The NEW Way to Grow on LinkedIn in 2026

In this video, I'm going to break down why the way that most people are trying to grow on LinkedIn is dead in 2026. And then show you the new way that you need to approach LinkedIn if you're serious about growing your personal brand and your business using the platform. This new framework I'm about to share is the same one I've recently started using with over 30 of the top founders on LinkedIn to help them build massive followings. And the results we're seeing with this new method is insane. And by the end of this video, you'll know exactly what's working and have a complete strategy for growing on LinkedIn, whether your goal is to generate leads and customers, attract a plus talent, or simply become the go-to authority in your niche on LinkedIn. All without wasting any time trying to figure out what's actually working right now. Now, at this point in 2026, I don't often have to convince founders and executives how important LinkedIn is as a platform. They already understand they maybe tried posting and are struggling because they're approaching the platform in a completely wrong and outdated way. And there are a few reasons for these pitfalls, right? So one might be that they're trying to build their company page on LinkedIn without realizing that company pages are pretty much dead at this point. You're going to get most of your distribution with your personal account as the founder, even if you're not a founder, you're going to get way more distribution from your personal brand. So if you're trying to use the company page to get an audience on LinkedIn, you're going to have a hard time because organic growth from company pages, unless you're a super well known brand is damn near impossible. Even well known B2B companies like zoom info, for example, don't get a whole lot of engagement on their company page when compared to their CEOs account. So founder led content is the way to go in 2026. But that's not all a lot of folks have already been trying to build their personal brand, they already understand the company pages are dead, and the people follow people, I might not even need to convince you of that. But you might be posting wondering why your account isn't growing, why your posts aren't getting enough reach. And the reality is that AI tools like chat GPT and Claude have reduced the barrier to entry and made it easy for people to start posting content. So therefore, the timeline has been getting extremely crowded, along with the fact that again, more and more people are understanding that LinkedIn is an extremely viable channel for b2b marketing. So the platform and the timeline is extremely competitive, and it's becoming harder and harder to stand out. And what worked in 2025, even is not going to work now. And even then, if you already understand that founder like content is the way and you're posting content is actually doing pretty well, and you're growing followers and impressions, but you're wondering why those eyeballs are not translating into leads, you also might be doing this wrong. And it's important that you have a strategy built out that yes, gets you the impressions gets you visibility, but also keeps in mind how to translate that or alchemize those impressions into actual customers for your business. Because if you're like most founders who I talked to, you don't really care about becoming a celebrity, you want to get customers or you want to get candidates for roles that you're trying to hire for. So how do you do this the right way? There's a big shift that's happening on LinkedIn at the moment. And that shift, like I mentioned, has been the move to founder led content. But not just that you need to really approach this in a strategic way. And a lot of the advice you get about building a personal brand on LinkedIn is just simply outdated, like I mentioned. So what actually works for founder led content in 2026. There's a few different components, right? So one is going to be the importance of narrative before in 2025. And earlier, you could get away with just posting valuable content, and building trust with your ICP or ideal customer profile that way. At this point, though, with the rise of cloud and chat GPT and other specific AI tools for LinkedIn, the barrier to entry to post content is just pretty much zero. So anyone can create valuable content and there's no differentiator there the way you differentiate in 2026 is going to be through narrative and personal stories along with your personality and tone of voice and writing style which i'll get into in a second but the main thing is sharing stories and anecdotes that ai cannot replicate because ai can replicate formats it can even replicate that writing style but it can't replicate your stories and along with the shift in strategy itself the algorithm has also changed quite a bit so older posts are getting surfaced this life cycle of a piece of linkedin content has extended so as such people are often having a harder time getting their content in front of the right people so because of that you need to be more intentional about what i call audience design so sending connection requests and engaging with people who you want to see your content because a lot of times you can't always rely on the algorithm to serve that content to the people you want to get in front of so now let's talk about how you can actually apply these learnings and take advantage of these shifts to still stand out on the timeline and build distribution get leads all the stuff you want to do with linkedin the good news is it's not that difficult first things first let's go over content strategy and the fundamentals here really haven't changed a whole lot you still want to build a content funnel top middle and bottom of funnel content as a refresher top of funnel content is going to be your broader takes that reach a broader audience of people aren't always super specific to your icp but the goal is to just generate eyeballs and get as many impressions as possible bottom of funnel content is going to be your product content so anything really that's a sales pitch so case studies product demos stuff where you're selling to your audience and that middle of funnel content is going to be your industry specific thought leadership and as always you want to have the appropriate balance of all three content types in most cases if you're posting five times a week which i would recommend you want to go one top of funnel three middle of funnel one bottom of funnel this will vary depending on your specific goals as a founder as a company but as a starting point that's what i'd recommend none of that has really changed and if you want more insight onto the content funnel i have a bunch more videos on my channel where i dive into that even deeper but what i want to highlight here is the shift that's occurred and what you want to do differently now and there are three main tactics i want you to implement in your content going forward so one is shift from how to to how i as i mentioned narrative is extremely important so i want you to get away from posting generic tips and tricks and get more into posting your personal stories so anytime you have a take or an opinion you should pair it with an anecdote so for example if i'm trying to convince you that linkedin is important for you as a founder i'm not just going to say linkedin's important here's why i'm going to share with you a story about a founder that i helped grow from zero to 30 000 followers on linkedin and it changed the course of their business that's going to be a way more compelling way to get you engaged to my content that's always been the case but now that more generic how-to type of post is just completely irrelevant so you have no choice but to lean into those narratives so whenever you write a piece of content i want you to run it through this filter pair every single take with a story if there's no story or no anecdote ai can copy you and you're not going to stand out the second tactic you'll employ is paying extra attention to the hook the hook has always been important again those are fundamentals but now as the bar for content quality has gone up it becomes even more imperative that you spend extra time on those first one to three lines because if those one to three lines are not on point someone's gonna read the post not be interested and just move on and miss the rest of it there's so much great content that gets buried beneath a bad hook again this has been always true on linkedin and any other social platform but now as the competitiveness has gone up you've got to make sure your hooks are on point the main shift with the way you want to approach hooks in 2026 is you want to use all the classic hook levers so story based hooks negativity bias listicle specific numbers credibility jacking all those things we know have historically worked you want to use them but you need to make sure you use them in a way that sounds natural and not formulaic people are very fatigued of the formulaic linkedin hook style and can tell when you're employing it and that's usually a sign to people that hey this person used ai in this content so you want to use those different techniques but you want to be sly with it and keep them kind of hidden and underneath a casual personable tone of voice so adam robinson is a great example if you want to study someone who does this really well so if you look at this hook it employs a lot of the tactics that make hooks work well so it's a story based hook it uses a popular name with elon and spacex you have specific numbers you have negativity bias i guess with the colonoscopy reference but you see what i mean it reads very casual and conversational but at the same time he's using those sort of ninja tactics that make hooks perform well the third tactical shift i want you to make in your content in 2026 is using media whenever you can you can still do text only not every post needs a photo or a video i still post plenty of text only content but whenever you can see if there's an area for you to use media ideally an in real life photo that goes with content austin from unified does this very well if you look at a lot of his best performing posts there's some sort of media with it. I mean, this is a great example of a Super Bowl stunt they did with getting a sign in the background of ESPN's first take, you might not be able to replicate this. But that image definitely adds to it. Here's a more simple example with a new hire highlight where it's a photo Austin with a new hire simple enough, that is something you can replicate. But notice how again, a lot of these posts have some sort of media with them, oftentimes a real life photo or video. By the way, if you're watching this, and you're like, this sounds great, but I don't to know what exactly to post help me out. I got you. I put together five simple LinkedIn content templates that you could steal right away and use in the next week to get more impressions, get more followers and ultimately get more customers. It's totally free. Link is in the description. Check them out. I think those templates will help you out a lot with actioning a lot of the stuff we're talking about in today's video. Now the content is only one piece of the puzzle. You also need to be very intentional about audience design. I mentioned the term earlier and what it means is LinkedIn gives you a lot more control over who sees your content than other social media platforms like Instagram, Tiktok X, you can actually influence pretty heavily the people who your content gets served to even though the algorithm right now is a little bit wonky. And the reason for this is you can send outbound connection requests to folks. So if you want to get in front of heads of design at series A startups, you can find a list of heads of design a series of startups and send them outbound connection requests. And when they accept that connection request, they're going to be served your content and you can feed people into your content flywheel. So if you follow the strategy with the content we mentioned earlier, and you also send connection requests every single day to build that audience manually, you're going to put yourself in a position where more people in your target audience are seeing your content on a daily basis. Now, you can't just send 100 connection requests per day, LinkedIn does have an upper limit on this. But on average, 20 connection requests per weekdays, the cadence that I recommend sending these out at and this is actually a good thing, because it means you don't have to spend two hours a day, three hours a day, chipping away at LinkedIn connection requests, it'll take you 10 minutes to send your 20 and you're good to go for the day. In addition to those connection requests, you also want to do outbound commenting. Now do not use AI to leave comments. People can tell when you do this, and it completely ruins your reputation. I don't care if you send 20 or 50 comments every single day, I'd rather you send five thoughtful, high quality comments on accounts that really matter to you. So there's two types of accounts that will work here. One is going to be ICP account. So obviously, if there's customers of yours or potential customers of yours that are posting on LinkedIn, you want to leave comments on their content. Sometimes and a lot of times your customers aren't always actively posting on LinkedIn, but there are other content creators or influencers that they're following who are posting. So Adam Robinson, who I mentioned earlier, he has a really large audience of SaaS founders. So if I was trying to get in front of SaaS founders to help them with LinkedIn, I would spend a considerable amount of time commenting on his content leaving thoughtful insights underneath his post in an attempt for that audience of SaaS founders to see my comment and then end up on my profile. And I want to reassure you here, this isn't going to take a whole lot of time. You don't want to spend hours and hours of your day commenting and messaging people on LinkedIn. Unless it's that high ROI for you, you really should only be spending 20-30 minutes max doing your engagement. Between that and writing your content, that's enough to get the benefit from the platform. You don't want your entire day to be consumed by LinkedIn. That's not going to be beneficial for you if you're a founder of a fast growing company. And one of the common reactions I'll get when I explain the strategy to folks is I just don't have the time to sit down and write content, this is going to take way too much time, as we've already discussed with the outbound piece, that doesn't take much time at all. But if I'm being honest, sitting down and writing high quality content does take a good amount of time. But there are ways that you can streamline this and I want to share with you the system that we use with our clients and my agency to make this all happen in just two hours a week. So first and foremost, just focus on one platform that being LinkedIn, obviously, if you're watching this video, and with the actual production of the content, you can set this up so your team does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. And this applies whether you're working with an internal hire full time, or if you have an agency you're working with on your LinkedIn content, they should be using a similar workflow. And you want to set this up so you're only involved in the most important part. So where it might take you 15 or 20 hours to do content on your own, this should really only take you two or three hours of your week, I'm not going to promise you it's completely hands off. If you want content to work for you, there's going to be some level of input some level of work that is required to do this well but you can reduce that load so how it works is you want to sit down with someone on your team every two weeks for what i call a content interview and you're going to show up to this interview and your team member or agency is going to have a list of prompts prepared ahead of time based on topics that you think are going to perform well with your icp typically this interview should be for about 45 minutes and in that time you can get through about 10 questions if you're really on top of it maybe five if you're a little bit more long-winded but that team member is going to run you through those questions and prompts kind of like a podcast interview the goal is for it to be very casual conversational and the goal is to get all the good stuff that's living in your head that would make for great content so personal stories anecdotes hot takes and opinions out of your head into that recording coming out of that recording you'll have the transcript and the video recording think of those like the marble block and then your team's job is to be the sculptor that goes in and makes that marble block very nice and pretty and optimized for the linkedin timeline and that every two week interview cadence should give you enough content for five times a week on linkedin and then your team will take that raw material and turn it into those five post drafts and then your last responsibility as the founder is to come in and leave any edits or feedback for tone of voice and writing style just to make sure it's as authentic as possible and as you do this motion more and more your team or your agency will actually get more accustomed to your tone of voice and you'll find yourself requiring less input to actually edit the content and it just makes the entire process a lot more streamlined and it gives you that flexibility and resilience to keep your content cadence on point without having to spend all of your time as a ceo on content and as a bonus tip here too if you're a bootstrap founder you don't have a full team you can't afford to bring on an agency you can actually have ai interview you as well so if you give ai these prompts like you can have it interview you and then turn those post responses into drafts in the same way that a team member would they're not going to be as on point and there's going to be some gaps in them and they'll likely require some more editing but you can do this in a way that again helps you make content production more scalable and by the way if you want a list of 100 post prompts that have been tried and tested across dozens of b2b founders i'll drop a link in the description below for the database that we use with our clients you can just take them but that content interview workflow really allows you to compress the amount of time that it takes you to produce winning linkedin content and then if you do that along with applying the the strategies we've talked about earlier in this video and on my other videos, you're going to be in a great spot to build distribution on LinkedIn. But if you just want to learn more, that's cool too. Click here if you actually want to understand the reasons why we're moving to this new way and what about LinkedIn is changing exactly that's influencing what we're doing as a whole. I'll see you over there.

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If you want to understand linkedin growth 2026, I break down the exact system I’m using to win with linkedin personal branding and consistent founder led content. I show how my full linkedin content strategy is built specifically for b2b marketing on linkedin, aligned with the latest linkedin algorithm 2026 updates.

I explain how I build authority on linkedin by combining organic reach with strategic linkedin lead generation, all powered by a simple but effective content funnel strategy. I structure everything around top middle bottom funnel content so every post has a clear purpose and moves people closer to working with me.

You’ll see how I use a proven linkedin storytelling strategy to turn ideas into influence, and how I layer that with a smart linkedin outbound strategy that doesn’t feel spammy. I also walk through my exact connection request strategy and linkedin commenting strategy to create daily visibility and real conversations.