The rise of LinkedIn

It was predominantly a B2B platform for professional networking. Now, more than 1.3 billion people worldwide have an account, with 25 to 34 year olds its largest age group, and a huge range of content and formats. A survey of MPs saw an 8.6% increase year-on-year signalling the continued migration to the platform from X.

As LinkedIn has grown, so has its role. It is increasingly a place where individuals share insight and expertise, building their own audiences and authority in the process.

You can see the growing power of individual voices on the platform. Andy Burnham regularly repackages speeches, interviews, announcements and press releases into more conversational LinkedIn posts, while Amol Rajan has become a regular poster since leaving the BBC in September 2026 to launch The Amol Rajan Connection. Both have spent years building their profiles, benefiting from the credibility of the institutions they have been associated with. What LinkedIn gives them though is a way to communicate directly with their audiences, putting the individual rather than the institution at the centre.

But this isn’t reserved for politicians, journalists or business leaders with established public profiles. Earlier this year, LinkedIn announced a shift from a ‘network-based’ to an ‘interest-based’ model, using AI to better understand what a post is about and match it with people’s professional interests.

That creates opportunities for people without such an established profile. Reach is no longer simply about how many followers you have or how many likes a post gets. LinkedIn is putting more weight behind genuine expertise and high quality content, meaning strong posts that say something interesting or new can travel further beyond someone’s existing network. At the same time, it is cracking down on generic, low value content. AI rubbish increasingly won’t cut it.

Businesses still need a strong corporate voice, particularly as audiences fragment across more channels. But individual voices within businesses may increasingly prove more effective at cutting through. By bringing their own expertise and perspective to an issue, they can help those messages travel further, potentially reaching MPs, civil servants, journalists and other decision makers beyond a company’s existing network. Individual employees can make a much bigger splash than their employer’s page.

For businesses used to putting the corporate brand first and carefully curating their external voice, this represents a gear shift. But the argument for putting more weight behind individual voices is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.