How would you improve LinkedIn for Influencers ?

First, I’d clarify what we mean by influencers. I’ll use the term for professionals who regularly share expertise and build an audience around it, including people who are just starting.

My approach would be to understand the objective, choose a creator segment, identify their biggest difficulties, and then compare solutions. I’d also look at whether the improvements help creators stay active and build meaningful engagement.

1. Understand the product and scope

LinkedIn connects professionals with people, knowledge, and opportunities. For creators, the value is being able to share expertise, develop a professional reputation, and build relationships with a relevant audience.

Before proceeding, I’d ask:

• Are we focusing on emerging creators, established influencers, or a particular profession?

• Are we improving the creator experience, the follower experience, or both?

• Is the objective content engagement, creator retention, or monetisation?

• Should solutions stay within LinkedIn or include external integrations?

• Are there timeline, budget, geography, or device constraints?

For this case, I’ll focus on the creator experience, improving content engagement and creator retention through native LinkedIn features, with no fixed timeline or budget constraint.

2. Choose a creator segment

I’d divide creators into two broad groups:

A follower count such as 10,000 could be an initial segmentation rule, but I wouldn’t rely on it alone. Someone with a small, specialised audience may already be an experienced creator. Publishing history and familiarity with the tools would help distinguish these groups.

Life stage, occupation, interests, available time, and accessibility needs would add context within each segment.

I’d focus on emerging creators who have useful professional knowledge but struggle to turn it into consistent content.

My hypothesis is that helping them get started could improve retention and bring more varied expertise into the feed. It could also encourage participation within their professional networks. I’d validate the size of this opportunity rather than assume this segment is larger or easier to retain.

3. Understand their journey and needs

I’d map the journey as:

Choose an audience → Find an idea → Draft content → Format and review → Publish → Engage with responses → Learn and repeat

For an emerging creator, I see four needs:

• Understand how to create content that resonates with the intended audience.

• Grow a relevant follower base and generate meaningful engagement.

• Develop a recognisable personal brand within a niche.

• Learn how to use the platform’s publishing features effectively.

For example, a product manager may have a useful lesson from a failed launch but be unsure how to turn it into a post. They might spend time studying established creators and still leave their own draft unfinished.

I’d investigate these problems through interviews, draft-to-publish behaviour, and the activity of creators who stop posting.

4. Prioritise the problems

I’d start with two connected problems:

1. “I don’t know how to turn my expertise into a useful first or early post.”

2. “I don’t understand what makes effective content in my niche work.”

These occur before a creator can benefit from advanced growth or monetisation tools. Examples can provide direction, while practical creation support helps them act on it.

I’d focus on reducing the effort of expressing a useful idea. Publishing faster is valuable only if the content remains relevant and original.

5. Explore solutions

To help creators understand effective content, I’d consider:

• Optional interest and audience selection: Let creators identify their niche and intended audience, using relevant profile information only where appropriate.

• Curated examples and case studies: Explain why selected posts work, including their structure, specificity, and audience relevance.

• Comparable performance benchmarks: Show aggregated engagement and growth patterns for creators at similar stages, where the data is reliable.

To help them create content, I’d consider:

• Adaptable templates: Structures for text posts, articles, and document-style carousel posts.

• Interactive walkthroughs: Contextual guidance through the creation tools.

• A private practice and preview space: Let creators experiment with formatting before publishing.

• Evidence-based suggestions: Offer recommendations based on comparable content performance, with clear limitations.

I’d avoid claims such as “Adding a video will increase your reach by 30%” unless we had evidence supporting that prediction. A pattern in historical data doesn’t guarantee the same result for an individual creator.

6. Prioritise the solutions

I’d use impact versus effort for the initial comparison. These are working estimates that I’d validate through research and engineering discussions.

I’d start with curated examples, adaptable templates, and private practice as one connected experience.

For the product manager sharing a launch lesson, the flow could be:

• See an annotated example explaining how a creator presents a decision and its consequences.

• Choose a structure such as “Situation, decision, result, lesson.”

• Add their own experience and perspective.

• Preview the post privately and publish when ready.

Before building, I’d audit existing drafting and preview capabilities. The improvement may be connecting and simplifying what already exists rather than creating a separate sandbox.

7. Consider the trade-offs

Templates could make the feed repetitive. I’d use prompts that require the creator’s own examples and reasoning, and offer several structures rather than one supposedly winning formula.

Curated examples could encourage imitation or overemphasise highly successful posts. I’d include different niches and audience sizes, explain context, and avoid presenting examples as guaranteed growth strategies.

The practice space could also become a place where creators keep polishing without publishing. I’d make the next step clear while keeping publication entirely under their control.

For examples and benchmarks, I’d use permissioned or appropriately available content and aggregated data. Private performance information shouldn’t become visible to other creators.

8. Measure success and recommend a direction

My primary metric would be four-week publishing retention among eligible emerging creators, defined as the percentage who publish again in the fourth week after entering the experience.

I’d pair this with engagement per impression and the quality of audience responses. Retention alone could increase while the feed fills with repetitive content.

For each part of the experience, I’d track:

Time spent browsing examples, the number of templates available, and repeat sandbox visits would be diagnostic measures. They wouldn’t establish success by themselves. I’d also examine which templates account for most usage to identify gaps or unnecessary options.

I’d compare results with a control group rather than rely only on before-and-after follower growth. Guardrails would include hides, unfollows, spam reports, and signs of repetitive or copied content.

My recommendation is to help emerging creators move from seeing a useful example to publishing their own perspective. If that improves sustained publishing and meaningful engagement, we can then expand into deeper benchmarks and personalised guidance.