to figure out who I was speaking to and why. It helped me map out content pillars around my goals, audience, and values — and Excalidraw helped me visualize those pillars into a living content map I could actually follow.

I created a consistent workflow

I used Notion as my second brain — a place to store every post idea, draft, and insight from the comments section. It became the foundation for a repeatable content workflow.

I refined my content and branding

Visuals matter on LinkedIn. Using Canva, I started creating simple carousels and banners that matched my profile branding. It gave my posts a sense of polish and familiarity that helped people recognize my content faster.

I scheduled and measured my content

One of my virtual friends, Gabriela, introduced me to a tool named Buffer. She suggested I join Buffer's 30-day Creator Camp, and that’s how I discovered it. Through camp, I learned how to turn ideas into a real posting habit. I began drafting and scheduling posts ahead of time, which removed the daily pressure to show up.

Now, I use Buffer to manage all my content — for both LinkedIn and Pinterest — and it’s become the backbone of my system.

Fun fact: Thanks to Buffer, I scheduled an entire month of content in two sittings for the first time ever.

What changed after building a system

Once I built a system around how I create, everything changed.

My posts started reaching the right people — the kind of creators and professionals I actually wanted to connect with.

I began getting thoughtful comments, DMs from creators I actually admired, and collaboration requests that aligned with my work.

I started seeing my follower count rise consistently.

But apart from these numbers and engagement, what changed most was my relationship with creating. It stopped feeling like a task I had to tick off. Now, I can create content without burning out and still have the energy to live my life outside the screen.

This, for me, is a big win as a content creator!

What I’d tell anyone starting from zero

I know starting something from scratch can seem very daunting to us – but it doesn’t have to be.

What I’ve learned after losing 7,000 followers is that starting again doesn’t mean you failed. It means you’re brave enough to admit the first path wasn’t right, and strong enough to choose a better one.

You can thrive on any new path if you stay consistent, build the right systems, and follow strategies supporting your growth.

I hope you do that for yourself.

Having a strong LinkedIn game is no longer an option.

What we’re witnessing in today’s tough economy is the inevitable rise of social selling.

This trend leverages social media platforms to build connections and establish meaningful relationships with potential business prospects — and when it comes to social selling, LinkedIn is the MVP.

The reality is that the best LinkedIn users are marketing machines. They use the platform as a content distribution system, not a resume builder.

This is your street credibility and personal brand all rolled into one. It’s the first impression you’ll make on prospective employers, clients, partners, or investors — so make it count.

My own LinkedIn experience

I’ve been posting on LinkedIn once a week without fail for six years. Thanks to that hard work and consistency, I've established a personal brand grounded in credibility and respect, and grown my follower count to 45,000.

I've built real friendships with the best B2B marketers in the world and I’m on a text-message basis with countless founders, CEOs, VPs, and executives.

I've earned millions in salary and consulting contracts, 100 percent inbound driven. I’ve been invited to speak on hundreds of podcasts and written for some of the most prestigious websites in business and marketing, like Buffer, HubSpot, Nasdaq, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, NBC, and more.

What’s the true ROI? Thanks to all of the above, I’ll never have to apply for a job again.

Here’s what I’ve avoided:

• I’ve never posted memes, clickbait, or gimmicky stories.
• I’ve never created LinkedIn content with the “goal” of lead generation or immediate-term sales.
• I’ve never used a content calendar or automation tool (although some of them can be useful).
• I’ve never cared about factors like which day of the week is best to post.

Here’s what I've done consistently:

• I’ve always prioritized sharing lessons “from the trenches” — real-world learnings directly from my day-to-day experiences as a marketing leader.
• I’ve always written posts using informal, simple, easy language.
• I’ve always made sure to connect with second-degree connections who comment on my posts.
• I’ve always made sure to engage and respond to people who leave comments.

In this article, I'll dive deeper into tactics for making your profile stand out on the increasingly crowded platform.

LinkedIn profile optimization best practices

Gone are the days when your LinkedIn page was nothing more than a digital resume to try and get job offers — it’s so much more now — and utilizing LinkedIn’s new features will help you get the maximum ROI from the platform.

You need a super compelling profile to enhance your online visibility and gain trust. Here are some top tips for creating a great LinkedIn profile.

1. Choose a distinctive profile and background photo

Your LinkedIn profile picture and background photo are the first visual impressions you make on visitors.

Conventional wisdom says to choose a professional, high-quality, and recent headshot of yourself — but I’d argue you can also pick something that displays your personality even if it’s not super “business–y.”

Take my LinkedIn profile example below, you’ll see my avatar plus Eddie Van Halen cover photo — this is by design, as it reflects the impression I want to share with my network.

Now, keep in mind that I’m a solo consultant and not affiliated with any specific company. If you’re a full-time employee, you may want to consider a banner that is aligned with your company’s corporate branding.

2. Write a catchy headline and LinkedIn summary

Your LinkedIn headline, limited to 220 characters, should succinctly capture who you are as a professional. Incorporate keyword-rich terms that potential employers, clients, or business partners might use to find someone with your skills or work experiences.

For the LinkedIn summary, you can weave a narrative about your professional journey, skills, achievements, and aspirations.

My profile summary explains my origin story as a musician and how that helped shape my career as a marketer.

Another cool example I really like is Tito Bohrt — he stands out with the pseudo, “Sales Mad Scientist” — which demonstrates confidence and a unique identity online.

3. Write a detailed experience section

The 'Experience' section of your LinkedIn profile is your online resume. So if you really want to stand out to hiring managers, follow these tips:

• Be specific. Don't just list your job titles and tactical specialties. Instead, be specific about what you accomplished in each role. What were your key responsibilities? What were your biggest successes?
• Use keywords and bullet points. When you're writing your experience, be sure to use keywords that are relevant to your industry and the jobs you're interested in. Using bullet points helps keep things clear and concise.
• Quantify your results. Whenever possible, quantify your results and remove as many buzzwords as possible. This will help you to demonstrate the impact of your work and make you more marketable to potential employers.

4. Add your skills, endorsements, and recommendations

It’s time to buff up that skills section. Include skills that are relevant to your industry and that align with your career goals. And you’ll want to throw in a mix of hard vs soft skills:

Here are some examples of hard skills:

• Coding: The ability to write code in a programming language.
• Graphic design: The ability to create and edit graphics using software such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
• Data analysis: The ability to collect, analyze, and interpret data.
• Customer service: The ability to interact with customers in a friendly and helpful manner.
• Sales: The ability to persuade others to buy a product or service.

Here are some examples of soft skills:

• Communication: The ability to clearly and concisely communicate with others, both verbally and in writing.
• Commitment: What’s something that took a long time to achieve?
• Leadership: The ability to motivate and inspire others to achieve a common goal.
• Adaptability: The ability to adjust to change and new situations.

Regularly updating this section and getting endorsements from colleagues can bolster your credibility.

For example, this is a recommendation I’ve earned from the CMO of Cognism. These types of endorsements are priceless.

5. Showcase licenses and certifications

If you have any licenses or certifications relevant to your profession, be sure to include them. LinkedIn has a dedicated section for these credentials, which increases your credibility and sets you apart from others in your field.

Not sure what to showcase?

If you’re a social media content creator — try this selection of courses recommended by Buffer.

If you’re in B2B marketing — try HubSpot Academy to showcase your skills.

If you’re in B2B sales — SaaS sales training programs are a no-brainer for leveling up.

6. Engage thoughtfully

This cannot be overstated. The top LinkedIn users regularly share, post, and engage with content that aligns with their professional interests.

Your activity on LinkedIn reflects your knowledge and passion in your field. These engagements can be a rich source of keywords and demonstrate your thought leadership.

Here are some of the best tips for engaging with people on LinkedIn:

• Be authentic. People can spot a fake from a mile away, so be yourself and let your personality shine through in your interactions.
• Be helpful. Offer to help others with their questions and problems, and share your knowledge and expertise.
• Be consistent. Engage with people on a regular basis, and don't just disappear after you've made a connection.
• Comment on their posts. When someone you're connected to posts something, take a few minutes to read it and leave a thoughtful comment.
• Share other people’s content. If someone you're connected to has shared valuable content, repost it to your own network.
• Demonstrate business acumen. You need to show potential business partners that you possess intelligent strategic acumen.
• Invite them to connect with you. If you see someone who you think you could benefit from connecting with, send them an invitation.

Job seekers

• Use LinkedIn to network with people in your field. Attend industry events, join relevant LinkedIn groups, and reach out to people you admire.
• Highlight your skills and experience in your profile. Make sure your profile is up-to-date and includes all of your relevant skills and experience.
• Use LinkedIn to research companies. Before you apply for a job, do some research on the company on LinkedIn. This will help you learn more about the company and its culture, and it will also give you some talking points for your interview.

Salespeople

• Use LinkedIn to find potential leads. LinkedIn is a great way to find potential leads who are interested in the products or services you sell.
• Send personalized messages. Send tailored, customized messages. Be human and write conversationally. Avoid being overly corporate or stuffy.
• Don’t be annoying. Be professional. Don’t connect and pitch. Leave deposits before attempting to make withdrawals.

Business owners

• Use LinkedIn to build your brand. LinkedIn is a great way to build your brand and establish yourself as an expert in your field.
• Share your content. Share valuable content on LinkedIn, such as blog posts, articles, and videos.
• Engage with your audience. Respond to comments and questions on your content, and participate in conversations on LinkedIn.
• Pro tip: You can also leverage LinkedIn to build a referral marketing program that drives passive lead flow — the gift that keeps on giving.

7. Customize your LinkedIn URL

A small yet essential aspect of profile optimization is customizing your LinkedIn URL.

A customized URL is not only more professional and easier to share, but it also enhances your personal brand.

Here’s how to claim your custom LinkedIn URL:

• Locate and select the ‘Me’ icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage.
• Click ‘View Profile’ and select ‘Edit Public Profile and URL’
• On the right hand side of the screen, select ‘Edit Custom URL’
• Your current URL will appear like this: www.linkedin.com/in/yourname
• Type your desired new URL in the text box and click ‘Save’

8. Include volunteer experience

Volunteer experience often gets overlooked but can be a powerful component of your LinkedIn profile. It demonstrates your commitment to community and social causes, providing a holistic view of your character beyond professional achievements. This can be considered a cause marketing strategy, and can help you stand out in the sea of clutter.

9. Use the featured section

The Featured section is a space on your profile where you can showcase work samples, achievements, and publications. You can use this section to highlight your best work, whether it's a blog post, a project, a certificate, or even a video from a webinar or a speech you've delivered.

10. Follow influencers and top companies

Follow influencers, leaders, and companies in your industry to stay updated with trends and discussions. Engaging with their content shows your enthusiasm for your field and keeps you visible to your professional network.

11. Adjust your public profile settings

Lastly, ensure your profile settings are adjusted for maximum visibility. Under the Privacy settings, make sure your profile can be seen by everyone, including search engines — this matters quite a lot for personal brand SEO.

Profile optimization is a continuous process. Keep updating and refining your LinkedIn profile as you progress in your career, acquire new skills, and achieve new milestones. Remember, a well-optimized LinkedIn profile isn’t just a static CV, it's a dynamic, evolving representation of your professional journey.

LinkedIn for job seeking

LinkedIn has become an essential tool for jobseekers worldwide, even in today’s difficult job market — in case you missed it, Crunchbase reported 150K tech layoffs this year.

With a multitude of features specifically designed to help you connect with potential employers and discover new opportunities, knowing how to effectively utilize the platform is paramount.

12. Optimize your job preferences

LinkedIn allows you to set your job-seeking preferences, including the types of roles you're interested in, your preferred location, and whether or not you're open to remote work.

This not only helps LinkedIn's algorithm to show you the most relevant job postings but also signals to potential employers that you're actively looking for opportunities.

13. Consider the 'Open to Work' feature

Using LinkedIn's 'Open to Work' feature helps recruiters know that you're actively seeking a new role.

This can be displayed on your profile picture for all to see, or you can choose to only show this to recruiters.

14. Build and nurture your network

Connecting with industry professionals, alumni, and influencers can significantly improve your job-seeking efforts. However, it's not just about increasing your connection count; meaningful engagement with your network through likes, shares, and comments can foster relationships that could lead to job opportunities.

• Be selective about who you connect with. When you're adding people to your network, make sure they're people you actually know or who you're genuinely interested in connecting with. Don't just add people for the sake of adding people.
• Send personalized connection requests. When you send a connection request, take the time to write a personalized message explaining why you want to connect. This will show that you're not just adding people for the sake of adding people, and it will make people more likely to accept your request.
• Engage with your connections. Once you've connected with someone, don't just add them to your network and then forget about them. Engage with them by liking and commenting on their posts, sharing their content, and reaching out to them to ask questions or offer help.
• Attend industry events and meetups. Another great way to meet new people and grow your network is to attend industry events and meetups. This is a great way to meet people who are already working in your field and who can offer you advice and support.

15. Use LinkedIn Job Alerts

LinkedIn's Job Alerts feature ensures that you get immediate notifications about new job postings that match your preferences. This can give you a head start, allowing you to apply early and increase your chances of getting noticed by recruiters.

16. Beware of scams and social engineering

This applies to both employees and job seekers — social engineering threats and job scams are sadly far too common on LinkedIn these days.

From the fake CEO boss text, to the phony recruiter scheme — LinkedIn users should remain vigilant to avoid getting tricked.

17. Craft a personalized connection request

When reaching out to new connections or potential employers, always personalize your connection request. A generic request may be ignored, but a personalized message demonstrates your genuine interest in connecting and can foster a more positive impression.

Here are some tips for writing a personalized connection request:

• Explain why you're interested in connecting. What do you admire about the person's work? What do you hope to learn from them?
• Be specific. Don't just say that you're interested in connecting. Be specific about why you're interested in connecting and what you hope to gain from the connection.
• Keep it short and sweet. No one wants to read a long, rambling connection request. Keep it short and to the point.
• Use a call to action. Ask the person if they'd be open to connecting, whether that’s over a virtual coffee or knowledge-share.
• Don’t “Connect and Pitch.” Please… just don’t.

Remember, job seeking on LinkedIn is about more than just applying for jobs or trying to pitch your products and services.

It's about establishing a personal brand, networking with the right people, staying informed about trends in your industry, and demonstrating your passion and expertise. With these tips, you'll be well-equipped to make LinkedIn a powerful tool in your job search.

LinkedIn for executives

For entrepreneurs, LinkedIn is more than just a networking platform; it's a tool for digital marketing, brand-building, recruiting, and even learning. Knowing how to maximize LinkedIn can give your organization a significant boost.

18. Establish your professional brand

A strong professional brand demonstrates expertise and builds trust with your audience.

To establish this:

• Highlight your skills, experience, testimonials, and accomplishments in your profile.
• Regularly share and publish relevant content that demonstrates your expertise and perspective. This could include blog posts, articles, case studies, or insightful comments on industry trends.

19. Attract the right audience

LinkedIn provides several tools to help you find the right people:

• Use LinkedIn's advanced search features to identify potential connections based on various criteria such as industry, job role, and geography.
• Follow influencers, join groups, and participate in discussions in your target industry to discover potential business partners and other ways to collaborate.

20. Engage with value

Sharing valuable content helps build credibility and initiate meaningful conversations.

• Share industry news, trends, and your own insights to have new interactions.
• Engage with your connections’ posts by liking, commenting on, and sharing their content.
• Use LinkedIn's insights and updates to personalize your engagement with new connections or potential partners. For instance, congratulate them on a new role or comment on their recent post.

21. Build meaningful relationships

Building trust and maintaining relationships is essential for LinkedIn success.

• Connect with potential partners by sending personalized connection requests.
• Nurture your relationships with regular check-ins, updates, and sharing of relevant content.
• Have meaningful offline conversations — invite connections to a 1:1 coffee chat.
• Studies have shown that salespeople who build relationships with potential customers are more successful than those who don't.
• Being genuine during the sales process is said to be one of the most important parts of modern selling strategies.

22. Empower employees to amplify your brand

Companies should do a better job training their teams to be successful on LinkedIn, but they often fail.

This goes beyond LinkedIn profile badges and certifications — it’s about investing in the success of everyone at the company.

Here are some ways companies can do a better job preparing their teams for LinkedIn:

• Understand the algorithm — LinkedIn's algorithm prioritize real-world expertise and practical advice from experts.
• Use training software — Corporate learning platforms can really make a huge difference in helping employees reach their full potential, by realizing what to do (and what not to do) to help promote the company online.
• Empower your partners and affiliates — Most in-house enablement collateral is a sloppy, disorganized mess. A member training system can help transform your partners and affiliates into an army of marketers for your brand on LinkedIn.
• Watch tutorials — There are tons of great YouTube tutorials that can give you inspiration for better marketing on LinkedIn.

23. Tell the founder story

As the founder, you are quite literally the face of your business.

A strong personal brand can lend credibility to your company and attract potential partners, customers, and investors.

Highlight your expertise, passion, and the vision behind your startup in your headline, summary, and experience sections.

Founders should also strive to be visionary and tell the company’s origin story. Videos can be clipped and repurposed across LinkedIn and other social media platforms,

Liquid Death, while gimmicky, may be the best example of this I’ve ever seen.

24. Showcase your thought leadership

Thought leadership is about becoming an authority in your field, someone others look to for insights, expertise, and guidance.

For entrepreneurs and CEOs, flexing your area of expertise on LinkedIn can build credibility, attract potential customers or investors, and open doors to new opportunities.

Here's how to showcase your thought leadership on LinkedIn:

1. Write blog posts and articles. Some people say publishing LinkedIn Articles is a dying art form — but I believe they can still be valuable. For example, when I joined Aura as their VP of Growth, I wrote an article called Why I’m Joining Aura, which earned tons of engagement.
2. Record and share videos. Videos are a great way to share your expertise and insights in a more personal and engaging way. In fact, LinkedIn videos receive five times more comments than other LinkedIn post types. Videos with closed captions are the most effective because they allow viewers to understand your video with their sound off. When recording videos, be sure to speak clearly and concisely.
3. Host podcasts and workshops. Podcasts and workshops are a great way to share your expertise with a large group of people. When hosting a podcast or workshop, be sure to promote it to your LinkedIn network and send texts or DMs to get people sharing.
4. Become a speaker at industry events. Speaking at industry events is a great way to share your expertise with a large audience and to build your personal brand. When speaking at an event, be sure to prepare your presentation in advance and practice it several times.
5. Contribute to industry publications. Contributing to industry publications is a great way to share your expertise with a wider audience. For example, if you’re an advertising executive, contributing to AdWeek or Forbes could bode well for your personal brand.
6. Connect with other thought leaders. Building relationships with other thought leaders is a great way to share your expertise and to learn from others. When building relationships with other thought leaders, be sure to reach out to them and introduce yourself. You should also follow them on LinkedIn and engage with their content.

25. Use LinkedIn for hiring

LinkedIn can be a powerful recruiting tool. Posting jobs on LinkedIn can help you find qualified candidates. You can also use the platform's search functions and LinkedIn Recruiter tools to proactively find and reach out to potential candidates.

26. Build a strong company page

Beyond your personal profile, a compelling LinkedIn company page is essential. It's where you can showcase your products or services, share updates, and post job openings. Make sure your page has a high-quality logo and banner image, a compelling 'About' section, and regular updates about your company.

• Regularly update your page with news, achievements, and insights about your company. This helps create an active, engaging presence that can attract potential candidates.
• Showcase your company culture. Upload pictures from team events, highlight employee achievements, and share posts that give a glimpse into your work environment.

27. Post detailed job listings

LinkedIn offers a feature-rich job posting platform where you can list open positions.

• Make your job descriptions clear and engaging. Detail the role responsibilities, desired skills and qualifications, and what the candidate can expect from working with your company.
• Leverage LinkedIn targeting to reach relevant candidates. You can target based on location, job function, industry, and more.

28. Use LinkedIn recruiter

LinkedIn Recruiter is a premium tool specifically designed to help hiring managers and recruiters find, connect with, and manage potential candidates.

• Use advanced search filters to identify suitable candidates. You can filter by skills, experience, location, industry, and more.
• For example, if you are trying to hire sales reps — you can filter by experience levels such as seniority, company size and annual revenue to find qualified candidates who align with the job requirements.
• Reach out to potential candidates directly using InMail, even if they're not in your network.
• You can also send them connection requests and keep in touch with them, so that in the future they will see your posts and engage with your content.

29. Tap your network

Your own network and your employees' networks can be valuable sources of potential candidates.

• Encourage your employees to share job openings with their networks. Employee referrals often result in high-quality candidates.
• Share job openings on your own profile and ask your connections to spread the word.

30. Engage with potential candidates

Simply posting a job and waiting for applications is a passive approach. Actively engage with potential candidates to increase your chances of finding the right fit.

• Engage with people who comment on your job postings. Answer any questions they have and thank them for their interest.
• Keep an eye on people who regularly engage with your company page. They already have an interest in your company and could be potential candidates.

31. Showcase your employer brand

Employer branding is about showcasing what it's like to work at your company. A strong employer brand can make top talent want to work for you.

• Share content that showcases your company culture, values, and work environment.
• Encourage your employees to share their experiences and to engage with your company posts.
• Highlight benefits, professional development opportunities, and unique aspects of your company culture.

32. Be responsive and communicative

Good communication can significantly enhance candidate experience.

• Respond promptly to inquiries about job listings.
• If a candidate reaches out directly, take the time to engage with them, even if they might not be the right fit for current openings.
• After interviews, let candidates know the next steps and timelines. If they didn't get the job, a kind rejection can leave a positive impression and keep the door open for future opportunities.

If all else fails with recruiting leaders for your startup, you can always try an executive recruiting firm to accelerate the process and land your dream candidate.

Navigate LinkedIn with confidence

Whether you're growing in your current job, hunting for a new job, closing a major sales deal, or hustling to scale your startup — LinkedIn offers a multitude of features and resources to help you achieve your career goals.

Remember, the key to success on LinkedIn lies in consistent, meaningful engagement. It took me over five years to earn 50,000+ followers. With dedication, you can do it too.

I hit 20,000 followers on LinkedIn in August 2025. The number itself is worth celebrating. After all, who doesn’t love a milestone number?

However, it has also led to much reflection about where and why I started on the platform. This was the first year I set a clear growth goal for LinkedIn, and reaching it gave me a reason to pause and ask: What actually drove this growth? What changed along the way? And what comes next?

In this article, I’ll share the strategies that fueled my growth, the opportunities that came with hitting 20K, and the challenges I’ve had to navigate along the way. I’ll also share how I plan to approach LinkedIn (and content more broadly) in this next phase.

Let’s get into it.

Hitting 20,000 followers wasn’t the plan (at first)

When I first started actively posting on LinkedIn, numbers were the last thing on my mind. At first, I was looking for community after losing my job in 2020.

Once I found work again, my focus shifted. I went back to using LinkedIn to connect with other professionals and learn from people in the content marketing space. But I was more focused on work and community than content. I only shared about 10 LinkedIn posts between 2020 and 2022.

However, in 2022, after joining Buffer, posting took on a new purpose. My profile became a proof-of-concept lab, and every piece of advice I wrote for Buffer (like finding your niche or setting content pillars), I tested on my own account first. If it worked for me, I knew it would resonate with our readers.

Some of those experiments worked better than I expected. They helped me define my niche, connect with the right audience, and build a platform that unlocked opportunities I couldn’t have imagined back in 2020.

Reaching 20K wasn’t on my radar then. It wasn’t until early 2025, after crossing 15K, that I set a clear goal: prove that Buffer’s strategies really work by applying them myself. I thought hitting 20K would validate the advice we share and maybe even open the door to brand partnerships — which it did, sooner than I expected.

Still, I’ve never seen followers as the only measure of success. On LinkedIn, growth looks like thoughtful comments, people referencing my work in their own posts, and conversations that carry beyond a single update. The milestone matters, but those signals matter more.

What actually drove my growth

The one habit that’s constantly reaped rewards throughout my LinkedIn journey is consistency. Not exciting, but very true. Setting up a sustainable posting cadence has always been at the foundation of my LinkedIn strategy, and it’s a tactic that Buffer’s data on consistency backs up again and again.

Beyond showing up, growth came from experimenting. I tested everything I was writing about at Buffer on my own account: finding a niche, choosing content pillars, and then narrowing into that “Venn diagram middle” where what I enjoyed overlapped with what my audience needed. That overlap became my content sweet spot.

Defining my audience made all the difference. Over time, it became clear that I was speaking to early to mid-career professionals who wanted to build international careers in marketing and creative industries. Once I leaned into that, my content started connecting in a more intentional way.

Sharing more personal reflections also helped; those posts often traveled further than I expected. And from 2020 to 2025, my growth has looked roughly like this:

• From 0 to 10K: five or six years between landing my first remote job and joining Buffer in 2022.
• 10K to 15K: a much faster two years.
• 15K to 20K: the fastest milestone at nine months, built on the foundation of all the lessons I had learned

Outside of my own actions, there were external turning points too. Creator Camp was a big one — the first time I committed to a clear posting cadence (seven days straight at the start).

It’s proof that intentionality compounds. Once I knew what worked and who I was speaking to, my growth accelerated.

What growth unlocked for me

Building an audience has directly shaped my career. At the start of 2025, I started landing brand partnerships — something I never would’ve thought possible back when I was posting out of necessity. That only happened because I committed to LinkedIn, set a goal, and showed up consistently. Now, partnerships feel like an option I can choose to tap into, not just a lucky break I can’t control the flow of.

Beyond partnerships, visibility changed how people see me in the industry. I’ve been invited onto podcasts, YouTube channels, and into articles as a contributor. The recognition has been validating, but more importantly, it’s helped me reach the people I care about most: early to mid-career professionals trying to build international careers.

What I didn’t expect about hitting 20K

All this probably sounds great — consistent growth, brand partnerships, new opportunities. And it is. But if I’m honest, I also feel weird about it. Here’s why.

LinkedIn feels narrower at scale. Unlike other platforms, people come here with specific goals: finding jobs, building networks, or learning something tied to their careers. That means my content has to fit those lanes to perform. I didn’t expect growth to feel constraining, but it does.

Balance gets harder, not easier. Too much lifestyle content risks credibility. Too much “advice” risks sounding generic. I’ve gone too far in both directions before — posts that are so polished that they feel sterile, and others so personal or “out there” that they confuse my audience. The sweet spot is where personal reflections connect back to professional lessons. But the bigger the audience, the harder I’ve found it to hold that middle ground.

Visibility creates pressure. With 200 followers, I could post freely. At 20K, every draft feels heavier. I catch myself over-editing or shelving ideas entirely. Ironically, the experimentation that fueled my growth is harder to hold onto now. That’s been the most unexpected part of hitting this milestone.

I’m not just a professional. This has been the hardest part to articulate. My life encompasses much more than my work, but on LinkedIn, every part of me has to come through the professional lens. That filter keeps my content relevant, but it also flattens me and my personal brand.

So yes, visibility is a privilege. But it’s also a responsibility and one I’m still figuring out how to carry without losing the curiosity and trial-and-error spirit that got me here in the first place.

What’s next

Hitting 20K should feel like a finish line. Instead, it feels like the starting line for something new. For years, my goal on LinkedIn was clear — build a platform I could use for Buffer experiments, connect with our audience, and prove that the strategies we recommended actually worked. I’ve done that. Now the question is: what comes next?

I’m not leaving LinkedIn. People rely on my content there, and I still enjoy the process of testing ideas and sharing lessons. But I am ready for a new phase — one where the focus shifts from proving the system to experimenting more freely. For the moment, I’ve decided that that will mean loosening up on LinkedIn itself, and moving into new spaces where the stakes feel lower and I have a bit more freedom.

That’s why I’m kicking things off with a new challenge: growing to 1,000 followers on Threads. It’s the first experiment in Proof of Concept, a new series where I’ll share what happens when I test different growth strategies across platforms and formats.

View on Threads

Threads is the perfect place to start because the playbook is still being written. In a past 30-day experiment, I learned that open-ended questions, timely replies, and joining conversations were far more effective than polished one-off posts. This time, I’ll be layering those lessons with strategies we've identified, like:

• Using tags to reach specific communities.
• Posting multiple times a day (instead of four times a week, like I do on LinkedIn).
• Sharing a mix of text-first posts with the occasional photo to stay true to the platform’s vibe.

So while 20K on LinkedIn is a milestone, it’s just the start of my journey as a creator. It’s the point where I get to ask: what else is possible when I treat content as an experiment again?