The Next Influencer Frontier: LinkedIn?
Somewhere between “excited to announce” and “I was laid off, so I became the brand,” LinkedIn stopped being a filing cabinet for job titles. Instead, it became the strangest creator platform on earth: part conference lobby, part group therapy session, part corporate Battle Royale, part open-air marketplace for people who realized expertise is monetizable if you package it with a pulse.
LinkedIn was supposed to be where you updated your job history every few years and pretended to care about someone’s promotion.
Now it has lore. Main characters. Copycats. Viral beef. Inside jokes. Audience expectations. Sponsored content. Parasocial regulars. Comment-section celebrities. Creators with posting schedules so consistent that when they miss a day, people DM them like they’ve been taken hostage.
Nicole Ramirez knows this too well.
Ramirez is the founder of NR Digital Consulting, a personal brand strategist, LinkedIn coach, managed content program operator, marketing advisor, and now an Inc. columnist writing The Visibility Economy. Before that, she worked at Forbes in growth and emerging products.
Which is a very polished way of saying: she understands the machine because several versions of it have eaten her.
Disappearing Act
If LinkedIn vanished tomorrow, Ramirez said parts of her business would still exist. Consulting would survive. Strategy would survive. But the distribution layer? Gone.
“LinkedIn isn’t exactly my identity,” she said, “but it is the front door to so much of what I do.”
LinkedIn is the hallway where your next client, agent, podcast invite, job lead, hater, plagiarist, and weirdly loyal reply guy all bump into each other. And creators built that.
Possibly by accident. Possibly by force.
“I think we shocked LinkedIn with what we were doing,” Ramirez said. “I don’t think that they saw this coming.”
She thinks LinkedIn expected to continue being a job board, recruiter cave, and B2B ad machine. Instead, people like her crawled through the air vents (welcome to the party, pal).
“Thought leaders on the platform created this by force,” she said. “We were like, ‘no, we’re here, and we are going to be creators on this app, whether you like it or not.’”
Trojan Horse Style, she called it.
During our interview, we kept circling back to the same realization: what makes LinkedIn addictive is its creators.
People log on for recurring personalities, running jokes, serialized workplace drama, comment-section regulars, and audience rituals.
“We are the product on LinkedIn,” Ramirez said.
The Creators are Coming From Inside the Platform
Alli Kushner works at LinkedIn, where she supports go-to-market thought leadership. She built her following while working there, but she is very clear about one thing: she is not speaking on behalf of LinkedIn. Her perspective here is personal, based on her own experience posting, experimenting, and watching the platform mutate from the inside-adjacent sidelines.
Before she started posting seriously, LinkedIn was basically where her résumé lived online. A place for job updates, polite networking, and the occasional “excited to announce” ritual sacrifice.
“I still had that old school mentality,” Kushner said. “It took me a while, even after starting at LinkedIn, to fully embrace it as not just professional identity, but where I could find community and share my ideas.”
She thinks the platform changed because work changed.
“I don’t necessarily think it’s a situation where creators forced the hand,” she said. “I think it’s a situation where social media and society and work have evolved.”
Her point: LinkedIn’s mission has always been economic opportunity. Creators are an economic opportunity now.
Five years ago, admitting you opened LinkedIn “for fun” would’ve sounded like a cry for help. Now, creators are building audiences that behave more like fandoms than professional networks.
The Job Board Platform Started Hallucinating Creators
For years, being “big on LinkedIn” sounded like having a favorite ergonomic keyboard brand. But the math is getting harder to ignore.
Heike Young grew her LinkedIn presence from 2,000 to 20,000 followers in year one, then from 20,000 to 50,000 in year two. In 2025, she pulled 61 million LinkedIn views and made enough from brand deals to feel confident leaving Microsoft, where she led content, social, and integrated marketing for Microsoft Advertising products as part of Microsoft AI.
In 2026, she got a talent agent who sells mostly LinkedIn brand deals for her, while she focuses on building her consulting and speaking business.
“I am a weird creator in that I started my creator business on LinkedIn, not another platform,” Young said. “Primarily videos.”
She knows she is an anomaly.
We cannot emphasize enough that this is not the classic creator pipeline. She did not build on TikTok, migrate to Instagram, then reluctantly professionalize on LinkedIn once the brand money got boring.
She started on LinkedIn. With video. On maternity leave.
“I started my LinkedIn journey while on maternity leave with my second baby,” Young said. “I taught myself video editing and made a video every week for several months.”
What began as a New Year’s resolution became “a new chapter” and “an entirely new career.”
There were three reasons: learn video, create new career opportunities, and have a creative outlet after years of comedy classes, musical theater, and even working as a Disney performer.
“Being on maternity leave and having two kids meant that most of my creativity was limited to doing funny voices at storytime,” she said. “I felt like it was time to bet on myself both creatively and professionally.”
This is the LinkedIn creator origin story in its purest form.
Not “I wanted to be famous.”
More like: I had expertise. I had a weird little voice in my head. I had a camera. I had no institutional permission. I posted anyway.
Kushner’s entry point looked different, but emotionally it was similar: experimentation before confidence.
She started posting consistently in January 2025 and treated the whole thing like a lab.
“I was going to treat it as data,” she said. “This is me putting myself out there. It’s going to be a learning experience. Once I started treating LinkedIn as a skill development exercise, it very much opened the floodgates for me.”
LinkedIn Influence is not TikTok Influence in a Power Suit
A TikTok creator can go viral for having perfect timing, a cursed facial expression, and a dog that looks divorced. A LinkedIn creator goes viral by making a marketing philosophy feel like a religious experience.
Young said: “A really popular TikTok will usually work on LinkedIn, but a popular LinkedIn post usually won’t work on TikTok.”
LinkedIn has its own ecosystem. Its own deranged native species.
“I recently made an infographic framework about B2B content strategy that got over a thousand likes,” she said. “I don’t see that happening anywhere else.”
She has roasted B2B marketing in videos that got thousands of likes on LinkedIn and maybe twenty on TikTok. Example:
“LinkedIn is where I can make the most specific and niche jokes about whitepaper trends, landing pages, and jargon and find my people.”
That is the secret. LinkedIn is not necessarily broader. It is sharper. The niche can be so specific it feels like a compliance violation.
Ramirez sees the same thing.
Instagram is visual. TikTok is entertainment. LinkedIn is tied to expertise.
“You might see TikTokers you’ve been following for a while, and you couldn’t even tell them your first name,” she said. “That would never happen on LinkedIn. Everything is tied to who you are and what you do.”
On TikTok, you can be a face, a bit, a vibe, a torso with good lighting. On LinkedIn, you’re attached to your résumé. And that makes the audience more valuable.
Ramirez got her first LinkedIn brand deal at 4,000 followers, and it brought the company she was working for thousands of dollars because the audience was that specific.
“You might be able to have a creator that has 6,000 followers do more monetization for your brand than a TikToker with 100,000 followers,” she said.
Fewer people, higher stakes, more purchasing power, better job titles, worse jokes about webinars.
Kushner sees that identity attachment as part of why LinkedIn feels unusually vulnerable compared to other platforms.
Visibility hardens fast online.
“If the news picks up a deranged post that you put out into the universe,” she said, “are you okay with that?”
The Money is in Becoming Unavoidable
Young hit 20,000 followers in her first year. That was when the real brand deals started.
“Clay was my first brand partner,” she said. “We did about a six-month partnership with a video once a month, and those videos were bangers.”
But what makes her interesting is that she sees LinkedIn creator partnerships as something bigger than promotion.
“I call this integration vs. promotion,” Young said.
She does not pitch herself as “a LinkedIn creator.” She pitches herself as a marketing expert who can be embedded into a brand’s marketing strategy.
“Yeah, I can make videos for you,” she said, “but I can also build upon your entire GTM program.”
For Storyblok, that meant sponsored content plus a webinar she helped drive registrations for through her newsletter, and a forthcoming LinkedIn article. For Teal, she made infographics instead of just videos.
“These infographics had hundreds of saves and a very long LinkedIn shelf life,” Young said. “I don’t know many other platforms where you can design a strategic framework for a brand and call that sponsored content.”
That sentence is basically LinkedIn’s creator pitch in a body bag.
On other platforms, sponsored content often dies after the scroll. On LinkedIn, a useful framework can keep getting saved, referenced, screenshotted, and circulated like contraband.
Young is blunt about where brands are in this evolution.
- Step one: use LinkedIn creators at all.
- Step two: use B2B creators as more than rented distribution.
“The opportunity isn’t just partnering with LinkedIn creators on their channels,” Young said. “These people are experts. Not just creators.”
Use them as guest bloggers. Podcast hosts. Video hosts. Event MCs. Webinar talent. Internal workshop leaders. Strategic collaborators.
Not a billboard with a headshot. A brain with reach.
LinkedIn Became the Portfolio Before People Realized it Had
Kushner thinks people misunderstand the order of operations online. Many aspiring creators think visibility comes after credentials. She thinks visibility increasingly creates them.
“I don’t think you wait until, ‘I have 10,000 followers, and then you pitch,’” she said.
Kushner has contributed to Forbes.com, Fast Company, Business Insider, The New York Times, HuffPost, Thrive Global, Motherly, and more. She has given keynotes at Google and Moët Hennessy.
“How do I show I can write?” she said. “This is me writing. I’m a decent writer. I’m authentic. I’m a human. Hi.”
Your profile is no longer a static artifact proving what you already did. Your content is increasingly the evidence that you can do it before anyone hires you.
Everyone Wants Employees to Post Until Employees Have Personalities
Companies want employee advocacy. They want executive visibility. They want “authentic voices.” They want employee-generated content.
Then someone posts with an actual voice, and corporate immediately starts looking for the nearest legal department to sedate it.
Ramirez works with clients navigating this exact tension.
“I’ve seen it many times,” she said. “Even in the beginning, if a company tells you that they’re excited to bring you on and that they are fine with your LinkedIn presence, you will still have people within the company who will have a problem with it.”
The shiny new hire with an audience becomes a liability the second someone screenshots a comment and asks why they were posting during work hours.
Ramirez tells people to get ahead of it. Put the value in writing. Show how employee visibility benefits the company. Frame the content around industry leadership, representation, expertise, recruiting, and trust.
And document everything.
“If you see here in this email thread that I sent you four months ago, this is what I said, and you were really supportive then, what’s going on?”
Still, she warns people not to be naive.
Her advice from one creator she interviewed: before posting, ask yourself, if my boss brings this up in our one-on-one tomorrow, am I okay defending it?
Ramirez also works with companies trying to build employee content programs. She believes in them, with one giant screaming caveat.
“Corporate will find a way to corporate it,” she said.
Meaning: the second a company edits everyone into a press-release paste, the program is dead.
“The companies that are going to do this well let their employees have their voice,” she said. “Don’t be making a ton of edits and things like that.”
Because the whole point is personality, if every employee sounds the same, nobody cares.
And in case you’re wondering, Kushner said working at LinkedIn does not mean the algorithm sprinkles fairy dust on your posts.
“I think this is a big misconception,” she said. “If you work for LinkedIn, you’re an insider.”
The actual advantage was simpler: posting was not treated like suspicious behavior.
“Me building in public and learning in public was not a negative,” she said.
And unexpectedly, it became a networking layer inside the company itself.
“I’ve met many people in APAC and EMEA and across the U.S. because they post on LinkedIn,” she said. “It was a connector for us internally.”
For hybrid companies, visibility is increasingly functioning as culture.
The Creator Line is Crossed When Strangers Expect You to be Yourself on Schedule
There is a blurry zone between “professional who posts” and “creator.” Ramirez has a clean test.
A thought leader posts ideas. A creator creates expectations.
“I have people who have the bell on for me,” she said. “If I don’t post at my normal 9:30 a.m., I start getting messages around one o’clock, like, where are you? What happened?”
“When people have these expectations of you,” she said, “if you were to put something up there that doesn’t sound like your voice, people would notice.”
People know what sounds like you. They know when you’re missing. They know when something feels off.
Kushner sees another side effect, too: creators slowly become recurring characters in people’s routines.
Which sounds ridiculous until you realize people now open LinkedIn the same way they used to open Twitter: not just for information, but for personalities.
Creator life on LinkedIn has all the usual internet rot: plagiarism, parasocial weirdness, AI scraping, strangers turning your posts into videos, and brands reading your work as scripts without credit.
Ramirez once had a brand read one of her posts word-for-word on TikTok.
“They were making money off of this,” she said. “Then they just offered me free product and kept it up.”
I told her someone once messaged me proudly announcing they had built an “Ashley chatbot” trained on hundreds of my LinkedIn posts.
“It felt invasive,” I said.
She immediately understood.
“No matter the platform, parasocial relationships with creators will always happen. It’s a part of what you sign up for.”
LinkedIn is not safe from the diseases of the creator economy.
“I have to make videos even when I don’t feel like it,” Young said. “It’s usually fun. But sometimes I have to make them when I’m sick or not feeling it. That said, I don’t think it’s insurmountable. And there’s nothing I truly hate about this job.
The LinkedIn Creator Workflow
Young described her workflow as “imperfect and chaotic.”
She captures ideas through audio chats with Claude and Wispr Flow while doing pickup or driving to the gym. She edits Notes and Notion files. She batch-films when her hair and makeup are done so that other days can remain “comfy” and “in my mom element.”
This is not the myth of the polished creator CEO waking at 5 a.m. to sip mushroom water and time-block genius. It is a working mother recording B2B jokes between life obligations because the content machine does not care if your toddler needs crackers.
Young has gone feral for a bit.
“I have borrowed menus from a local restaurant to make a restaurant set in my kitchen,” she said. “I’ve worn my kids’ clothes as costumes. I’ve used their toy doctor kit to diagnose problems in B2B marketing.”
“I would go to any length to make my point and make somebody laugh.”
That is why LinkedIn is getting interesting. The people winning are smuggling entertainment into expertise without making the expertise stupid.
Kushner is experimenting with video, too, though not always with the traction she hoped for.
“I created my own version of Oregon Trail called Corporate Trail, budget edition,” she said.
The premise: a burned-out professional trying to survive corporate life and Q2 budget cuts.
“I’m fording the river and the Q2 budget,” she said. “No, I died.”
At the end of the game, players get two options: “Update LinkedIn or play again.”
Ramirez says the “boring” stuff often works because people are secretly starving for specificity.
One of her clients worked in residential construction. They made a post about rock formations and how drilling into rock can break nearby windows, so contracts need insurance language.
“It did like 10,000 views,” Ramirez said. “It was a post about rocks.”
A post about rocks.
That’s LinkedIn, baby.
Become Useful Enough to be Remembered
Ramirez is careful about this.
“I tell my clients all the time that you don’t have to be a content creator to have LinkedIn work for you,” she said.
You can be a consumer. An engager. A commenter.
“You don’t necessarily have to be creating the content to still benefit from how incredible LinkedIn is as a platform.”
Young’s advice is similar: do not set out to become a LinkedIn creator. Set out to become a visible expert.
“On LinkedIn, the substance of what you say is more important than the aesthetics or entertainment factor,” she said. “Yes, you need style, but on LinkedIn, it’s secondary to substance.”
That does not mean being boring. Please, for the love of all unpaid webinars and gated whitepapers, do not be boring.
It means the bit needs a spine.
“You want to become an original, credible, and authoritative source for subject matter knowledge and use content to make your expertise visible to more people,” Young said.
Give away value. Over and over. Week after week. Until people care.
“My goal isn’t to become the biggest LinkedIn creator,” Young said, “but to build the best business for me.”
That might be the healthiest creator strategy on the internet. Suspicious, frankly.
The Next Creator Frontier
LinkedIn is not replacing TikTok. It is not becoming Instagram for people with better dental insurance. It is not suddenly cool in the way platforms usually become cool.
It’s becoming something far stranger.
A place where creators are not just entertainers, but operators, consultants, speakers, ghostwriters, columnists, strategists, and former corporate people with enough receipts to be dangerous.
A place where 4,000 followers can convert better than 100,000 elsewhere.
A place where a woman can leave Microsoft because videos about B2B marketing helped build a business sturdy enough to jump.
A place where someone laid off from Forbes can realize that the title was never the source of her authority.
Ramirez said that after she was laid off, she had to confront why she even wanted another corporate job.
“I had tied so much of my identity into the title and the big brands,” she said. “When I was laid off and doing content, and I wasn’t tied to a big brand, it was realizing that people would still listen to me and respect me without having that Forbes name behind me.”
Then people started asking how she grew from 2,000 to 10,000 followers in six months.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I can show you how to do that,’” she said. “And they said, ‘Okay, so how much do you charge?’ And I thought, ‘oh, people actually need this, and I can make a living helping them and doing something I love to do..’”
There it is. People will pay you for the things you learned while trying to survive.
And maybe that’s why LinkedIn is working now.
Because while every other platform is stuffed with performance, LinkedIn is stuffed with people trying to turn their expertise, layoff scars, career pivots, hard-won lessons, and professional neuroses into something that compounds.
It is still cringe. It is still full of AI sludge, engagement bait, and men posting fake humility essays from airport lounges.
But beneath that, this is a creator platform that formed because work became unstable, expertise became content, and people started to realize the safest bet might not be the company name in their headline. It might be themselves.
And if LinkedIn deletes their account tomorrow?
Well. That’s the nightmare with no pants.
