How Executives Should Be Using LinkedIn in 2026

Linda: Welcome to the B2B Brand 180 podcast where we deliver the strategies, perspective, and mindset shifts. You need to make 180-degree turn in your branding, leadership, and growth strategies. I'm Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency, and your host today. Let's get started with the hard truth.

If you're an executive and you're not actively using LinkedIn today, you are invisible to a large portion of your market because this year in 2026, LinkedIn is no longer a platform. It is actually your digital reputation. Today's guest is Eli Igra Serfaty from MAIA Digital, a leading LinkedIn agency focused exclusively on B2B executives and organizations. Eli and his team help leaders turn LinkedIn into measurable growth through strategy, content, and amplification.

From startups to Fortune 500 companies, his work sits at the intersection of visibility, credibility, and revenue. Eli, welcome. I'm really excited to have you here today. I think LinkedIn is such an important part of any business owner, entrepreneur, CMO, anybody who has any type of organization, so it's great to have you here today.

Eli: It's great to be here, Linda. Thank you for having me, and I'm looking forward to hopefully by the end of the episode creating a 180 shift on how people are thinking about LinkedIn. Linda: Yes, and I'm hoping before they leave today, they're going to learn maybe at least 3 top tips why LinkedIn has become one of the most underutilized growth levers for executives, what a modern executive presence actually looks like just beyond posting and how to turn LinkedIn into a scalable business asset.

So we can get started. What has fundamentally changed? Where is LinkedIn today and why are there so many executives still behind the 8 ball when it comes to LinkedIn? I'd love to get your perspective on that.

Eli: Awesome. Let's dive in. So Linda, you come from Microsoft. You used to work there.

I think what many people don't know about LinkedIn is that Microsoft acquired them in 2016. LinkedIn's been around since 2002, way before Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, the other social media platforms. And since 2016 when it was acquired for 26 billion, a really major acquisition where today I think LinkedIn alone brings in $18 billion. So I think it was a pretty good investment on their part.

LinkedIn has 1.3 billion members today. Very different than where it was traditionally. Many of our listeners, executives, CMOs, who have been around in business for many years may think that LinkedIn is just for job seekers or for hiring managers.

But today it is the number one platform for B2B professionals for relationship building. It is not a social media platform. It has social media elements, which we'll discuss, but it is at its foundations a platform to build relationships, to have trust with your audience with, it could be clients, it could be hires across 1.3 million members.

Today on the platform there are 65 million decision makers. There's 10 million C-levels, right? So we can understand that the audience is there in difference from other platforms, also in its usage are actively looking to make buying decisions are actively, they're not just scrolling to have a good time on social media. They're usually there for work.

What's really important to understand is it's still very early. It's a growing platform, and I think what's really interesting to help people understand of how early it is is only 1-3% of users on LinkedIn today create content. Linda: Wow. Eli: It's a very, very small amount.

So those who decide to get on to the stage and speak, imagine you're in a stadium and around you, you have every single person who could be of interest. It's your current clients, it's your future clients, you have your partners, you have your investors, you have your employees, your current employees. That's also for retention, your future employees that you want to hire. They're all just looking to see you to visible- to build that relationship with you.

That's really what makes it so powerful. So I think that's where it was and where it is today from a metric standpoint. Linda: Yeah, that's great. I think perception and behavior is so unique with executives or CMOs or businesses today as far as LinkedIn is concerned.

I think a lot of companies just say, okay, we need to post 3 times a week on LinkedIn, and then that's the end of the conversation around LinkedIn, and that's just, honestly, it's not enough for the company to just be active on LinkedIn. I mean, would you agree with that? Eli: 100%. It doesn't lie just within the marketing team and just 3 corporate posts or a post here and there and a repost from the CEOs, A CEO isn't active just because he re-shares or has something go up.

Really utilizing LinkedIn today is turning it into a centralized growth engine. It is the only platform that we have as individuals and as companies, especially B2B, where we can get every single person onto that platform from the company. So we have the company page, we have the executives, we have the C-levels, we have the VPs, we have the subject matter experts, we have the employees as well. All of them should be on LinkedIn, engaging with each other, which is also influencing the success of the post going up, but also commenting and engaging with, again, investors, clients, partners.

It will draw more eyeballs into this ecosystem, and you can't do that with other platforms. Where are you going to get your executives, your employees? They really go on Facebook and it's fragmented across the other platforms. But here we're able to for several different objectives.

It could be for HR, right? A company could be thinking, okay, now we really want to hire better talent. We need more talent. Great.

So then there's specific things that we're able to do within LinkedIn and who should be visible. Imagine if your company has employees who are now visible to other employees or job seekers. It's like, great. They can understand why they should be working for your company.

If you're looking for sales, again, that's always the easiest to understand of why LinkedIn influences sales you want to get in front of. Investors can also do that. I think what's also interesting and important to note in B2B is 95% of your market isn't looking to buy today, right? 5% is only looking to buy today and actively make that decision.

And we know that typical sales cycles in B2B are much longer, 9 to 12 months on average, several stakeholders and the need for frequency and touchpoints. So now when you take beyond the founder and you take the employees, you take all the different departments, you take the executives, you take the company page, again, all cohesive on LinkedIn, you're able to really get across different decision makers. You're able to, especially we've been talking about organic, if we put on top of that LinkedIn ads and then do thought leadership ads or do anything, any other campaign, then we're able to be very surgical and who we want to target and get this content in front of.

The more that you build there and the foundations have to be organic, the more you build there and the more you get your organization into LinkedIn, the more you're able to work with. Linda: When you're talking about those sort of strategies, are you looking at that from more of an executive perspective or a company perspective? Because I know there's a lot of executives that are not visible on LinkedIn at all, that's more of a corporate focus. I feel like they need to be visible obviously, but when you're talking about some of these strategies, is it from an executive perspective or a corporate perspective or both?

Eli: It's from both. So ideally within the organization there should be an active company page. There's frequently the consideration or discussion. What's more important a company page or a personal profile?

Both. They both serve different purposes and different audiences and especially large organizations, more recognizable brands, more resources do allow them to be on both places. Within LinkedIn, maybe we're not talking about go be on every platform. We're talking about be on LinkedIn, but make sure that you're in every place within LinkedIn, so you have a company page and that's the corporate page, and that's important because people are doing their due diligence.

Again, whether it's clients or employees, they're going to a company page to check them out, and if it's not maintained and there's no activity and frequent content, then it's a missed opportunity. Whether people are searching on LinkedIn or on Google, again, someone types your company on Google, the first thing that's coming up, probably even before your website is the LinkedIn page. So that's the corporate side, and then you have the executives, which yes, the CEO, the CMO, the CPO, the CTO, all of them should have a presence on LinkedIn, different voices, different audiences, right?

A CTO will be speaking to the technical audience, the CEO or the CMO can speak to other audiences and have different strategies under them and together with them, there's the employees that amplify both of those channels, liking, commenting, sharing, but also creating their own content. And then you have employees who are now not only more effective in their jobs because they're now able to get their messages out or the company's message out to different audiences. They're also now more engaged.

And internally companies will see higher retention because they have employees who now are being invested in with training, they're getting recognition, they're feeling more connected to the company because they're able to talk about their work, be proud of their work, who they do it with, what they do. And now you're creating this flywheel that's really again, HR, sales, marketing, fundraising pretty much. And that's exactly what we focus on when we meet a prospect and we're considering working together, we're not diving straight into, well, what metrics are you looking to gain on LinkedIn?

What are you looking to achieve in your business? What are the main things in the next 6 to 12 months that you need? And some will say, well, I'm about to go and hire my series A or my series B. Great.

There are things that we need to do to get in front of the investors ahead of time, not today. When you want to open the round months before or you're going to a new market or you're looking to hire for a different position, or even you're looking to improve conversions or retention, these are all things that can be influenced through LinkedIn. Linda: Is there one thing that executives just get wrong when it comes to LinkedIn? Eli: There's several things.

I think one of them, it starts from a mindset. Again, it's that paradigm shift of great LinkedIn is not just a social media platform or just for job seekers. I understand why I as the executive need to be there and why my company should be there. And I guess that also ties into another hesitation, which sometimes people will say, well, I don't want my employees to be visible because then they're going to get poached and they're going to leave the company.

It's like, no, your employees aren't going to be leaving because they're building a brand and contributing to the company from there, if they're leaving, there's a whole nother element and discussion on why that's happening. There's a lot more good to be gained from them being present on LinkedIn than being poached, right? If he is a star employee, these HRs are headhunters. They're going to find him or her and get to them.

But if they're visible and you're focusing more on, great, how can I focus on keeping them engaged, keeping- incentivize them? If you get your employees to be active, make sure that you recognize it. Make sure that you and their managers are saying, Hey, Linda, I noticed your post. Good job.

Hey, great engagement. Celebrate them, right? Send it in Slack. Do it at the all hands.

Get them excited about it so that they understand that it's not just, oh, marketing sent out a nice templated email with a few things to upload or to or share. It's like, guys, no, no, it's not just a side project. This is a core strategy for our company. We're going to be there as the executives and the employee initiatives always work better, of course when they see the executives there.

So if we're talking about priorities, where they should be first start from yourselves, walk the talk, have the leaders being active because one that will be super effective from when your clients see you as the leaders and the founders being active, but it'll also help the employees say, well, great, I see them. I also want to get involved. And you don't have to start in the entire company. It can be a big win to start.

We typically start with 5, 10, 15 employees, get them to start the groove and then other employees start seeing them. It's like, oh, this looks great. Oh, this is fun. Oh, I heard about the can I also get involved?

And then we open another group and they join, and then it becomes really a whole ripple effect into the whole company. Linda: Perfect. I know we talked about a few pieces related to this, but what does a high performing LinkedIn strategy look like and what are the non-negotiables? Eli: It can vary depending, but I think each individual should be aiming for at least 2 to 3 posts a week.

Ideally 3 posts a week, minimum once a week, don't need to be at 5. I like to give a scale to people to understand, and if we're looking at the time investment that's needed, again, whether you're doing it on your own or you outsource it and you have someone supporting you, it's usually about an hour a day that needs to be done. And if I look at what needs to be done on, what should the executive listening saying to himself, great, well, I'm going to do it alone for now. It's putting in your calendar for an hour, whether it's 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening, and you're doing a series of actions.

You're inviting people into your network every day. You can invite around 30 people a day, 150 a week, depending on what days. Look at it a weekly basis, 150 people a week. You need to continuously add people that are relevant, whether it's future employees, partners, investors, so that when you are posting, they're able to see your content.

You should be commenting every day. It's not just posting, it's also commenting. Yes, it does take time, but commenting on 5 or 10 posts can really sometimes even be more effective than a post itself. When me and you, Linda, post the algorithm decides who's going to see it based off a bunch of parameters and our networks.

But when you comment, you have the ability to go, whether it's the direct client or person that you want to get in front of and comment right in front of him or her so that he sees your face, he sees your comment and is able to click on your name and come to your profile. Or maybe you're commenting on someone that your people of interest are also in the common section and hanging out there. So then they have the ability to discover you through that comment. And then there's also, the third thing is starting the conversations.

It's looking at the engagement, it's looking at the profile views, ideally starting with those people because those people are not cold outreach, those are already lukewarm. If someone viewed your profile or liked or commented, that's some level of intent or engagement or interest. So starting a conversation from there may not necessarily lead to a sale, but it could lead to an opportunity depending on who that person is. Of course, if you need to do a cold outreach can also do that as well.

Again, depending on the role, depending on the profile. But that's kind of if someone was thinking what he could do himself, it's commenting, it's posting 3 to 5 times, usually a post a day from a corporate page. We do look to do more. And then LinkedIn ads, everyone here who hasn't tried LinkedIn ads, and I do want to point out that it's different.

People may be looking at LinkedIn today and saying, great, I see LinkedIn saying I can boost a post rather than LinkedIn ads. So the format that I want everyone to be familiar with coming out of this episode, Linda, is called thought leadership ads. Thought leadership ads is LinkedIn's newest format for LinkedIn ads, which is the capability from a company. So if we have an overlying company page, you go into the campaign manager there and where we would traditionally take a company page post and promote to the audience that we determine.

LinkedIn now allows us to take a personal post, let's say your CEO's posts or an employee's post and add budget behind that and then decide exactly the audience that you want to see, the revenue that they have, the seniority, the location and so on. And then they're able to see the personal profile posts at scale. And what I love about that format is that it doesn't only work internally. It can also be done with third parties, people external to your company.

So if you have a partner or a client or anyone saying something about your company that you want other people to see, you can take their words with your budget and then put it in front of the exact audience that you would want someone third party talking about you and your brand, which we all understand the power of that rather than us talking about our own brands, right? Linda: So you're not posting, but you're distributing strategic content. Eli: The ability to distribute on LinkedIn and create trust, credibility, and authority at scale is exactly where LinkedIn comes in.

And I said in the beginning that LinkedIn is a relationship-driven platform. To create relationships, whether it's online or offline, we know this at home with friends: it takes time to build trust, to build familiarity. That doesn't happen overnight, and it doesn't happen by posting once. You need to post consistently, right?

There's the frequency. A month posting once every 2 weeks probably is not going to be enough, posting several times a week over the next 120 days. That's already a great starting point to then look at it and say, great, are we reaching the right audience? How's our content doing?

What do we need to talk about more? What do we need to talk about less? What's usually something that they get wrong is that they quit too early. They say, well, I heard this awesome episode with Eli and Linda and they started a few times.

They maybe didn't see what they were expecting. And we can talk about also the algorithm, the impressions that are happening today on LinkedIn, and then they stop after a week or two. LinkedIn is long-term. The things that we're discussing here, Linda, are over 6 months, over 12 months, over the next 18 months, and this all aligns with B2B and the nature of how these deals work and these relationships work.

That's why I always come back to it because we need patience. You need patience and consistency, and if you focus on bringing value to your clients or to your audience and consistently showing up, I don't know how long it'll take, and I don't know what it'll be when it comes to you, but I have no doubt that life-changing opportunities will come your way to your company's way. If you do all of this and you're out there and you're allowing people to understand who you do, what you do, how you can help them.

Again, it depends on who the person is or what the company is or what stage it is. Things will come. LinkedIn isn't just a lead generation. Sometimes people just think lead generation.

I look at it more as opportunity generation. Because when you're out there and you're visible, opportunities will come your way. That could be a podcast invite, that could be a sale, that could be a hire and so on. Linda: No, that's perfect.

If you boil it down a little bit, you're talking about LinkedIn. It's not just about content. It's not just about posting here and there. You have access to a tremendous audience.

You have access to having great conversations. You have access to building these relationships that bring new opportunity. And there may not be other ways to do that, especially in this global national environment that we're in today. It's not like you're going to a trade show every week.

I mean, maybe some companies do, but if you're looking to make connections, LinkedIn provides a great vehicle for that. So definitely. Eli: I've met incredible people all around the world because of LinkedIn. Some of them have just formed into friendships, and that's super valuable and many have turned into business opportunities.

What I also enjoy about LinkedIn is I find the conversations and the things that we're able to learn there, not only to sell, we're able to really, they're stimulating as opposed to other platforms that are a little bit more toxic and a little bit more wild west. Linda: Yeah, no, that's a great point. There's anything else you wanted to cover? Eli: One thing if it kind of just to give an overarching framework to maybe help people remember the things that we discussed.

So I like to look at it as ARC, Attract, Relate and Convert. Right? So the first part to attract people really starts from your profile. It's you have to optimize your profile.

We were talking about content and being and commenting and having a presence, but everyone here should make sure that your profile is optimized, that it looks good, that it's aligned, that it's a strong first impression just as you would invest in your website. You don't want people coming in that you've brought in and then dropping off and not understanding how you can help or why you're the right person. So once you have that profile and you start with your presence and you're creating content and you're commenting and you're out there, you're able to attract people and get people to start saying, well, who is this?

Who are they? Ask those first questions. From there, the relating part with them to relate, that takes time and that you're able to nurture with your content and with your comments as well. And then when the time comes to convert them into whatever the opportunity is, they will be more receptive to it once they've seen you and they become familiar with you and they've built that relationship through that content, through that journey that you've been able to bring them towards.

Linda: Perfect. That's awesome. So what's the biggest LinkedIn myth executives still believe? Eli: That they have to be influencers.

Linda: Okay, awesome. So if you were to pick one, is it content or engagement, which matters most? Eli: Content. Linda: What's the biggest mistake you see consistently?

Eli: Quitting too early. Linda: There you go. And one word that actually defines LinkedIn's success in 2026. Eli: Consistency.

Linda: Awesome. Eli, this was a great podcast. I appreciate all your insight on LinkedIn. I think we know LinkedIn is not optional anymore.

It's not a “nice to have.” It's actually a leadership tool and it's a corporate tool and executives I think who understand that are the ones that will outpace the others. So I would love for you to share how people can get in touch with you, your company. Eli: So this will probably not come to a surprise to anyone, but you can find me on LinkedIn , me and my co-founder, Shay Thieberg, and we have our company page as well, MAIA Digital.

We're talking about best practices and trends and anything that's important to LinkedIn. Feel free to, if you have any questions from our episode or ideally after 120 days that you really gave everything here a try, feel free to reach out and say that you came from this episode and I'd be happy to help with anything from there. Our services, if there's anything that we can help with LinkedIn, anything and everything LinkedIn, we'd be happy to help from company pages to thought leadership for executives or to training your team so that they can also be on LinkedIn.

Linda: That's great. Thank you. Thank you for listening in today. If you found this valuable, please hit like, share, comment or subscribe.

And if you're ready to rethink how your brand shows up, visit https://mill.agency/ or https://lindafanaras.com/ . We'll see you at the next episode.