Key Takeaways from this post:
LinkedIn’s algorithm now favors your “topic fingerprint,” so relevance drives reach more than your follower count does.
Organic reach (across individual and company pages) has dropped sharply platform-wide over the past two years, a shift Richard Richard van der Blom’s 2026 Algorithm Report frames as an industry-wide trend rather than a personal misstep.
Image posts and documents or carousels tend to earn the strongest performance, while text-only posts and video struggle for consistent reach and engagement.
LinkedIn newsletters offer three-way distribution, through SEO, inbox, and feed, but they only perform when they carry real substance, generally 800 to 1,500 words.
It’s more important than ever to be intentionally and focus on key topics (2-3 max) to make it as easy as possible for LinkedIn to deliver your posts to those who also care about those topic (and are most likely to engage with your posts).
I still get asked, at least once a week, some version of the same question: how do we grow our LinkedIn following?
Here’s the honest answer: that question made complete sense a few years ago, when LinkedIn’s algorithm ran almost entirely on your connections. Now, this question is almost irrelevant. LinkedIn now rewards relevance over reach, and relevance comes down to what you talk about, more than who’s connected to you.
This post walks through how LinkedIn’s algorithm actually ranks content today, the engagement benchmarks worth tracking, the post formats earning the most attention, and how to build content pillars that keep you visible, so you can put your energy where it actually pays off.
For years, LinkedIn ran on what its own team calls the relationship graph, where your reach was mostly a function of your first-degree connections and company page followers. That structure has shifted. LinkedIn now runs on an interest graph, which means your content gets shown to people who care about your topics, regardless of whether they follow you. Followers matter less than they used to, and they predict reach far less reliably than before.
How LinkedIn’s Algorithm Ranks Content in 2026
LinkedIn tracks what’s sometimes called your topic fingerprint. Everything you comment on, save, or spend time on tells the algorithm what you care about, and it uses that fingerprint to decide who sees your content next. Every save, comment, and pause adds to that profile. It’s less like a follower list and more like a transcript of what you do and like that follows you around. If you’re still building the internal case for this channel, we’ve broken down why EdTech companies should invest in LinkedIn in the first place. But seriously…of all of the social media channels, LinkedIn is the most effective channel to reach and engage influencers and decision makers in EdTech. We’re not just saying this, we have managed, audited, and created strategies for more education and EdTech brands than we can count.
This is also part of why organic reach has fallen so sharply for so many accounts. Richard van der Blom’s 2026 Algorithm Report, based on more than a million posts, found reach down 60% for active creators over the past two years, with views down 50% and follower growth down 59%. If you’ve seen your own numbers slide, the more likely explanation is a platform-wide shift rather than a personal misstep. The algorithm changed underneath everyone at the same time.
Shameless Plug: The 2026 Algorithm Report by Richard van der Blom is one of the most comprehensive and helpful reports we rely on throughout the year and if you purchase it, he also updates it halfway through the year. You can purchase it here.
[Good human alert] We do make a small commission from your purchase but we wouldn’t recommend it if it wasn’t going to fundamentally affect the way you post and engage on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Engagement Benchmarks Worth Tracking
Once you accept that followers no longer function as the scoreboard, the next question is what to track instead. A few numbers are worth paying attention to. For a broader view of where things stood heading into this year, our key social media insights from 2025 are still a useful benchmark.
Organic company page content is a sliver of what anyone actually sees. LinkedIn company page posts makes up roughly 1% of the average feed. Ouch! Company pages can still play a key role, but they work best when they amplify what real people are already saying, rather than when they try to carry a strategy alone. And don’t forget to boost your overperforming organic company page posts to propel your reach in a targeted way.
Socialinsider’s 2026 LinkedIn benchmarks put the platform’s average engagement rate at 5.2%, an 8% year over year increase, with native document posts leading at a 7% engagement rate. Sprinklr’s LinkedIn benchmarks tell a similar story: consistency and format choice matter more than volume. The reward goes to posting the right kind of thing, less often, with more intention, rather than simply posting more.
Which LinkedIn Post Formats Perform Best
This is also a question I get a lot. Which post types should I use and when? Just like topic clarity, you also need to be intentional about the post types you use. Sometimes, your topics may align better with a certain type of topic or content pillar. For example, if one of your content pillars is “AI in education,” and a lot of what you want to do is educate your audience, you may find yourself creating more swipe-able resources that provide helpful information slide by slide.
Here are how the major LinkedIn post types show up most and perform best:
Image posts are still the default. They’re the most common format on the platform, and they get strong engagement and reach. When you’re deciding what to post, a well chosen people-forward image with a real caption is usually a safe, solid choice. This also includes multi-image posts. Pro tip: Try not to include more than 4 images in your multi-image posts.
Text-only posts are the hardest format to make work. They have the lowest reach of any type, largely because there’s no visual to earn space in the scroll, so the first two lines have to carry all the weight. A plain text post pays off best when the hook is strong enough to make people stop scrolling. Just like anything, when this post type is authentic and stands out, they can perform, but they are hard to consistently earn high reach and engagement.
Polls surprisingly get the highest reach but they also get the lowest engagement (womp womp). They can be a good format to use sparingly, maybe once a month, as a way to get your audience’s opinion or generate future content.
Video is currently the format under the most pressure. Remember when we all thought LinkedIn’s feed would be all video by now? They certainly tried but LinkedIn’s audience is not consuming video at the expected pace. Videos on LinkedIn still perform in the middle of the pack, but reach has been sliding. LinkedIn has also finally moved to a vertical-first format for video (welcome to vertical video LinkedIn), with one exception: newsletters, where a horizontal video can still work in the primary hero spot.
Documents and Carousels are the most underused format BUT their reach and engagement is consistently higher than most post types. The tradeoff is time. Even with templates, it takes time to ensure this is a resource that your audience wants to swipe through. Best practice right now is six to nine slides, a strong cover slide, minimal redundancy, a clear closing slide with a call to action, and a title that compels someone to swipe. Reach drops by roughly 40% once you cross ten slides, so tighter is better.
Why LinkedIn Newsletters Deserve Their Own Strategy
If there’s one format that’s genuinely underused relative to how well it performs, it’s LinkedIn newsletters. A newsletter functions like a LinkedIn article: it gets crawled for SEO and GEO (it’s increasingly cited by AI tools, which is its own kind of reach), it lands directly in subscribers’ inboxes tied to their LinkedIn profile’s email, and it also shows up in the LinkedIn feed. That’s three distribution channels from one piece of content. In education, the deliverability to their email is HUGE. In education, turnover is high and a school or district email will bounce quickly. LinkedIn profiles are tied to a person’s personal email, which follows them on their career journey.
The format has its own rules. Newsletters need real substance, generally 800 to 1,500 words, and should stay under 2,000 for deeper dives. A short “here’s what I’m reading” summary of two or three hundred words performs poorly, and it signals to the algorithm that the newsletter carries less weight, which makes the next issue harder to surface, too. Committing to a newsletter means committing to writing something worth the length. Speaking of committing, a LinkedIn newsletter is a commitment you make to your LinkedIn audience. Show up repeatedly and at minimum once per month, ideally 2-3 times per month. And it’s worth saying again, your LinkedIn newsletter cadence should be aligned with your capacity to deliver value-driven long-form content (not just emails you repurpose into a newsletter format).
How to Build LinkedIn Content Pillars That Work
All of this comes back to a more basic question: what do you and your company actually want to be known for talking about? Two or three pillars is plenty. Trying to cover everything just confuses the algorithm on how to deliver it to those who enjoy the topic and typically engage with those posts. Plus, a lack of topic clarity and focus dilutes your topic fingerprint instead of sharpening it.
The good news is that you probably already have the material you need. Look at the conversations you’re already having, the questions people keep asking you, the things that come up on a normal week, what topics truly best align to your topic/service/audience needs. Those are your topic pillars. The best content is usually found rather than invented. For a step-by-step framework, we’ve mapped out a 3-step strategy that works for education brands on LinkedIn.
Putting it All Together
We study LinkedIn’s algorithm and post and engage A LOT on the platform. But even for us, this can be a bit overwhelming to remember all of the rules and best practices that seem to change too often. My advice: Read this post, and take away 1-2 things you can do immediately. Don’t get in your head and please don’t ever let these best practices ever get in the way of your authenticity. Whether you’re representing a brand on LinkedIn or yourself, never forget to let your passion shine through. Note: With the sheer amount of LinkedIn AI slop dominating the feed, this is more important than ever.
And if all fails, make sure you start with finalizing your content pillars instead of growing your follower count.
