LinkedIn has long been known as the go-to social platform for hiring and job searches. In recent years, however, it has developed into a channel where companies can blend product and brand updates with personality and showcase their culture, often through employees themselves.
LinkedIn’s association with business and the professional world has made it a fertile space for B2B marketing – in the last 12 months, 68% of B2B marketers increased their use of LinkedIn according to the Content Marketing Institute, with 85% saying it delivered the best value among the major social platforms.
With that said, LinkedIn’s growing importance and burgeoning influencer economy are increasingly attractive to B2C brands as well. For many, however, LinkedIn is still uncharted territory. From finding the right format and tone to empowering employees to speak for the brand, how can brands get the most out of LinkedIn? We’ll take a close look how companies are succeeding on LinkedIn and what to consider when posting to the platform.
As LinkedIn is a professional social network, marketers may assume that this means a serious, formal tone is required.
While it can depend on the brand, many companies have successfully used a more conversational, even playful tone on the platform. Duolingo, for example, is a case study on social media for its strong brand personality and how it helps the company stand out – and its LinkedIn activity is no exception.
Not afraid to be outrageous in the quest to go viral (remember the ‘death of Duo’?), Duolingo’s team know how to get people talking. This can even be seen in their job listings, which are filled with jokes and emoji, such as one titled ‘Hot owl seeks VP of Growth & Product Marketing’.
Duolingo does adapt its approach to LinkedIn, sharing behind-the-scenes product insights and team updates as well as light-hearted work-related content like ‘career horoscopes‘.
Influencer marketing (also called creator marketing) is a LinkedIn trend to watch out for. As thought leaders gain a following on the platform with authentic stories and insights, brands can expand their reach and connect with new audiences by partnering with them.
This can often be a more effective vehicle for delivering a marketing message, as (according to a survey by LinkedIn itself) 87% of B2B buyers prefer content from trusted industry influencers over branded sales messages. As LinkedIn’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, Yolanda Zaw, writes, “In B2B … [t]he buying process is often lengthy, involving multiple decision-makers. The purchases aren’t fast fashion or cosmetics but multi-million dollar CRM systems. A high level of trust and credibility are required.”
Earlier this year, workspace tool Notion showcased how impactful influencer marketing can be on LinkedIn with its #NotionFaces campaign.
The idea was to use Notion’s free tool to create a custom portrait of your face, which could be used, say, as a LinkedIn profile picture or a virtual meeting avatar. The brand partnered with more than 50 creators, each of whom who added their own spin to the campaign.
Rather than a campaign to sell the product per se, Notion Faces was all about the community; as more and more professionals jumped on the bandwagon to make their own ‘Face’, it was clear the brand had succeeded in getting people talking – showing how the right partnership or set of partnerships can achieve brand impact even while LinkedIn influencer marketing is in its infancy.
Different formats, from images to video, links to polls, can be used to maximum effect on LinkedIn.
Carousel posts, a series of images that can be clicked or swiped between, work well on LinkedIn to share educational content (for example, informative graphics) or tell a story. Social media management tool Hootsuite tends to publish carousel posts with a range of tips on different topics (from social media marketing to ‘self-care’ for marketers). It’s a visual format that can showcase a brand, it’s useful for top-of-the-funnel content, and it doesn’t feel boring.
Vertical videos currently seem to be favoured by LinkedIn’s algorithm – but these still need to be interesting to deliver a satisfactory average watch time.
Polls can help brands boost reach while also involving the audience in answering questions – a great way to make LinkedIn content more interactive and not just feel like a one-way broadcast.
Challenger bank Monzo polls its audience frequently, always with the title ‘MUNDANE POLL’, sparking engagement and conversation. The idea is to ask questions on which everyone has an opinion – often lightly poking fun at aspects of corporate culture – to convince people to vote or even continue the discussion in the comments.
When done well (as it still has to fit with the brand’s overall tone, or it will seem jarring) this can humanise a brand, build the habit for followers to engage, and even allow brands and marketers to join the subsequent conversation.
The best way to understand the format that works for your brand is to commit to testing different ideas in order to find the ones that perform best. Work on a strategy that blends different formats and make sure you monitor your reach and engagement per format to focus on the ones that are cutting through.
From funny and relatable content to a story that resonates with your audience, inviting engagement is key on LinkedIn, signalling to the platform that a post is interesting and valuable.
A growing trend on LinkedIn sees brands interacting in the comment section to amplify their reach and showcase their personality. Comments tend to get good visibility (in some cases even better than a new post), making them an important consideration alongside publishing dedicated content. Finding relevant conversations to engage with can complement a brand’s social listening strategy.
Design tool Canva is highly engaged on LinkedIn, responding to mentions both on their page and in posts by individuals – which reinforces the bond between Canva’s users and the brand. Some of the brand’s posts will also invite users to tag others, creating a beneficial network effect.
To celebrate two million followers, Canva’s social team created an ‘unofficial Canva connection thread’, inviting users to introduce themselves and “Share your biggest Canva win” – successfully fostering a sense of community in the comments.
LinkedIn may be known as a B2B social space, but B2C brands are increasingly getting in on the act, realising that they can also use the platform to reach relevant buyers (after all, professionals are consumers when they’re not at work).
Gucci, for example, wouldn’t be the first brand that comes to mind when thinking about LinkedIn. Yet with more than 2 million followers and as a globally recognised luxury brand, they feature content from their latest collections, their ambassadors, their events, and their products in a visually consistent way.
Their strategy is about keeping it classic and visual, presenting content in a way that follows the platform’s best practices without deviating from what the brand is about. Gucci has also made use of LinkedIn’s livestreaming functionality, for example to stream its recent Gucci Cruise 2026 Fashion Show.
What’s key for B2C brands is to understand what sets LinkedIn apart from other platforms. LinkedIn is the channel where people ‘can talk about work’ but still be creative, highlight their organisation, and celebrate big milestones.
LinkedIn’s algorithm tends to favour posts coming from individuals compared to those coming from a brand page, which can mean that brands need to take a different approach to the platform compared with other social channels.
Individual profiles won’t replace your brand’s company page, but they allow you to go beyond your main distribution channel to reach wider networks and attract more authentic conversations.
Thought leadership content from executives and senior leaders is on the rise, with more and more figures using LinkedIn to share their expertise, building the company’s and their own profile at the same time. Brands should look to activate their internal experts and support them in creating content that reflects their insights.
Further down the organisation, employee-generated content (EGC) may involve posting about the company’s culture, an individual employee’s role or professional achievements, or amplifying the organisation’s content in general. As more brands spend time building their EGC strategy on LinkedIn, one of the most important points is to make sure that your team is encouraged rather than mandated to support the organisation’s content.
The best way to keep their voices authentic is to give them the tools and training to use the platform in a way that makes sense for them. For one person, it might be about sharing a glimpse behind the scenes at their job. For someone else, it might be about boosting posts coming from the brand account. In this way, a strong brand and a strong employee presence can complement one another.
There should still be a unified social media policy in place along with guidelines on what employees need to consider (or avoid), but brands must also make sure they give their teams space to express themselves, as genuine, human-sounding posts will resonate the most.
Publishing to LinkedIn has the potential to aid visibility not just on the platform but in search more broadly. Like blog posts, LinkedIn articles will rank in search, meaning they can be a beneficial source of external traffic.
LinkedIn has even created a tab on the Pages Dashboard for Search Appearances, which allows you to see the number of times your pages were found, the top keywords that led to your page, and the companies that searched for them.
Hashtags are no longer as necessary for reach as they once were, but keywords and content that focuses on your main topic pillars will help you boost visibility and appeal to both followers and search engines.
More up-to-the-minute social media insight can be found in the latest edition of Econsultancy’s Social Trends Quarterly.