LinkedIn still gives a personal profile real free reach, the share of your own followers who see an unpaid post. A personal LinkedIn profile's posts reach about 5.61% of its followers, according to a 2024 study by Socialinsider, a social media analytics company, as reported by usevisuals, a company that sells AI writing tools. That LinkedIn reach comes with two conditions. The post has to come from a personal profile, not a Company Page. And LinkedIn posts only bring in customers if your buyer is a professional at work. The full comparison table puts LinkedIn and eight other social media channels side by side.
LinkedIn still has real organic reach if your buyer is at work
A LinkedIn post reaches people already connected to you, not strangers. TikTok and YouTube are still better than LinkedIn at showing your posts to strangers.
- A personal LinkedIn profile's posts reach about 5.61% of its followers, against about 3.2% for an Instagram account and 1.25% for a Facebook Page in Socialinsider's 2026 data.
- A LinkedIn Company Page's posts reach about 0.8% of its followers, about one seventh of a personal profile's 5.61%, in Socialinsider's 2024 data.
- LinkedIn Company Page posts reach about 1.6% of their followers, 15% less than in late 2023, in the Algorithm Insights Report 2025 by Richard van der Blom, a LinkedIn consultant, which analysed 1.8 million posts.
- A LinkedIn document carousel, a post of slides the reader swipes through and the format with the most free reach, takes 1 to 3 hours to make, against 15 to 30 minutes for a LinkedIn text post.
- Spend as long commenting on other people's LinkedIn posts as you spend creating your own, because commenting is one of the main ways to grow a LinkedIn following.
- Half of a LinkedIn post's likes, comments and shares arrive within about 23 hours of posting, against about 52 minutes for a post on X, according to Scott Graffius, a technology executive who tracks how long social media posts stay active.
LinkedIn turns 2.74% of visitors into leads only when the buyer is a professional at work
- 2.74% of visitors who came to a business website from LinkedIn became leads, against 0.77% from Facebook and 0.69% from Twitter, in a HubSpot study of over 5,000 businesses.
- For a company selling software to businesses, a developer tool, an agency or a consultant, LinkedIn turns more visitors into enquiries than any other social platform.
- For a broad consumer brand, LinkedIn is a poor fit, because reaching people by their job title, which LinkedIn does well, does not help sell to the general public.
- The one consumer-brand exception on LinkedIn is a founder sharing the story of building their own product in public, for an audience of other founders and investors, because there the thing being sold is the founder's credibility, not a mass-market product.
If your buyer is a professional making a careful, planned purchase, LinkedIn is the best free social media channel in 2026. If your buyer is a member of the general public, spend the hours you would put into LinkedIn on short video instead.
Use Camera to Clipboard to draft a LinkedIn carousel on paper
A LinkedIn document carousel, a post of slides the reader swipes through, gets the most free reach on LinkedIn. Making one carousel takes 1 to 3 hours. Drawing ten rough carousel slides on one sheet of paper is a faster way to plan the carousel's story. The slow part of planning on paper is getting the drawing onto your computer. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, is a phone camera app that puts each photo straight onto your computer's clipboard, ready to paste.
- A photo you take inside Camera to Clipboard is sitting on your computer's clipboard the moment you take it, ready to paste. Your phone sends the photo directly to your computer over your own local network, with no email, cable or upload.
- Camera to Clipboard can send several photos at once from your phone's photo library, so carousel slides photographed one at a time all arrive on your computer together. A pasted Camera to Clipboard photo lands as a new layer or document in Photoshop and GIMP, and in line with the text in Word and Google Docs.
Conclusion: LinkedIn is worth growing only if your buyer is at work
- A personal LinkedIn profile's posts reach about 5.61% of its followers, more than Instagram or Facebook Page posts reach.
- A personal LinkedIn profile reaches about 7 times the share of followers a Company Page reaches, 5.61% against 0.8%.
- Spend as long commenting on other people's LinkedIn posts as you spend writing your own.
- In a HubSpot study, 2.74% of website visitors from LinkedIn became leads, about 3.6 times the rate from Facebook.
- LinkedIn is close to useless for a broad consumer brand that sells to the general public.