October 13, 2025
Learn to develop quality content and leverage proven growth tactics to build a strong brand presence on LinkedIn.
Whether you’re an executive aiming to build thought leadership or a communications professional crafting a principal’s story, LinkedIn is the most important platform for building a professional brand.
To learn how to truly master LinkedIn, we sat down with Peter Walker, LinkedIn Top Voice and Head of Insights at Carta, for an inside look at how he grew his LinkedIn following from a few thousand to over 150,000 in just four years. We dove into the core principles and actionable tactics he leveraged to become the go-to resource for insights among private capital firms, early-stage startups, and enterprise companies.
This guide is built for leading executives as well as PR, communications, and marketing professionals who want to develop quality content, earn trust, and use proven growth tactics to build a strong brand presence on LinkedIn.
Why Does Building a Brand on LinkedIn Matter in 2025?
With over 1 billion professionals spanning more than 200 countries, LinkedIn has firmly established itself as the premier platform for professional networking, thought leadership, and industry content sharing. It’s the place where everybody – from investors and founders to government affairs professionals and communications leaders – come together to connect and learn.
If you’re an executive or leader who is not actively using LinkedIn to build your brand, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Many brands make the mistake of just posting on the company LinkedIn account. The reality is, personal accounts far outperform corporate accounts. People want to connect with stories and hear authentic, unfiltered opinions – not just polished brand messaging. When leaders post consistently, they humanize their companies and build trust in a way that company pages simply can’t.
If you’re serious about growing your company’s brand, investing in your personal brand on LinkedIn is essential. It’s how you build trust organically with potential customers – without sounding like a salesperson.
LinkedIn content is also a powerful trust signal. Sharing helpful, engaging posts on a regular basis puts your brand in your ideal customer’s mind before they even need your product. Content that solves real problems for your customers helps build genuine trust. Even if a customer doesn’t need your product right now, you’ll be on their radar, and when the need does arise, your name will come to mind first.
Plus, LinkedIn doubles as an instant feedback engine. Instead of waiting for survey replies or chasing emails, you can see right away what resonates through comments, DMs, and post interactions. This real-time feedback gives you insight into exactly what your audience cares about and what’s most relevant to them.
“LinkedIn and all social platforms favor people. You are much more likely to take off if you are a person rather than a brand. Not to say brand accounts don't matter, but they don't go viral the way that people can.”
What Should Be the Goal of Your LinkedIn Content?
Many people start posting on LinkedIn with the goal of immediate sales or lead conversion. According to Peter, that’s the wrong move.
Your role on LinkedIn isn’t to sell. Instead, it’s to be helpful and valuable to your ideal customers and to become the trusted resource they turn to before they even consider buying. Your content should focus on what matters to your audience – their goals, challenges, and interests – not your product.
When Peter shares content on LinkedIn, he’s not selling Carta’s products directly. He’s focused on making Carta’s data a ubiquitous, useful resource for those in the tech and VC ecosystem. By doing this, Carta’s insights and resources become their go-to source for all their data needs. So when the need for a product does arise, Peter – and subsequently Carta – are already top of mind.
“I don't truly care that much if someone who reads my LinkedIn post buys Carta that day. I just want you to know and like us, and to have a positive association with Carta because we've already been helpful to you as a founder, as an employee, as an investor. So I get to do this work from a very customer-oriented perspective.”
How Do You Build a Scalable Content Engine on LinkedIn?
How did Peter grow his following to nearly 150,000 in under four years? By building a scalable content engine that allows him to consistently produce and distribute high-value content for his ideal target audience.
Here’s the blueprint:
Post every day if you can, but at minimum aim for 3 posts a week. This consistent cadence helps you develop a feel for what resonates and what falls flat. LinkedIn is a numbers game, so the more quality posts you create, the more chances you have to connect with your audience.
Pick a niche where you can be the go-to expert. You want to be known as the go-leader for that niche, so focus your content entirely around that area. For Peter, this was startups and VC data. He built his brand by leveraging Carta’s data insights to create valuable content for startup founders and investors.
Write for a specific persona. Who do you want reading and engaging with your content? When you first start writing content on LinkedIn, narrow your focus to a clearly defined audience. Be as specific as possible. For example, you might target first-time, early-stage startup founders seeking seed funding. The more you can define who you’re speaking to, the better you’ll understand how to craft content that resonates with them.
As you grow your audience, start expanding to adjacent personas (i.e. people that your target personas engage with regularly). Think about who your ideal customers talk to day to day. For Peter’s audience of early-stage startup founders, that includes investors, lawyers, CFOs, and HR leaders. He then develops content tailored to executive finance and HR teams, so they can bring those insights back to the founders.
Use questions from your audience to guide your content. Peter estimates that 30-40% of his posts come from questions people ask in his comments and DMs. These interactions give him insight into what’s interesting, helpful, and top of mind for his audience. He then develops content around those themes. Chances are, if someone’s curious enough to ask, others probably are interested in the topic too.
Build your content calendar around your company’s business priorities. While you’re not directly selling products, this approach primes your audience to be ready and more receptive when the time comes. For example, if you have a big product launch approaching, plan to share relevant data, insights, and stories in the weeks leading up to the release. This keeps your content relevant to business objectives and helps build momentum around launches.
“If you create one piece of content a week, you're very reliant on that one piece of content breaking through. If you create seven pieces of content a week, you have seven times as many chances to hit a vein of interest. So there is something to more being better, as long as the quality bar can remain high.”
What LinkedIn Growth and Engagement Tactics Work Best?
Posting quality content is crucial, but it’s only part of the equation. Beyond creating high-quality posts, here are some proven tactics Peter recommends to help you grow your LinkedIn following and boost engagement:
Comment thoughtfully on others’ posts. Identify 20-25 people in your industry whose content you consistently engage with. Leave thoughtful, substantive comments that add value to their posts. These kinds of comments get noticed by their audience and increase your content’s reach. Regular engagement also primes your content to show up more often in their feeds.
Newsjacking when relevant. Stay alert for trending news or hot discussions in your niche and industry. If you see a good opportunity, pitch in with your unique perspective and insights. Peter keeps tabs on tech headlines and will add Carta’s data-driven insights when it fits naturally into the conversation.
Offer contrarian opinions. When everyone’s talking about the same topics, you can offer alternative takes to spark engagement. Say something like, “here’s another way to think about it,” or “this is wrong because” and offer your perspective. Well-reasoned contrarian opinions are helpful for boosting engagement on your content, as long as you’re not stirring controversy for controversy’s sake.
Use visuals whenever possible. Infographics, charts, and visual frameworks get more shares than plain text. People are more likely to screenshot and share visuals, which will extend your content’s reach organically. According to SocialInsider’s 2025 LinkedIn Benchmarks report, multi-image posts lead with the highest average engagement rate on LinkedIn at 6.60%, outperforming text-only posts which average around 4%. Visual storytelling remains LinkedIn’s engagement sweet spot, making image-rich content a key tactic to boost visibility and interaction on the platform.
“The best thing that you can do is to say, everyone seems to be talking about X, but X is either not true or X is unimportant compared to Y. And that framing is very helpful if you are looking to increase engagement on social platforms because you will get both sides of people in the comments. If you can look at commonly held wisdom in your industry and disprove it, that is a great framework for more content.”
Conclusion
There’s no magic formula or shortcut to cracking the LinkedIn algorithm. Building a strong brand presence takes consistent effort. You need to nail your niche, regularly produce high-quality content, and aggressively iterate based on how your audience responds and what is most helpful to them. Focus on delivering real value and tailoring your content to the people you want to reach. Consistently apply these two core principles with the other growth tactics from Peter’s playbook, and you’ll be able to build a scalable content engine that drives organic engagement and long-term influence on LinkedIn.
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