Last month, I ran a simple test. Same content. Same time of day. One post from our company page, one from my personal profile.
The personal post got 8x more impressions and 12x more engagement.
This wasn’t a fluke. It’s the new reality of LinkedIn in 2025, and if you’re still pouring resources into company page content while wondering why your reach keeps declining, well… now you know.
The Numbers Don’t Lie (Even When We Wish They Would)
LinkedIn hasn’t exactly announced this shift with a press release. But the data is everywhere once you start looking.
Personal profiles are seeing 5-10x higher organic reach than company pages for similar content. HubSpot’s social team noticed it. Buffer documented it. And every B2B marketer I know has been quietly freaking out about it since mid-2024.
The engagement gap is even starker. Comments, shares, meaningful interactions—they’re all clustering around personal posts. Company page posts? They’re getting the LinkedIn equivalent of a polite golf clap.
Here’s what surprised me: even posts from company pages with 100K+ followers are getting crushed by personal profiles with 5K connections. The follower count advantage has essentially evaporated.
Why LinkedIn Made This Move (And Why It Actually Makes Sense)
LinkedIn’s algorithm shift isn’t random. It’s strategic, and frankly, it’s working exactly as intended.
The platform has been moving toward what they call “knowledge sharing” for the past two years. They want LinkedIn to feel less like a corporate billboard highway and more like a professional conversation.
Personal profiles create conversations. Company pages create announcements.
Think about your own behavior. When was the last time you genuinely engaged with a company page post versus a thoughtful take from someone in your industry? When did you last comment on a brand’s product announcement versus respond to a peer’s insight about a challenge you’re facing?
LinkedIn’s data shows that posts from personal profiles generate 8x more comments per impression than company page posts. And comments are the engagement currency that matters most to the algorithm right now.
There’s also an authenticity factor. LinkedIn is watching what happened to other platforms—the decline of organic brand reach on Facebook, the shift toward creator content on Instagram. They’re making a calculated bet that authentic voices from real professionals will keep users more engaged than polished corporate messaging.
And let’s be honest: most company page content reads like it was written by a committee that was afraid of saying anything interesting. (Because it usually was.)
The Employee Advocacy Gold Rush
So naturally, every company is now scrambling to build employee advocacy programs.
Some of this is working beautifully. Companies like Gong, Drift, and Refine Labs have built entire content strategies around empowering their employees to share expertise. Their people are becoming industry voices, and the company benefits from the halo effect.
But here’s what most companies get wrong: they treat employee advocacy like a distribution channel instead of an expertise channel.
They create content, then ask employees to share it. That’s just company page content with extra steps. The algorithm sees through this immediately—identical posts from multiple accounts within hours of each other get throttled hard.
What actually works is enabling employees to create their own content based on their genuine expertise and perspective. Yes, this is harder to control. Yes, it requires trust. No, you can’t run everything through legal review.
Welcome to the uncomfortable reality of this shift.
What This Means for Your Actual Strategy
Let’s get practical. You still need your company page—it’s your professional storefront, your credibility marker, your place for announcements and job postings.
But it can’t be your primary content distribution channel anymore.
Here’s the framework that’s working for B2B companies who’ve adapted:
Company pages handle the official stuff. Product launches, company news, job openings, event announcements. Keep it updated, keep it professional, but don’t expect organic reach to do heavy lifting.
Personal profiles handle the thought leadership. Your executives, your subject matter experts, your salespeople who actually understand customer pain points—these folks become your content engine.
The split should be roughly 80/20. For every company page post, you should have four personal posts from team members going live.
This doesn’t mean everyone needs to post daily. It means identifying 5-10 people who can consistently share valuable insights, then supporting them properly.
The Support Infrastructure Nobody Talks About
Here’s where most employee advocacy programs die: companies ask employees to create content without giving them any support.
“Just share your thoughts!” is terrible guidance. Most people, even experts, don’t naturally think in content-friendly frameworks.
What works better:
Content coaching, not content police. Help people identify their unique perspective and expertise. What do they know that others don’t? What questions do customers always ask them? What industry assumptions do they disagree with?
Idea generation support. Weekly or bi-weekly sessions where marketing helps identify content opportunities from recent customer conversations, industry news, or internal expertise. Not creating the content for them—helping them see the content opportunities they’re sitting on.
Light editing and formatting help. Most experts can write. Most experts can’t write in a way that works for LinkedIn’s format. Having someone who can help structure their thoughts without sanitizing their voice is valuable.
Performance insights they actually care about. Don’t just send analytics reports. Tell them which posts resonated and why. Help them understand what’s working so they can do more of it.
This requires actual investment. Either dedicated headcount or a significant chunk of your content team’s time. The companies seeing results are treating this like a core marketing function, not a side project.
The Personal Brand Hesitation
I keep hearing the same concern: “What if we invest in building someone’s personal brand and then they leave?”
Fair question. Wrong framing.
First, talented people are building their personal brands whether you support them or not. The question is whether they’re talking about your company’s expertise and perspective while they do it.
Second, companies with strong employee advocacy programs have better retention. People like working at places that invest in their professional growth and visibility. Shocking, I know.
Third, the alternative is that nobody at your company has a meaningful presence, which means you’re invisible in the conversations that matter.
The risk of building personal brands is real. The risk of not building them is worse.
What Content Actually Works on Personal Profiles
Not all personal content performs equally. After analyzing hundreds of high-performing posts, here’s what consistently works:
Specific, tactical insights from real experience. Not “5 tips for better marketing” but “Here’s exactly how we reduced our CAC by 34% in Q3 and why I think it’ll stop working in Q1.”
Contrarian takes with evidence. Everyone says X, but here’s data showing Y. LinkedIn’s algorithm loves posts that generate discussion, and nothing generates discussion like a well-argued contrarian position.
Behind-the-scenes process breakdowns. How you actually do the work, not just the polished results. People are hungry for practical detail.
Lessons from failures. These outperform success stories by a significant margin. Everyone’s tired of humble brags disguised as insights.
Responses to industry trends with specific perspective. Not just “AI is changing everything” but “We tested 6 AI tools for content creation and here’s the only one that actually saved us time.”
Notice what’s not on this list: company news, product features, or generic motivational content. Those posts die quietly.
The LinkedIn Creator Mode Question
Should everyone switch to Creator Mode? The answer is annoyingly nuanced.
Creator Mode changes your profile in specific ways: hashtags instead of featured links, a Follow button more prominent than Connect, your featured content at the top of your profile.
For people posting consistently (3+ times per week), it’s worth testing. The algorithm does seem to give Creator Mode profiles a slight boost in distribution.
But Creator Mode makes sense primarily for people actually creating content regularly. If someone’s posting monthly, the trade-offs aren’t worth it.
The bigger factor is consistency. LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards regular posting more than it rewards Creator Mode. Someone posting valuable content twice a week without Creator Mode will outperform someone with Creator Mode posting monthly.
The Video and Newsletter Multipliers
Here’s something most people are missing: LinkedIn is heavily pushing two specific content types right now.
LinkedIn native video (not YouTube links) is getting 2-3x higher reach than text posts. The videos don’t need to be polished. In fact, the slightly rough, authentic videos often outperform the professional productions.
LinkedIn newsletters are getting absurd reach. When you publish a newsletter on LinkedIn, it notifies all your subscribers directly. This is one of the few notification types LinkedIn still sends reliably.
I know multiple people who’ve built newsletters from zero to 10K+ subscribers in 6 months, purely through LinkedIn’s promotion of the format. Each newsletter issue reaches more people than their regular posts by an order of magnitude.
The catch: you need to publish consistently. LinkedIn’s algorithm rewards newsletter publishers who ship regularly. Miss a few issues and your reach tanks.
Making This Work Without Burning Out Your Team
The biggest mistake companies make is trying to turn everyone into content creators overnight.
Start small. Identify 3-5 people who are already comfortable sharing insights. Support them properly. Build the infrastructure. Learn what works.
Then expand gradually.
Some people will never be comfortable with public thought leadership. That’s fine. Focus on the people who are energized by it rather than forcing the people who aren’t.
Also, content doesn’t have to mean writing from scratch. Some of the most effective LinkedIn content comes from:
- Turning customer conversations into posts (with details changed for privacy)
- Sharing insights from internal presentations
- Responding to industry news with specific perspective
- Documenting processes and frameworks already being used internally
The content is already there. It just needs to be translated into LinkedIn-friendly formats.
What About Paid Promotion?
Company pages still have one significant advantage: they can run ads. Personal profiles can’t (mostly).
LinkedIn’s paid promotion is becoming more important as organic reach declines. But here’s the thing: you’re now paying to achieve the reach you used to get organically.
The math still works for many companies, especially in B2B where customer lifetime value is high. But it’s a fundamental shift in the economics of LinkedIn marketing.
Some companies are finding a hybrid approach: create content on personal profiles to build authority and engagement, then use company page ads to promote specific offers and campaigns to the audiences those personal profiles have attracted.
This requires more sophisticated tracking, but it’s working better than either approach alone.
The Long Game
This algorithm shift isn’t temporary. LinkedIn has made a strategic decision about what kind of platform they want to be.
Companies that adapt quickly will build significant advantages. The ones that keep dumping resources into company page content while wondering why nothing’s working… well, they’ll figure it out eventually.
The uncomfortable truth is that this shift requires giving up some control. You can’t run every employee post through approval processes. You can’t sanitize everything until it’s safe and boring.
The companies winning on LinkedIn right now are the ones willing to trust their people to be interesting.
Start with one or two people. Give them actual support. See what happens. Then scale what works.
Your company page isn’t dead. But it’s not your growth engine anymore. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you can build something that actually works.
