Louise Brogan shares her top habits to help you and your executive build authority and visibility on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the platform for business networking. Since 2019, the platform has grown exponentially, from approximately 600 million to over 1.3 billion members. Rather than simply being viewed as a recruitment site (which is still its main focus), users have come to realise the value in using LinkedIn to network, connect, and be seen as a thought leader in industry. The opportunity to raise your personal brand through the LinkedIn profile is huge, so let’s change the story for you – and your executive.
Build a Network of Value
Your LinkedIn network consists of the people you have connected with, and the people who follow you. Think about LinkedIn as being the online equivalent of your industry in-person networking event. You attend a networking event, speak to people, swap contact details, and build on business relationships. LinkedIn is exactly the same, only online.
Rather than accept anyone into your LinkedIn network, consider connecting with people who you would have conversations with at an in-person event. This could be clients, potential clients, collaborators, suppliers, and simply people who are interesting to you and would be interested in what you have to say. It is much better to build a small and mighty network of relevant people on LinkedIn than to accept anyone and everyone who reaches out to you.
Stay on Top of What Is Happening in Your Industry
LinkedIn, as a resource, is valuable for finding out what is happening within your industry. When you are following others in your space, you can keep up to date and contribute with your own thoughts.
Comment Regularly
Now that you are starting to get the right people into your network, we can dip a toe in the water of using LinkedIn by commenting on other people’s posts. This is easier to do with people you’ve just connected with. It’s even better if you have met them in person at a recent event. Another way to do this without feeling awkward can be to engage on posts from thought leaders in your industry. They are used to people they don’t know commenting on their posts. Comments on posts on LinkedIn in 2026 can get more views than the posts themselves, so why not take advantage of this current trend!
Commenting on someone else’s posts not only raises your visibility with the author of that post, but also with their network. So be strategic about where your own potential audience may be spending their time on LinkedIn.
Top Tip
Read the post and think of something relevant to say; don’t just write ‘Thanks’ or ‘Good idea.’ Consider what you might say if you met this person or organisation at their booth at a conference and go from there. Ask a question!
Keep an Eye Out on the LinkedIn News Section
Local LinkedIn news teams have their own company pages on LinkedIn, and they also show the top five or ten stories of the day on the top right-hand side of your LinkedIn desktop. Commenting and sharing these stories raises your profile not only with your network, but with the LinkedIn editors themselves.
Engage with People via Messaging
You can connect with people directly via the messaging tab. This works best when you treat the message as though you are having a conversation with the person. Maybe there is an article you thought they might find interesting, or an event coming up they might like to attend. Do not sell in the messaging tab. Think human conversation first.
Plan Your Content: Posting on LinkedIn
First things first, what do you want to achieve from posting on LinkedIn? What’s your overall goal? Maybe it’s connecting with more people, establishing yourself as a thought leader, or getting leads and new business. Having clear goals is essential. It’s also important to figure out who you want to reach on LinkedIn. Who is your target audience? Knowing who you’re talking to will help you create a more clearly defined content calendar.
Next, you need to decide how often you want to post on LinkedIn. There are different forms of content – written newsfeed posts, video posts, carousels, articles, newsletters, and polls – you may decide on a different frequency for each. For example, you might decide to write one article or newsletter every month and base the rest of your content around that. The frequency you choose to post at doesn’t matter – what matters is that you stay consistent with it. Now comes the fun part! Brainstorm a list of ideas, topics, and themes you can discuss on LinkedIn. Keep this to four or so different broader topics to build credibility in these subjects.
Raising Your Executive’s Visibility
It is quite common to come across a senior executive profile on LinkedIn with only the basic core areas of the personal profile completed – no company graphics, no links to the company website, and no information about the executive themselves.
Note: Never log in to LinkedIn as your executive, as this puts their account at risk. If you are found to have given access to your personal profile to someone else on LinkedIn, your account can be deleted. So, your executive needs to manage this part themselves.
However, most executives simply don’t have the time to work through all of the above tips. This is where you, as their EA, come in – spotting the right people for them to connect with, flagging posts worth commenting on, and drafting DMs for them to send in their own voice.
Your role as the Executive Assistant is to create posts on their behalf, which can be scheduled without you logging into the account. This can be amplified exponentially by the executive themselves also engaging with their LinkedIn network.
Start a LinkedIn Newsletter
If your executive is to do ONE thing from this list, I would recommend this: start a regular LinkedIn newsletter. This is something you can definitely help with. The goal of the newsletter is to provide something that others will want to read.
The value in a newsletter is manyfold:
- They are the second most cited sources for the AI LLM tools when someone is looking for recommendations (Reddit is no.1).
- When someone subscribes to your newsletter on LinkedIn, they also receive an email from LinkedIn in their email inbox, so you are not relying on the subscriber seeing it on the LinkedIn platform itself.
- Writing longform content can help establish your thought leadership.
- Publishing regular newsletters gives people a reason to follow you on LinkedIn, as you are providing them with something interesting to engage with.
Host a Monthly LinkedIn Livestream
Ready to be even more visible? Start hosting a monthly LinkedIn livestream. These are set up as Events on LinkedIn, and you can invite your network to attend. Think about this as being the key pillar of content. This could be a monthly 30-minute interview slot with another industry expert or a solo ‘show’ where your executive answers questions from their audience. To kickstart the engagement, you could prep some questions and put them in the comments.
Once the livestream is finished, don’t stop there. This is where my methodology COPE comes into play – Create Once, Publish Everywhere. Your executive, speaking for 30 minutes on one topic, is all the content you need for the next month. Take the transcript and write the newsletter. Chop it up into short, conversational starting pieces to share as LinkedIn posts. It could even be repurposed into a monthly podcast episode.
Show Up
The ideal way for both you and your executive to use LinkedIn more strategically is to start, show up, and see how useful and interesting it can be! Ideally, check the platform once or twice a week to comment, connect, and message your network.
Raising your executive’s visibility on LinkedIn doesn’t happen overnight – but small, consistent actions will compound quickly. Start with one action from this list, whether it’s a planned regular comment session or creating that first newsletter, and build from there. The executives who stand out on LinkedIn aren’t the ones doing everything. They’re the ones showing up consistently. And as their EA, you’re often the one making that consistency possible.
