The Future of LinkedIn (Do This ASAP In 2026)

LinkedIn just announced that sales navigator pricing could be quadrupling in 2026. And that's just the beginning. In the next three to five years, your ability to master LinkedIn and master these major platform shifts is going to be absolutely make or break. And if you're trying to grow and scale your business or personal brand on LinkedIn going into 2026, this might be the most important thing you learn all year. I know this because I've been in the trenches on LinkedIn for the past three to five years, and I've built a seven figure LinkedIn content agency helping brands dominate the platform. So to help you, I wrote down five of my biggest takeaways from what I'm seeing right now. Starting with number one is a really important idea I'm calling the IRL to URL pipeline. A lot of the best content on LinkedIn comes from in real life activations like billboards, conferences, events, stunts that turn into viral marketing moments. The savviest founders on LinkedIn take in real life stunts and engineer them for virality on LinkedIn. But why is it so important right now going into 2026? The reality is the timeline is getting filled with AI slop. It is easier than ever to go from nothing to a pretty good okay post in a matter of seconds with right prompt the timeline gets saturated and how do you actually stand out one way to create a moat and ai proof your personal brand is by capturing in real life moments it functions as a sort of proof of originality and it makes your content feel human and irreplaceable this campaign from ramp is one of the most extreme examples of in real life stunts done well and they had a crazy viral moment they hired kevin from the office to do a live stream all day promoting their company and ramp is a traditionally boring category as a b2b product they're a corporate spend management platform. They shouldn't be that entertaining. But by doing this out of the box, they were able to stand out. The campaign got millions upon millions upon millions of views. Now, you may not have the budget to go and hire someone like Kevin from the office to be in a campaign for you. So here's an example of a more scrappier version from Austin at Unify, where at a recent conference, they had one of their SDRs walk around with this sign on their back, which read top BDRs come talk to us for $15. In this image that Austin shared of that stunt got almost 700 likes on LinkedIn. The funny thing is this post actually generated way more meetings than the in real life activation. So the great example of that in real life stunt turning into content and the content you get as a result of those stunts is often more impactful. Now, the second trend I'm seeing has to do with media selection. So what type of media does best with LinkedIn content? And we're seeing some pretty obvious trends coming towards the end of this year going into the next. When I look across our active client roster, I very clearly see that posts with relevant media tend to do better than posts that are text only. And this goes back to the first idea that we were talking about. One of the reasons why those IRL stunts work so well is they set you up to be able to capture scroll-stopping images in video. But you don't need to do crazy stunts to make this happen. You just need to be proactive with your B-roll and image collection process. In real life, images are the easiest and most scalable way to do this well. I also see infographics and savable graphics tend to do pretty well. The key is the image itself has to be savable. You're not going to get someone to save or like or engage just because you do an infographic. It actually has to be valuable. But that goes for any piece of content on the platform. When it comes to video, video as media for your posts is kind of hit or miss right now. I would still recommend doing it, but it's not hitting nearly as well as late last year when LinkedIn was really making a short form video push. That said, I would still recommend doing video from time to time on about a one time per week cadence, just so your audience can actually listen to you and see you speak. And that helps to build trust at a faster rate, even if that content doesn't go viral all the time. Now, when it comes to the trend around media, the simple action item I want you to take coming out of this video is set up a simple workflow for collecting images and B-roll around the office especially if you have an in-office setup in san francisco new york wherever you're based out of it you want to have a workflow for capturing images and b-roll one company that does this very well is pylon marty their founder posts very consistently on linkedin and one thing they do very well is having these videos from their san francisco office that go with each post and they're not very high production or cinematic and that's fine and same thing goes with images i think austin from unify also does this quite well so if we look at this post from this morning where austin announced a new hire they made at unify he could have just made the text only post it probably would have done quite well and done fine enough but he added this image with him and jason the new hire he's announcing and it just adds an extra element to the content piece and the image itself serves as a scroll stopper and trend number three is the importance of storytelling i know storytelling is a buzzword in the linkedin personal brand industrial complex but being able to tell compelling stories especially now in the age of ai is becoming more and more important and it's one of the main ai survival skills that you have at your disposal And one consequence of this that we've seen play out over the past year especially, but over the past really two to three years, is the importance of personal brands. If you're starting on LinkedIn today going into 2026, do not build your company page. Build your personal brand as the founder. Founder-led content is the way to go because people want to connect with people, and it's a lot more difficult for AI to replace you as a personal brand than it is for it to replace boring corporate company page content. Let's look at this example from ZoomInfo. Their CEO posts fairly consistently on LinkedIn. If we look at his content pieces, this post that he made a couple weeks ago has almost 300 likes, 30 plus comments, and almost 25 reposts. If we go over to their company page, it has 265,000 followers, almost three times the follower count, and the engagement is far lower. This post just has 52 likes, five reposts, and zero comments. You see how the engagement on the CEO content is so much higher? I'm sure there are exceptions, but for the most part, your personal brand is going to perform way better. And within that personal brand, you want to tap into your personal stories and storytelling to stand out in a crowded timeline. I want to give you three specific types of stories that you could use going into next week. And these are all high performers that we've tested across 50 plus B2B founders. The first one, and this is the absolute banger, is the origin story post. We start every client with the origin story post. It's telling the story of how and why you started your company. So this is a great example from Aaron at Risotto of an origin story post. You start with the background that got you into starting your company, why you started it, and what's coming next. And I like to pair origin story posts with a picture of the co founders, or a picture of the early days of the company. The second type of story I would recommend doing is some sort of adversity story. So telling the story of a very specific incident where you had to overcome a challenge, people are drawn to challenges and conflict. And one of the easiest ways to apply this as a founder is to tell the story of a adversity or a piece of adversity that you've overcome. This is a wonderful example from Adam Robinson. In this post, he talks about how he went through four years of hopelessness until he really hit it big, which is retention.com and rb2b so he's taking a phase of adversity that he went through and telling that story on linkedin people love to see that and ideally you want to share this after you've come out the other side and this works really well for adam because he's crushing it right now with a 20 plus million dollar company and because he's made it people trust him and want to see that struggle that he went through in the early days and really relate to that and the third type of story is an absolute classic it's the customer story or case study this is extremely easy these work as great social proof. Here's an example of a case study that Austin did. This one has a quite cinematic media piece, which you can do. And this actually tends to work quite well. But you don't have to go this hard with it, even just sharing text only or with a simple graphic or image can be totally fine. But share a case study or customer story that really speaks to your ICP. This is probably the safest version of storytelling that you could use. And it's still quite effective no matter how many times B2B companies share case studies on social media. Now one corollary to storytelling is sharing your personal interests. A lot of times people, especially on LinkedIn, founders are terrified to share their personal interests. All they wanna talk about is business. And I understand the thought process. You want people to know you for something in your business category, but you also want them to know, like, and trust you as a human. And one of the reasons why personal branding is such a powerful protector against AI content saturation is because people get to know you. And if you're only talking about business, that can work, but it's gonna be so much more powerful if you can share some of your own personal interests. You don't need to vlog your entire day in the life. You don't need to share parts of your life that you don't want to talk about. Like if you don't want to share anything about your family, don't pick elements of your personal life that you feel comfortable sharing on social. People want to learn about your personal interests and you can do this selectively in a way where you don't have to overshare ever, but you can present more of yourself on LinkedIn in a way that actually drives outcomes. Now, the fourth big trend I'm seeing on LinkedIn right now is signal based outreach. Posting content is not enough. If you just post organic content, you will get inbound leads that will definitely go up. But it's very random. Some weeks might be really high lead count, some weeks might get zero leads at all. And when I look across our client roster, and the companies that are winning on LinkedIn, they often pair organic content production with signal based outreach. So using the engagement on the content profile viewers to inform who they're sending outreach to on LinkedIn and via email, there are only three main tools you'll need to execute this well. One is Hey, reach for the actual LinkedIn outreach itself, whether it be sending connection requests or DM campaigns two with sales navigator for building your actual lead list the third tool i love is trigify for keeping track of social signals trigify makes it very easy to keep track of who's engaging on your content and other people's content and turning that into lead list which again you can feed into hayreach and they have a direct integration which i love now how do you action this i'm gonna give you three simple levels depending on your experience level for the very first level all you gotta do is just send 20 outbound connection requests per day just find people who are in your icp using sales navigator and our manual search or you can even go on other people's posts and see who's engaging if they're in your ICP and just send them connection requests. And if you really want to offload this, you can automate it in Hayreach. You can build that lead list in Sales Navigator, import it into Hayreach, and you're all set. The second level of outreach on LinkedIn is doing direct outreach to profile viewers. Do your connection requests. And in addition to that, you want to go over to your profile and click on the profile views section in your analytics tab. And it actually shows you exactly who's looking at your profile. So you want to go through and look and see who might fit your ICP out of the people that are looking at your profile. If you find someone who is in your ideal customer profile, you want to send them a connection request if you haven't already. And you can also do some personalized outreach. So if I'm looking through my list right now, I see Zach is a CEO at Anton. I don't know what Anton is, it might be in our ICP, but I know I want to reach founders and CEOs. So I clearly have already sent a connection request. And if Zach was in my ICP, what I could do is go over to his LinkedIn profile and send him a direct outreach message. And how I like to approach this, there's different schools of thought here. But what I like to do is add some sort of value up front. So for me, as someone who's running a LinkedIn content agency, how I think about it is I just send him over a loom video on it of his LinkedIn profile of certain things that would change. For example, if I wanted to update his about section, if I thought it could be better, I might give him some suggestions there. I'd include stuff like that in that loom video. So he gets a very quick win from me without me really selling anything. The third level here is actually looking at your profile engagement. So people who are engaging on your content. And the tool I'd like to use for this, as I mentioned, is Triggify. And what you can do in Triggify is actually go to your profile and see exactly who is engaging on your content. And then if you see people who are in your ICP, you can actually export them to a clay table or just to a CSV that you can upload into a platform like HeyReach to then do outreach to them. And if they're engaging, if they're taking the time to engage in your content, that's a pretty strong signal that they will be receptive to your outreach. And the open rate and reply rate on that outreach will be much higher than if you're just going to send a ton of cold outbound campaigns people who have never heard of you before now the fifth major trend on LinkedIn is the rise of thought leader ads LinkedIn is pushing this very very hard as platforms mature they tend to want to get you to spend more money on advertisements we saw this on Facebook and we're this now on LinkedIn and in particular one ad unit that's performing very well right now our thought leader ads these are when you take personal brand content pieces and put some ad spend behind them think of them like when you do white listing ads on Instagram or Facebook the content piece appears from that personal profile in the user's feed and on linkedin the content looks extremely organic the only indication that it's an ad and there's paid spend behind it is this super small promoted text underneath the profile picture in the name which is pretty hard to see if you've been building a personal brand on linkedin for some time and you have a pretty active follower base and your organic content is performing pretty well i would definitely recommend you at least test thought leader ads to see how they do and here's how i'd approach the testing framework you want to take your top performing pieces of organic content after they've run for about two to three weeks because one of One of the good things about thought leader ads is that when you boost an organic piece of content, it retains all of its engagement. So when you launch an ad from scratch, it has zero likes, zero comments. And think about how you scroll the timeline, right? If you come across a content piece and it has zero likes, you're likely not going to be the first person to like it. Whereas if something has hundreds or thousands of likes, you're going to be a lot more likely to engage. So let your best organic content run for a few weeks, run its course organically, and then put some spend behind it. To start, I'd allocate about $30 to $100 a day for this test. if you can't afford to spend that much, I would just focus on organic until you get to a point where your business can afford to spend that $30 to $100 a day, which is still quite a low budget on LinkedIn. But you want to have enough spend to actually get meaningful data. And one thing you want to do when you boost your thought leader ads is once the post has run its course organically, you can actually go in, edit the content piece and add a PS line with a CTA to a link before you boost it as an ad. Because the cool thing about thought leader ads is even though you can't boost them with a conversion objective, you have to boost them with an engagement objective, you can still circumvent this and have a CTA or call to action in the copy by adding that PS line and just editing it in there. So here's an example of what I mean. This was a post that I ran as a thought leader at it for some time talking about what I would do if I was starting founder like content from scratch. But look at the end here. Notice this PS line PS I sent out a weekly deep dive into founder like content playbooks in my newsletter, social files, and here's the link. I added this PS line after the post had already run organically, I let it run organically and then added that PS line after before I ran this as a thought leader as this PS line serves as the call to action button because I can't actually have a call to action button in a thought leader. And one pro tip here as you get this whole motion in place, once you start running thought leader ads, and those ads start racking up additional likes and comments, you can feed these into your signal based outreach as well. Along with your organic content. As you start to rack up this engagement on your paid posts, you can use that to inform who you send LinkedIn connection requests to or DMS to or even cold emails to and you can use Trigger five for this exact function as well. Now if you want to learn exactly what the smart founders on LinkedIn are doing to prepare for the future, click here to go to the next video learn exactly what you need to do to grow on LinkedIn step by step. I'll see you over there.

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