Transcription
LinkedIn's rules have changed going into 2026. And if you're still playing by the old rules, you're actively putting yourself at a disadvantage. I know this because I spent the past four years working with over a hundred of the top founders on LinkedIn. It's quite literally my job to know what works on LinkedIn and I've watched the rules change time and time again.
What I'm seeing right now is that the people who are crushing it simply understand the new rules and they know what LinkedIn actually rewards right now. So, in this video, I'm breaking down the new rules of LinkedIn in 2026. What changed, why it matters, and exactly how to position yourself to win.
First, we've got to understand what most founders are getting wrong on LinkedIn right now. The reality is, over the past three years, the idea of building an audience on LinkedIn, posting content, and trying to be a creator or an influencer on the platform has gone from a fringe idea to now being a mainstream marketing strategy among a lot of the top companies in the world. This is especially true among B2B technology companies, so B2B SaaS and AI companies. A lot of times, these founders will raise a seed round or a Series A and immediately go invest in content support. Whether it's hiring a marketer full-time or bringing in a content agency to support content on LinkedIn, in particular, is often at the top of the list of what they care about. I take 10 to 20 of these calls every single month with founders who are wanting to post more on LinkedIn. It's pretty much become the default now.
In addition to that, the advent of AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT has made the time cost to get a passable LinkedIn post essentially zero. Anyone with an internet connection and a $30 ChatGPT subscription can produce infinite LinkedIn content. The algorithm itself has actually changed quite a bit over the past year alone. What worked in 2025 or 2024 no longer works in 2026. Anyone telling you that, "Oh, my reach went up so much," they likely went from not posting at all or posting really bad content to getting their stuff together. But if you've been consistent on LinkedIn and following all the best practices, you've likely seen your reach go down over the past year.
Just take a look at these analytics. These come from Shield, a LinkedIn analytics company. And Andreas breaks down the average impressions based on follower count. And if you notice, if you have 25 to 50,000 followers, the typical impression count is just about 2,500 impressions, which is quite low. And it has gone down since last year. The overall popularity of LinkedIn, the advent of AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT, along with the decreased organic reach, have converged to make the LinkedIn timeline a lot more competitive and crowded and harder to stand out.
Yet, most founders follow the same old playbook they have been for some time. And they wonder why their results have not improved or, in many cases, gotten worse over the past few months. They're simply showing up every day and posting five times per week. They're adding value. They're staying consistent. And they end up 90 days into this wondering why they're not actually seeing results from the platform. And when you're following all of these generic best practices, it's very easy to end up in a position where you've put all this time, effort, and energy into creating LinkedIn content, get 90, 120 days in with nothing to show for it. No leads, no momentum, not even any improved top-of-funnel metrics like impressions or follower growth. The content you do publish ends up with five likes, mostly from your employees. So surely LinkedIn doesn't work, right? Wrong. The platform is still the best way to get in front of B2B buyers. So if you're running a B2B technology company, whether it's SaaS or AI, LinkedIn is by far the most effective platform.
Now, you also got to understand why this is all happening because unless you really understand how the LinkedIn platform is working in 2026, you're not going to actually be able to apply the strategies I'll let you in on later in this video effectively. The first area to call out here is platform maturity. As platforms mature and they become more popular, they tend to decrease organic reach in an attempt to get people to pay for advertisements. But as the platform becomes more proven and more popular and there's less of a need to really convince people to sign up, that organic reach tends to go down over time.
The second reason for this is timeline saturation. Independent of the platform maturity and whether or not they're playing with organic reach to get people to pay for ads, the simple fact that more people are posting on the platform makes the timeline more competitive and it's more difficult to stand out. And as I mentioned, the development of these AI tools has made the barrier to entry to post content essentially zero. Organic content was always free from a monetary perspective as long as I can remember, but there was still the investment of time. You had to really sit down and clarify your thoughts and get them on paper before you publish them. Now, you can input a simple prompt in ChatGPT and get a pretty decent LinkedIn post. Generic, but decent enough to post. So, as the timeline gets more crowded, it's more competitive and it's more difficult to stand out and there's not as many impressions to go around. There's not enough attention to go around.
One very clear shift that has happened in the LinkedIn algorithm is that it is surfacing older content. If you go on LinkedIn right now and scroll through your timeline, you'll likely see content from one week ago, two weeks ago, even as far back as three or four weeks ago appearing on your timeline now. In addition to that, the feed will often surface content from people you don't follow. And if you really think about it, there's likely people that you follow on LinkedIn whose content you'd like to see more often, but it just doesn't show up in your feed that much.
By the way, if you want to grow on LinkedIn in 2026, I took the guesswork out of it for you entirely. I know we were talking about how the algorithm changed and what's working right now. I put together five simple templates that you could use over and over again based on content that's winning across our dozens of clients right now. It's essentially a content calendar for Monday through Friday that you can cycle through for the next 30, 60, 90 days. And by the end of that time period, you're going to gain your first few thousand followers on LinkedIn and likely get your first few leads from the platform as well. It's totally free. If you want to get access to it, I'll drop the link to it in the description below.
So, now that we've established that we're playing the LinkedIn game on hard mode in 2026, what actually works right now? How do you stand out on this crowded timeline and put yourself in a position to get consistent organic leads coming from the platform? If I had to summarize the shift in LinkedIn's algorithm in one sentence, it would be this: You'll be rewarded for creating content that only you can create. So, you must evolve from "how to" to "how I." And you've got to tell stories and use examples that AI cannot copy.
You also must stop relying only on LinkedIn's algorithm to get your content in front of the right viewers. The advantage that LinkedIn has over other platforms like Instagram or X is that you actually have more control over who sees your content. You have more control over your audience and you can design it to your advantage. You can do this by sending outbound connection requests and proactively commenting on other people's content.
Okay, now let's get very actionable. How should this actually affect your LinkedIn content strategy and what you post on a day-to-day basis? The idea I want you to focus on is shifting your content from "how to" to "how I." So stay away from generic value-based content and try to tie every take into a story. One pro tip for you for the very first post you should publish on your account is your origin story post. This is the first post type we run with every single one of our clients because it performs so well. That's often times the best performing post ever, independent of an acquisition announcement or a fundraising announcement. Origin story posts crush. So, for example, if you say that companies should be in-person, not remote, pair it with an anecdote about how you got an in-person office in San Francisco and why it benefited your company in particular. Don't just give the generic advice, give a story to go along with it.
And if you are going to use value-based content, I want you to think about data storytelling. A lot of the folks that are still winning on LinkedIn with "how to" and value-based content are able to back it up, not necessarily with stories or narratives, but with proprietary data. That example of the benchmark report from Shield that I showed you earlier is a great illustration of using proprietary data to perform well on LinkedIn. Nobody else can have access to this data but Andreas or anyone on the Shield team. Someone from the outside doesn't have these impressions numbers. If Andreas would have just made a post saying, "Hey, impressions are down," it wouldn't have really meant much because he's able to use this proprietary data. It ended up getting over 600 likes and over 200 comments. Their head of insights, Peter Walker, often will post these data-oriented posts with visualizations just like this. And again, similar to the Shield benchmarks report, this is compelling because it's specific. If he would have just said LinkedIn impressions are X, Y, or Z, this is what I'm seeing, it wouldn't have been as interesting because he's able to give actual numbers and visualize those numbers. It's very effective.
Including relevant media with posts whenever you can. Text-only content can still work. I post it quite often. If you look at my last content, I think four of the past five posts were text-only and they did pretty well. But I'd be lying if I said that adding a relevant photo didn't impact the performance because it does. So, if you have an in-person office, what I'd recommend is turning your office into a studio. At least on a weekly basis, you want someone on your team to capture photos, behind-the-scenes videos, and it doesn't have to be super complex. The more media you can harvest, the better.
Along with those tweaks to your content strategy, you'll also want to build out a content ecosystem. The simple way to put a content ecosystem is this: You're simply layering in multiple accounts. Not just one founder, but your entire founding team and also additional employees. If you're running a company, I'd suggest getting to a point where you have three to five people actively posting on the LinkedIn timeline. If you can do this, you'll be in the top 0.1% of companies on LinkedIn. Some companies still have this outdated belief that their employees building a personal brand is a liability. They're afraid that they're going to build an audience and leave or there's reputational risk. And this is just so dated. It's 2026. Use your employees who want to post and build a personal brand to your advantage. It's mutually beneficial. You get the distribution and they get to build a personal brand asset that will stay with them for the rest of their career. This is an area that I'm working on personally in my agency. I want more of my team members to post. I've been pretty consistent over the past several years of posting on LinkedIn. My head of content has gotten more consistent over the past year and I want to layer in more and more of our team to get active on LinkedIn and put us in a position where our ICP will not be able to escape us.
Now, it wouldn't be a discussion about LinkedIn strategy in 2026 if we did not mention outbound engagement. You got to focus on outbound. The good news is the execution of this is extremely simple and not time-intensive. For outbound connections, all you're going to do is send 20 connection requests per day. You can even send more if you wanted to. There's an upper limit on how many connection requests LinkedIn will allow you to send. So, send 20 per day.
And the second part to this is you'll want to spend 15 to 20 minutes leaving outbound comments on other people's content. Comments are just another form of content on LinkedIn. And you can think of them like a billboard. And there's two types of accounts that you'll want to leave your comments on. One, accounts that are in your ideal customer profile that could eventually become buyers, obviously. The second type of account is going to be ICP influencer accounts because oftentimes people in your ICP aren't always the most active posting. And there might be only a small handful of people in your industry that actually consistently publish content, which is one of the reasons why it's so beneficial to post on LinkedIn. But because of that, you might run out of people to leave comments on. So, one way to get around this is by commenting on ICP influencer accounts because while a lot of people don't post on LinkedIn, they're lurking. They're reading content. They're following these content creators. And if you can show up in those creators' comment section, you could use your comments as a billboard.
And if you need to find accounts to connect with or leave comments on, you could use LinkedIn's manual search, but I also recommend using Sales Navigator. There's a lot of very powerful filters that you could use to get lists of accounts that could be in your ICP. One of the most common filters I'll use is the company headcounts and how big your company is depending on whether you're going SMB, mid-market, enterprise. You should have a pretty good idea of how many employees a company in your ICP would have. But you could use Sales Navigator to narrow down to those types of companies. So say I want to get in front of software companies with 200 employees. I would use this. Another filter I often use is location. So, we work with B2B SaaS and AI companies, and a lot of times those companies will be in San Francisco or New York. Obviously, there are founders and executives that don't live in either of those two cities that run companies that we could work with, but just for simplicity's sake, a lot of those companies in those cities will be tech companies that could be within our ICP. So, I can use Sales Navigator to filter for that.
So doing this can help you scale your outbound engagement and put you in a position where you're constantly getting in front of new people in your ICP. And again, you're relying less on LinkedIn's algorithm because it has been a bit flaky lately and you're still putting yourself in a position where your content can get in front of potential buyers.
Now, the point of this video was to give you an idea of what the new rules on LinkedIn are and show you a little bit of what you need to be doing with your content strategy. But for that reason, I didn't really have time to go into my actual content strategy. So, click here to go to the next one where I break down everything for you and show you exactly what you need to be doing if you want your content to dominate and actually grow your business on LinkedIn.