1. Post from your personal profile, not your company page
This one still confuses people and honestly it shouldn't.
LinkedIn is a PEOPLE platform. It always has been.
The algorithm doesn't care about your company page. It never did.
Your company page gets maybe 3-5% organic reach compared to a personal profile because LinkedIn wants humans talking to humans, not logos talking at people.
Think about it.
When's the last time you engaged with a company page post?
NEVER right?
You engaged with the founder behind that company. The person who had an opinion. The person who made you feel something.
Your company page exists for one reason: social proof when someone googles you.
That's it. Your personal profile is where the growth actually happens.
Stop splitting your effort. Pick the profile that has a face attached to it and put everything there.
2. Optimize your headline and about section for ONE clear topic
This is where most people blow it immediately.
Their headline says something like "CEO | Speaker | Mentor | 3x Founder | Dad | Coffee Addict ☕"
And I'm supposed to know what you do from that?
Here's what actually happens: someone lands on your profile, spends 3 seconds reading your headline, doesn't understand what you do, and leaves.
You just lost a potential lead because you were too afraid to pick a lane and actually take the time to optimize for it.
Your headline should do two things:
1. Say what you do
1. Hint at the result you get people
Your about section should expand on that… NOT your whole life story.
Not your childhood dream of becoming an entrepreneur.
The result you deliver, who you deliver it to, and why you're credible.
The more specific you are, the more the algorithm can match you to the exact audience that cares about what you say.
3. Use PDF carousels as your primary visual format
If you're not using PDF carousels on LinkedIn right now you are leaving REACH on the table.
Here's why this works: LinkedIn's algorithm is optimized to keep people on platform as long as possible (that's how they sell ads).
When someone swipes through a 10-slide carousel, they're spending 45-60 seconds on your single post.
That's insane dwell time compared to a static image or a text post they scroll past in 2 seconds.
LinkedIn sees that, says "this post is keeping people engaged," and pushes it to more feeds.
Carousels also give you something text posts can't.
The format that wins: a strong hook slide, 7-9 slides of genuinely useful content, clean design, 2-3 lines of copy per slide, and a final slide with a clear call to action.
Worth the time it takes to create these for sure.
4. Write hooks to deliver value (not bait)
"I almost quit everything last year."
"Nobody talks about this."
"The truth they don't want you to know."
You've seen these hooks a thousand times.
And here's the thing: they USED to work.
But LinkedIn's audience has gotten smarter and more annoyed.
They've been baited so many times that they've stopped trusting the setup.
What actually works now is opening with the value itself.
Instead of "I almost went broke last year (here's what saved me)..."
try something like
"Founders waste 80% of their LinkedIn effort on content that never converts. Here's the 20% that actually does."
Boom.
I know exactly what I'm getting. I'm already interested. I didn't have to trust that your "almost quit" story was going to lead somewhere useful.
The first two lines have one job: give them a reason to click "see more."
The way you do that in 2026 is by making the value obvious before they've committed to reading.
Stop writing hooks that tease. Start writing hooks that deliver.
5. Make every post worth saving or sending to a friend
Before you post anything, ask yourself one question: would I DM this to someone I know right now?
If the answer is no, the post probably isn't ready.
Saves and DM shares are the two metrics that matter most for distribution in 2026.
When someone saves your post, they're telling LinkedIn "this is worth coming back to."
When they share it in a DM, they're extending your reach to an entirely new audience that the algorithm can't fully track but absolutely benefits from.
Likes are vanity. Comments are good. But saves and DM shares?
Those signal that your content is actually USEFUL, not just entertaining or agreeable.
So every post should either: teach something tactical enough to save for later, challenge a belief strongly enough that someone wants to send it to a friend who needs to hear it, or give away something so good that NOT sharing it feels selfish.
If your post just gets nods and likes but nobody's saving it, it's hitting the surface but not going deep enough.
6. Reply to every comment in the first 60 minutes
This is one of the most proven levers for reach and I still see people ignoring it.
When your post goes live, LinkedIn is watching it closely for the first hour.
It's deciding whether to push it to more people or let it die.
The main signal it looks for? Engagement velocity.
Are people responding? Is the conversation active? Is this post generating energy?
When you reply to every comment and reply fast, you're doubling the comment count, keeping the thread alive, and signaling to the algorithm that this post is generating conversation worth promoting.
Practically: for the first 60 minutes after posting, be available.
Don't post and disappear to a meeting.
Sit with the post.
Reply thoughtfully. Ask follow-up questions. Keep people in the thread.
This is not optional if you want reach.
It's literally the difference between a post that hits 2,000 impressions and one that hits 30,000+.
7. Leave human comments on other people's posts daily
This is something nobody talks about nearly enough.
Commenting on other people's content does three things:
1. It puts your name in front of THEIR audience.
Every strong comment you leave on a well-performing post is free distribution. Their followers see your take, click your profile, start following you.
2. It trains the algorithm to associate your profile with activity and relevance.
LinkedIn notices when accounts are consistently engaging with content in a specific niche.
3. It builds actual relationships.
The people who become the biggest names on LinkedIn aren't just posting.
They're PARTICIPATING.
They're in the comments.
They're known.
They're visible outside of just their own feed.
Key word: HUMAN comments.
Not "great post!"
Not a generic "I agree, here are 3 takeaways 👇".
Actual thoughts.
Actual opinions.
Actual disagreements when you disagree.
Spend 15-20 minutes a day doing this on posts in your niche.
It compounds faster than almost anything else you can do organically.
8. Keep videos under 90 seconds with captions
Video is incredibly popular on LinkedIn right now.
But most people are doing it wrong.
They're posting 5-10 minute talking head videos like this is a YouTube channel.
It's not.
LinkedIn is a scroll platform.
People are on it between meetings, during lunch, in the 3 minutes before a call.
You have MAYBE 90 seconds to give them something worth watching, and that's being generous.
The formula that's working: hook in the first 3 seconds (visual or spoken, say something or show something that stops the scroll), deliver one clear insight in under 90 seconds, add captions because 80%+ of people watch without sound.
That last one is non-negotiable. If your video has no captions, a huge portion of your potential viewers are scrolling past it before they've even heard a word.
This is the format that's winning right now.
9. Stop putting links in the post body
This is one of the most well-documented things about the LinkedIn algorithm and people STILL do it.
LinkedIn does not want to send their users somewhere else.
Every time you put a link in your post body, LinkedIn suppresses your reach, sometimes significantly.
They're not punishing you personally.
They're just prioritizing content that keeps people on LinkedIn over content that routes them to another platform.
The workaround is simple: put your link in the comments.
Mention in the post that you'll drop the link below.
Your audience knows to look there.
LinkedIn's algorithm doesn't suppress comment links the same way it suppresses post body links.
This one small change will immediately improve the reach of your link-sharing posts.
It takes 10 seconds to adjust. There's no reason not to do it.
10. Track saves, comments, and DMs instead of likes
Likes are the Instagram brain poisoning the way founders think about LinkedIn.
Everyone celebrates when a post gets 200 likes.
But nobody's asking: did anyone save it?
Did anyone DM me about it?
Did anyone say "I needed to hear this today"?
THOSE are the metrics that tell you if your content is actually working.
Saves = your content is useful enough to return to.
That means your audience sees you as a resource.
Comments = your content sparked enough of a reaction that someone took time out of their day to respond.
Especially valuable when the comments are substantive, people sharing their own experience, asking follow-up questions, pushing back.
DMs = your content moved someone enough that they wanted a private conversation.
This is where leads actually come from.
Not from people who liked your post.
From people who slid into your DMs and said "This hit. Can we talk?"
Stop optimizing for likes.
Start optimizing for the kind of content that makes people want to save it and reach out.
That's a completely different creative standard, and it's a higher one.
The bigger picture
Here's what all 10 of these have in common:
The LinkedIn algorithm in 2026 is filtering for genuine helpfulness to a specific group of people.
That's it. That's the whole game.
Every algorithm update over the past 3 years has moved in this direction.
LinkedIn is slowly but consistently deprioritizing content that performs well but means nothing, and rewarding content from accounts that are clearly, specifically, consistently valuable to an identifiable audience.
This is actually GREAT news if you're a founder, consultant, or agency owner with expertise to share.
Because the bar for "real expertise" is shockingly low on LinkedIn right now.
Most of your competitors are posting AI-generated nonsense that sounds like a McKinsey press release.
All you have to do is show up as an actual human being with actual opinions about your actual industry.
The founders winning on LinkedIn right now are not the ones with the biggest content budgets or the most followers.
They're the ones that a specific group of people genuinely look forward to hearing from.
That's the real algorithm hack… be someone worth following.
Everything else on this list is just mechanics to support that.
