You’re probably overthinking your LinkedIn strategy.
In a sea of thought leadership and professional success stories, it’s easy to feel like there’s nothing left to say or that nobody’s paying attention anyway. The feed’s louder, every third post might be AI-generated, and trust is harder to earn and easier to lose. But your power isn’t in the volume. It’s in your connections and how you cultivate them.
The professionals still winning on LinkedIn aren’t out-hustling everyone with daily essays. They’re being remembered.
According to a 2026 Social Insider analysis of 1.3 million LinkedIn business posts, platform engagement is rising—averaging 5.2%, up 8% year over year—while research on 2025-2026 algorithm shifts shows personal profiles still get two to five times more organic reach than company pages. The opportunity’s there, and it’s your move.
Kayla Ihrig knows how to make the most of it. A marketer, LinkedIn trainer, SUCCESS contributor and author of How to Be a Digital Nomad: Build a Successful Career While Travelling the World, she relaunched her career abroad using the platform, and it led directly to clients, friendships, a book deal and features in outlets like Forbes and HubSpot.
“LinkedIn is not that different from how we interact with each other offline,” Ihrig told SUCCESS. “But the opportunity is greater because we can interact with so many people.”
If you value relationships, you’ll use LinkedIn well. If you don’t, no posting schedule will save you.
Welcome to the Relationship Economy
When Ihrig returned to LinkedIn after a break, skepticism was everywhere. She gets it.
The platform used to feel less crowded. You also used to assume what you read was real. Today, when a job seeker posts fluently about their field, you wonder: Is that them—or AI?
“That trust is gone,” Ihrig said. “Content is a little bit flimsier in general than it used to be. The internet is flimsier than it used to be.”
Thought leadership used to be LinkedIn’s bread and butter. Now it’s easy to fake. The shift Ihrig sees—and teaches—is toward what she calls a professional diary: less “look at me on stage,” more “here’s one thing I learned at this event.” A diary isn’t trying to prove anything. You just write down what happened and how it felt.
That peer-to-peer mindset matters more than you’d think.
“Peers are your greatest asset in life, in work, in business,” Ihrig said. “But people often look over peers and just look to decision-makers, not realizing that peers are the ones that mention you, send you links [saying], ‘I think you should apply for this.'”
Decision-makers get the spotlight. Peers compound quietly over years.
AI has accelerated what Ihrig calls the “relationship economy.” Trust takes longer to build now, but once you’ve got it, it’s worth more.
So what does that mean for you? Stop optimizing for impressions. Start optimizing for being remembered when an opportunity shows up.
Ihrig has three active projects right now that all landed in the last two months—each from someone who thought of her first.
The Compounding Effect Nobody Talks About Enough
The biggest LinkedIn wins rarely look like viral posts.
They look like a DM you almost ignored.
Ihrig’s book deal landed that way. She thought it was a scam and left the message unread for a month. The publisher had to follow up.
“Everyone who’s been on LinkedIn a long time has one of these stories,” she said.
Her conversation with SUCCESS traces back the same way, one coffee chat on LinkedIn in 2022 with someone doing similar work. They hit it off and promised to introduce each other to their editors when the time came. She sent her new contact to GoDaddy; the contact sent her to HubSpot. That HubSpot assignment led to an interview, the interview led to a writer’s group and the writer’s group led to a SUCCESS byline—and eventually to this conversation.
“It all compounds with time,” Ihrig said.
That’s the relationship layer in action: stay in touch, make new introductions and treat the platform like a living archive. Not a résumé you update only when you’re job hunting.
“It compounds to have projects and connections and recommendations from five to even 10 years ago,” Ihrig said. “If that was just on your CV, and you waited until your next job to look at it again, what’s it doing for you?”
SUCCESS Tip: Scroll your message history. Find one person you haven’t spoken to in a year. Send a 15-minute coffee chat invite this week.
You’re Already a Marketer
Ihrig spent 10 years marketing brands before she realized the same skills apply to people.
“Everyone is a marketer,” she tells job seekers and founders. “They just are not marketing themselves.”
The gap shows up fast.
Individuals often post copy that could’ve come from the brand account—full of “we” language when there’s no team behind the screen. “Who’s ‘we’ whenever you’re an individual?” Ihrig said.
“If your content would be identical between your company posting it and you posting it, it is not going to resonate very well,” she said.
A personal brand needs a person. That doesn’t mean oversharing. It means answering the questions humans actually care about: What happened? How long did it take? How did it feel?
It also means keeping it short. Ihrig aims for around 100 words and encourages her clients to do the same. “The more you write, the fewer people finish it,” she said. “Say one point, one thing.”
Her most successful posts weren’t polished manifestos. One was a photo of her in-laws’ elderly cat sitting on her laptop with the question: Do pets make remote work better or worse? Another asked: How tall are you—and what would I know about you if we were friends in real life?
People flooded the comments. Someone 3 feet tall responded. Someone 7 feet tall did too.
“People react to human,” Ihrig said. “And even humorous.”
LinkedIn designer Zubia Hassan proved the same point when she playfully tagged LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, offering to redesign his banner if he accepted her connection request. He accepted and commented, “Let’s see it.”
“If that had been a formal pitch, it would’ve been so different,” Ihrig said. “People forget that we’re all just people looking to be a little bit entertained, a little bit educated.”
Being human on LinkedIn isn’t about how much you expose. It’s about how much of you comes through. “I feel like I really know several really talented writers on LinkedIn who wear burkas,” Ihrig said. “I couldn’t tell you their face, but I could tell you what they eat for breakfast. I can tell you where they work. I can tell you they’re really good at these specific things.” Letting yourself out can take a lot of forms.
SUCCESS Tip: Before your next post, ask: Would my company account say this exact thing? If yes, rewrite it in the first person—with one specific detail only you could share.
Visibility: Comments Beat Content (and Lurkers Aren’t Wasting Your Time)
If you only have 20 minutes on LinkedIn, Ihrig wouldn’t spend all of it writing.
She structures her activity like a pyramid: comments are the base, creating content is the middle and connecting with new people sits on top.
“It is a very strange thing when some people want 1,000 connections on LinkedIn, but they do not want to talk to those people,” she said. “It’s very flawed, and it also won’t go anywhere.”
LinkedIn creator Jasmin Alić popularized a 95/5 approach: when you’re starting out with no audience of your own, you spend 95% of your time in other people’s comment sections, because that’s where you earn the presence and credibility to be worth following. Alić did exactly that for years before his own posts got traction. Now, at 332K followers averaging 1,700+ comments per post, he’s flipped the ratio: 95% of his time goes to nurturing the audience he built. The point is that the 95/5 split isn’t permanent. It’s the price of admission you pay early, and you earn your way out of it. Ihrig’s seen it work in her own results.
Comments are conversation. Posts without engagement are monologues, and even large influencers struggle when they auto-publish and never open the app.
“[Social media is] supposed to be a dialogue,” Ihrig said. “And if you treat it like a monologue, you will not get very far.”
The thing stopping most people isn’t strategy; it’s nerves. “People are worried that they’ll look stupid or that they’re bothering somebody,” Ihrig said. “But everyone who posts something on LinkedIn hopes that other people will find it interesting and engage. So you’re fulfilling a hope that that person has.”
Worried about profile viewers who never engage? Ihrig calls them “lurkers” and says they’re among the most valuable people on the platform.
“Every freelancer I know gets inquiries from someone who says, ‘Oh, I have been following you for three years. I am ready to hire you,'” she said. That person never liked a post. Quiet doesn’t mean uninterested.
Exposure makes people feel like they know you. Show up in comments on posts from people in your field, and you’ll appear in their networks’ feeds too.
SUCCESS Tip: Open LinkedIn and leave three thoughtful comments before you write anything. Look for one personal detail to respond to—not “Great post.”
How to Earn Trust When AI Made Everyone Skeptical
Process beats polish now.
Humans have always gravitated toward the unscripted. Reality TV proved that decades ago. On LinkedIn, showing how you work, what you’re learning and what you’re building creates the trust that glossy thought leadership used to carry automatically.
Ihrig has started sharing handwritten notes and calligraphy in posts, partly to stand out, partly to feel more human. She admits she felt a little embarrassed the first time she posted it.
She also gets ruthless about connection requests. Everyone who sends a request without a message gets rejected.
“It’s very strange to not introduce yourself whenever you’re meeting someone,” she said. “If that is the most effort people are going to put in, they are not going to engage with your content in the future either.”
As for AI bots sliding into DMs, one recruiter tipped her off to a simple filter: add a line in your About section asking AI scrapers to address you as “Kayla, this is AI.” The recruiter told her a shocking share of his inbox self-identifies that way.
Trust isn’t built by sounding more professional. It’s built by being recognizable, consistent and real.
Your 30-Minute LinkedIn Reset (Do This Monday)
Ihrig runs workshops where attendees leave with an updated profile and a plan. Here’s the home version.
Answer Two Questions on Your Profile (10 Minutes)
Where are you right now? What are you doing right now?
You don’t need to document every job you’ve ever held. Most people get stuck in CV mode and close the app.
Connect Backward (10 Minutes)
Start with people who already know you: current colleagues, conference contacts, former co-workers. That’s the bedrock of your network.
Engage Five Minutes a Day (Ongoing)
Comment on posts from people you know or want to know. Profile visits rise. Opportunities follow, including invitation-only roles you’ll never see on a job board.
If you’re ready to post, Ihrig suggests a “Goldilocks cadence”:
Minimum: Share major career updates when they happen: new role, finished project. Update your profile and tell your network. Most people skip the second part.
Medium: Engage weekly—or daily if you can sustain it.
Maximum: Post once a month to once a week, but only if you’re learning and enjoying it. Batch-posting 52 generic updates is checking a box, not building a presence.
For a full posting session, try her five-step routine:
Spend 15 minutes drafting (without letting AI rewrite your voice)
Engage for 15 minutes
Hit publish
Then engage for 15 more. Warm up the algorithm.
Reply fast when comments arrive.
Treat it like dialogue—not a broadcast.
A Coffee Chat Request That Doesn’t Feel Creepy
Ihrig wrote for SUCCESS about LinkedIn coffee chats. Her DM formula fits in the 300-character limit:
Use their first name
Say how you found them
Say who you are
Say what you want—honestly
“You need to be really upfront because they know that you want something,” Ihrig said. “And if they have to wonder or guess, it’s usually not a very flattering thing.”
The good news: Asking is a gift, not an imposition. “People are flattered whenever you ask them for their insights because it validates that they have something valuable worth giving,” she said.
Ask for 15 minutes, not an hour. Send your calendar link so you control the length; Ihrig learned that one the hard way, stuck in an hour-long coffee chat she couldn’t politely exit.
SUCCESS Tip: Set a realistic month-one goal: two to four coffee chats with people in your field, not 50 strangers.
If You’re Skeptical, Start with Your Feed
You don’t need to love LinkedIn. You need a feed you can stand opening.
“If you open up LinkedIn and you do not like what you see, you have a problem to fix right away,” Ihrig said. “Remove the people who make you not want to open the app. Start engaging with content you like. Your home feed will start being personalized to you.”
Every niche is represented on the platform. You belong there—even if networking feels uncomfortable at first. Ihrig hears it often in the Netherlands, where some professionals tell her LinkedIn feels “very American.” Often that discomfort reflects a cultural preference for modesty over self-promotion rather than a real problem with the platform. Her response: dig into why messaging feels hard. Usually it’s fear, not facts.
And there’s no test to pass. “There’s no single ‘right’ way to do LinkedIn,” Ihrig said. “The most important thing for curious people on the sidelines is to start using the platform so they can see what works for themselves.”
The habit she’d leave you with is simple: comment more than you post.
Relationships are the foundation. If you don’t value them, the platform will always feel hollow.
Ihrig is proof the long game pays off—from a blog started in a London hostel to a Kogan Page book deal to training researchers and job seekers on the same platform that changed her trajectory.
These days she’s traded the nomadic life for a permanent address, but she’s still working remotely, writing for clients including SUCCESS, Reader’s Digest, Forbes and HubSpot while helping people access opportunities that keep shifting. “Networking influences every single aspect of your life,” she said.
If you’ve been feeling the tug-of-war of wanting to post but not knowing how to use LinkedIn for what it can actually do in 2026, your next move is to start showing up like yourself. Your real perspective—messy feelings, human truths and all—beats the polished posts every time.
Featured image by metamorworks/Shutterstock
