The 2026 LinkedIn Algorithm (Quick Hit)

This is Jeff Zimper and I'm back for another quick hit podcast and today I'm going to be bringing you some key takeaways from the state of the LinkedIn algorithm for 2026. If you're going after business professionals, self-employed people or whatnot, LinkedIn is a place that makes sense. So I want to share this with you and then before we wrap up, I'm going to share with you a couple of wins the week from some of the loan officers in our community over at my age and classes and how they are winning agent relationships and referrals. By leveraging a one-to-many approach, I spend a fair amount of time in a digging into data. And one of them is a LinkedIn study benchmarks, trends, and performance data from Metra Cool. And then the other one is from Chris Connelly. He's got over a million followers on LinkedIn and is a very successful business person and he's not in the most business at all. But again, one of those good people to learn from. Metra Cool, I believe, looked at roughly 60,000 posts and Chris Connelly and his team looked at over 200,000 posts. And so each has their own separate and sometimes conflicting data. This isn't supported or backed by LinkedIn. I'm just going to quickly go through this because you might find some of this interesting. So let me start with the biggest kind of controversy that exists out there. And that is, should you post links in LinkedIn posts? The answer is it depends. So Metra Cool, according to their data, say that links drop reach on personal profiles by 27% on impressions and 20% by interactions. Oh, by the way, the other, the company that's actually teamed up with Chris Connelly to do this LinkedIn research data is called say what? Say what is also a posting platform exclusively for LinkedIn. So that's where this data comes from. Say what says that links raise reach plus 43% for one to three links and plus 210% for link heavy posts. So what's the truth? A link in and of itself doesn't necessarily carry a fixed penalty. It amplifies whatever the post already is. So if you are just doing a bare bones link that's applying now, right? The link syncs a thin irrelevant useless post a link to a generally useful resource. The argument is made by say what is that that lifts a strong post. Now here's some additional context for you on this. These posts that from say what were across 50 different industries. So here's the argument of why links still win is because their resources that people actually want. Once again, assuming that you're linking to resources that are what people want and they're not like just a blatant sales picture or whatever, right? Then it is considered high value content. Remember, LinkedIn prioritizes engagement. So valuable content wins despite links. So here's an example for a loan officer, right? A link might be to a 2026 first time home buyer cost breakdown, okay? That has some value. As I said, moment ago, the apply now, right? Or otherwise empty post doesn't. So think about that. The reality is most people are not posting high quality content, not just suddenly tamed, but other other places as well and link or not. That is why it suffers. Now, let's talk about going the most likely formats to go viral are videos, infographics, and carousels. And by the way, just because it goes viral doesn't mean it's the same for conversion depends on what your goal is, right? So an interesting side note is that viral vertical videos don't typically result in much follower growth. So people may see your video, but that doesn't mean they're going to follow you, right? So, and then there's quotes. Everyone posts quotes, few go viral, right? Now regarding carousels, what helps carousels go viral are carousels that tell stories. Old carousels were listicles, right? Now what they are is they're educating with pictures, contrast, and stories, right? So obviously people love stories and you can never go wrong with educating. So video, of course, does go viral. Like I said, however, the ones that go viral are typically feel good stories and don't even include the person who's posting them. They don't really build a personal brand. Interesting data from say what says that horizontal videos perform a 36% better than vertical video. How could that be? People use LinkedIn at work and a content quality trumps format orientation, but pick the format that's easiest for you. Test it yourself, but don't assume vertical is better. So what gets the most reach carousels are the safe bet five times greater than images, okay? With a 4x increase in reach versus text posts, only text posts, right? So carousels are great for getting reach. Infographics come in at about second, but they actually go viral more often. Okay, so how long should your posts be? Once again, I'm pulling this from say what long post perform best to 150 that's 3000 characters. They perform 31% better than short posts. And again, this assumes that you've got good quality content in there. That doesn't mean you can ramble, right? So why is this happening? Well, trust is that at all time low, people want depth and connection, not fluff authenticity beats polished longer posts show real thought thoughts, vulnerability and mistakes. This is again, where you showcase your real human, you've made mistakes, share those stories, but you've got to spend some time, right? Putting and crafting your post together, conversational writing will win. This the key is sounding exactly what like, you know, when you see that person on video, the same phrases, the same energy and voice. That's why it's important. If you're going to leverage AI to help you brainstorm or conceptualize, not right for you, but help you at least come up with some of the frameworks for some of your content on social media. You've got to train the AI on your voice, your brand voice. Shout out Katie Shive. If you're listening, she's one of the best in the industry that does that. She's got a whole process to take you through about building your personal brand book. She's been the guest host of my podcast multiple times. Katie Shive, K, A, T, K, A, T, I, E, S, H, I, V, E, calm, look her up. Hey, here's a quick side note on blocks of text. Do not do huge blocks of text. Sounds obvious, but some people still do. People won't read them, right? Posts with fewer than seven paragraphs performed 71% worse than posts with greater than 14 paragraphs. What does that mean? It means people are spacing out the text when it's written text format to give people white space to be able to read and allow the eye to flow. Does that make sense? And of course, avoid complicated language. Long words, lower engagement. One of the ways you can leverage AI is to take the post that you've got written once again, making sure you have a hand in writing it. And put that into chatchipsy or Claude and say, please rewrite this at a seventh or eighth grade reading level. Now, what about questions? Should I put questions in my post posts ending with questions performed slightly worse? Why it's not working like a one but was before? Because everyone asks generic questions now. Let's pin your biggest career mistake, right? Like that's vague. And, you know, people have to spend some time thinking about that users are tired of fake conversation starters and they can sniff them out probably because they've been burned before, right? What works now? Specific questions. Genuine. For example, I'm heading to a conference, right? Maybe it's a conference in your industry. Hey, I'm heading to the ice conference to the digital mortgage conference too. Whatever, right? Ask a question that's relevant to that. Who's one of the vendors that I definitely must see? Hey, who here's a list of speakers? Who's a speaker that I definitely should sit in on? Right? Do emojis help my posts? And the data is the same on this from both sources. Posts with emojis perform better than posts with amount without emojis significantly better. Why? They had color to posts linked in text is all gray making posts more likely to stop the scroll with emojis. They help break up text and they draw attention to key points but avoid emojis that are often used by AI models such as the rocket ship, right? Don't overuse them though. That can you look unprofessional. You use them to highlight key points specific examples, right? They're there to draw attention to the actions that you the writer want that you the reader to take. Follow share, save, sign up for newsletter, right? Use them sparingly get more emphasis on your call to action. Our hashtags helping on LinkedIn. Well, again, similar data here from both sources posts with greater than three hashtags perform 70% worse than posts with none. LinkedIn's algorithm already defines relevant keywords in your post content, experienced creators recognize this and have avoided hashtags newer creators with typically worse performing content tend to overuse the hashtags. That could explain the performance gap now. What what day should you post? Well, you can look at your data in your LinkedIn analytics to check that. But there's a weekend advantage actually according to this data from say what post on Sunday and Saturday get higher reach than weekdays and as far as weakest day, there is no clear bad day to post. But interestingly enough, people have a little bit more free time on weekends, right? So versus being in the office and busy at work. So what are they doing? They're checking their phone and their social media on the weekends when they got some more time. So think about that. Now, here's a really important one. Top creators comment a lot more top the top 1% of creators reply 741% more 286 replies a week versus 34 for average content creators. Now that number skewed based on comments and how many how much engagement you're getting, right? So just take your engagement. The real question is, are you replying at all? As a matter of fact, one of the best practices is this for you to before you post your content engage on other people's content because you're kind of priming right in LinkedIn and priming the algorithm and remember the people who follow you your content is going to show up. And so a recency of commenting will help keep that top of mind. So why does this work? Well, by the way, first of all, more comments equals faster growth and it works because comments build relationships, but quality matters. I'm so tired of seeing great posts. Right. This is a comment. Great post. You know, one word post, emoji comments, things like that. Guys, strategic commenting in your niche compounds growth. Take the time. Take a few minutes to give a thoughtful, relevant comment, not a generic. Wow, thanks a lot for that generic week comment that anybody could post. All right. Let's talk about lead magnets. I'm going to be experimenting with lead magnets coming up soon, but so the old winning lead magnet formats were playbooks, one pageers, you know, kind of walkthroughs and they do still work. But what appears to be crushing right now is GPTs are top of the performing lead magnets unlinked in for small accounts. So a GPT, what do I mean? I mean, a custom GPT. If you don't know what that is, a custom GPT is simply purpose built to achieve and perform a certain task. I've built a half a dozen of them. We work, we use those a lot in my community of loan officers. We share them obviously with LOs, but we also have purpose driven purpose built custom GPTs that our loan officer share with real estate agents. What would be an example of some of those? Some glad I'm glad you asked. One of them is a seller credits listing booster custom GPT. It helps agents turn every seller credit into a high converting marketing campaign. Another one is the seller seminar playbook for realtors. This is helping realtors co-host educational events to tend to be over 50 years old, understand their selling and financing options, and attract more listings. It's already the used toolkit to host high impact events, build your brand, generate seller leads. What else? We have open house expert custom GPT, the next gen buyer, custom GPT, the YouTube custom GPT. The Google business profile optimization cup to custom GPT. Those are tools that are free to use. What's cool is you can share those with agents, with peripheral partners, with consumers. I know some of you listening have probably created a few, and if you haven't, start doing the research on how to create those. You can drive leads with your lead magnet. Unlike them, maybe you're going to have to financial advisors or something like that or divorce attorneys or CPAs, real estate agents as well. They do have profiles just matter of do they have and are they actually going there? It's got to be something valuable. It becomes a hook that you offer on your post, LinkedIn posts. Obviously, these workouts were as well, including Instagram. You could repurpose this idea or strategy over Instagram. What you do is just say, hey, comment or DM me right for a link to the thing. How long does a post live? Now a post can obviously get picked up and continue to grow over time. According to this data from Metricool, half of a post's lifetime impressions land in the first two days. For personal profiles, 40% of all interactions happen on day one. That's why it's important to publish at the right times, right? At the windows of where the post has its greatest chance of building momentum. The most crowded slot time on LinkedIn, 9am to 12am. Okay, so that's my quick rip on some of that LinkedIn data. If you guys like this kind of content, let me know. Message me if you're listening on Spotify. Leave a comment or question. If you want more of this kind of data, I can definitely cover it and even share some of these resources with you guys as links so you can dive deep into the data yourself. Before we go, real quick, listen, are you in a situation where you are tired of chasing agents? You're tired of being treated like a vendor and you want to understand how to move through the referral gap. Because there's a thing that exists called the referral gap, which is too many loan officers are seen as the solicitor and vendor because they're leading with every, you know, whatever else leading with, which is product and price, right? And so what you want to do is shift away from leading with product and price and pitching and you want to be seen as a partner and appear. How do you do that? How do you leapfrog bottom tier and go to the middle and top tier? How do you fill the referral gap? You lead with value and education. You help build your self problems. The primary way that I've been helping loan officers for a decade do that is by leading with educational content and classes in your local market, becoming five mile famous, building your personal brand. And I just wanted to share with you, as I always like to share a couple of shout outs for our members who are doing the work and getting results. Here's Tiffany Saxon. What's up Tiffany? She taught the AI search blueprint class a few weeks ago and it is still attracting agents to reach out to her and wanting to center business. She shared in our group a copy of an Instagram DM. She got the agent said that she wasn't able to attend the AI series that taught, but she would love to send her future clients. By the way, Tiffany had never worked with this real estate agent before. She didn't chase her. She didn't make, you know, do the awkward coffee. This agent reached out to her after the fact. Here's my man Armando, who actually won our win of the week weekly gift card giveaway. He was also teaching one of our AI classes, which by the way are very simple to teach once you follow our proven system and process to become a facilitator. You are the messenger. You're not the subject matter expert. But for Armando, Armando thought that class and he was able to have real conversations met two new agents booked a one-on-one and reconnected with an agent who hadn't seen in quite a while. And on top of that, three agents who couldn't make the class want him to come present the classes at their offices. Once again, no chasing, no awkward coffee meetings. So small crowd, big connections, real momentum. If you've ever heard the phrase that little hinges swing big doors, that's exactly what's happening there. I got one more for you. This is from a man, a Zenon who's in Hawaii. What's up Zenon? Good to see a man. So Zen has only been alone for several about a year. And so he's obviously in ramp up mode and right doing all the things he can. And so he really got after it and put in the work. And he taught several of our classes through the cohort that cohort that we do. And so of the attendees that he recently had, one of them was a past president of the Realtor Association and a high end realtor who had been avoiding Zenon for over a year. Zenon also had a couple second time attendees show up for his class. What does that say? People come back for a second time. They saw value and they want to learn more now soon after Zenon gave his most recent presentation. He was invited to give that same presentation to another office, which he did. And from the presentations, he's done. He's got several new close relationships with good performing agents. He's been able to follow up with all the attendees and included them on his follow up drip sequence emails. This is opened up a dialogue with the past president who had previously been emailing. Zenon got his foot in the door with a new office three to four top producing agents that he's now engaged with. And the cool thing that I love that he says here at the end is this isn't so much about giving presentations to groups, right? Even though that's valuable. It's really been about laying the foundation for an amazing outreach option, which has been opening doors that Zenon didn't have open to him before. What was he doing before? The hustle, the grind, the chasing. And now he's reversed that and he's got new relationships with productive agents. And as he says, I'm confident the deals will come with time. Now we have lots of people who are getting deals and closing business, whether that's my man Kevin Dwyer, who his first class got a $700,000 loan within the next 12 months. He added $20 million additional fundings to his business. Now, if this sounds of interest to you and you want to be part of our next cohort, so we're not launching the next cohort until September. But if you want to get on the list because it fills up fast, I need you to reach out to me and just DM me once again, if you're listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there and I'll see that comment. I will have my announcement that I've been brewing for some time about the shift we're making in this podcast in my business and so forth. I just want to have everything ready to go for that. So that's it for now. Thanks for listening, guys. Appreciate you and we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.