PR is back, baby.
Why LinkedIn Is the #1 PR Channel for B2B Right Now
I want to reframe LinkedIn for you today.
B2B marketers have always relied on PR in some form. But in 2026, the balance of power has shifted from the press to social. Instead of waiting for a journalist to write about you, you can play offense and build your own PR machine.
LinkedIn is the #1 PR channel for B2B startups and founders today. It costs nothing (it can cost a lot but it doesn’t have to, let’s be clear). It compounds every week you do it. And it doesn’t require videos, designs, or anything fancy. Just writing. Same skill you already use to send a Slack message or update to the board.
I’ve been making this case for years. But it got stronger in the last 12 months and most B2B teams haven’t caught up.
Here’s the part that’s new. By 2027, Gartner says 95% of the B2B buyer journey will start in an LLM instead of Google. When your buyer wants to figure out who to hire or what tool to evaluate, they’re going to ask ChatGPT or Claude. And the answer those models give back is being shaped right now by what’s on LinkedIn, in podcast transcripts, and in community threads. If your brand isn’t part of that conversation, you don’t show up in the answer.
The old reason still matters more than the new one. People buy from people. The marketers who win on social aren’t winning because they cracked an algorithm for a day. They’re winning because they show up consistently and build a body of work that compounds. I think I’ve been writing on LinkedIn for (gulp) 10 years now?
Last week I was on Slate’s Social Social Club webinar with a few of the sharpest people I know on this stuff. Brianna Doe, founder of Verbatim and one of the top voices in B2B influencer marketing (she has 250k LinkedIn followers of her own, crazy). And Jeff Meltz, who runs social at Atlassian — the team behind Jira, Confluence, and Loom. And Carmen Vicente from Slate (16k on her Instagram, she is trying to teach me how to do better).
I pulled out six lessons for you to help with your social media strategy.
1. Stop calling it “personal branding.” It’s PR.
Both Brianna and I pushed back on the “personal brand” framing during the panel. “How do you build a personal brand?” Neither of us set out to build one. I never sat there thinking, man would I love to be famous on LinkedIn. I wrote about marketing because I liked it. It was fun to talk about the work I was doing. Brianna started posting because she wanted to network without being reliant on her resume, and her followers came as a byproduct and also gave her plenty to write about.
Reframe it as PR and the whole thing makes more sense. You’re not building a “personal brand.” You’re building a mini media company. Every post is the new version of a blog post. The audience that follows you is opted-in distribution. Not a vanity metric. A press list you didn’t have to pay for.
That’s how you should be thinking about your CEO’s LinkedIn page. Not as a branding exercise. As a media channel.
2. Social is the third space.
Most of my friends at home don’t want to talk about B2B marketing. But Brianna does. Jeff does. The 5,000 marketers in Exit Five do. Social is where peers find peers when their day-to-day life doesn’t put them in a room together.
That’s the human reason it works. The machine reason is that the comments under your posts are increasingly the dataset AI is using to figure out what people actually think about a brand. Comments are the new reviews. Even if you don’t know what to write, you can just sit there in the comments — which act as prompts for you to reply to.
Also comments make it clear I am real. Have you seen some of the AI slop in my comment section holy smokes.
3. Brand page vs. Personal page.
Carmen asked us how she should think about Slate’s social strategy with their brand page vs. employee pages. My answer: don’t over-invest in the brand page.
Posts from a company page get a fraction of the reach of posts from a person. Why? Because nobody knows who wrote the company post. Was it an intern? The social media manager? The faceless brand? People want to hear from people.
Keep the company page active. Use it for news, product launches, and jobs (LinkedIn is still the first place candidates go to see if a company looks legit). But the real engine is the people inside the company. The CEO. The VP of Marketing. Whoever has a real point of view about your category.
This is the same playbook Rippling is running. Branded content is fine. Branded content from a real person with real opinions is what actually moves.
4. Don’t ghostwrite for your CEO. Build a platform-first strategy.
The old play was: “Hey CEO, give me 15 minutes a week and we’ll get you posting.” That play is dead. Anyone can spin up a Claude project, train it on a CEO’s voice, and post ghostwritten slop five days a week. You can’t separate it from real content because half the feed is already AI noise.
The new play is platform-first. Pick a strong point of view. Pick a channel that fits your audience. Decide what you’re going to be known for. Then put in the work, including replying to comments.
I’d rather have a CEO post twice a week with a sharp opinion than five times a week with polished, voiceless content. So would the algorithm. So would the LLMs.
5. The trolls are theater. Ignore them.
Every time I bring up B2B social, someone tells me they’re worried about putting themselves out there. The trolls. The fear of looking dumb. What if it’s cringey?
Brianna’s framing was perfect. If the person trolling you isn’t living a life you’d want, building a career you admire, or paying your bills, why are you giving them airtime?
I met my number one troll at a conference a few years ago. Walked right up to me. “Hey Dave, good to see you.” Total normal guy. Couldn’t have been nicer. None of the nonsense he writes online. Most of it is theater. Don’t take it home with you.
The related concern people raise is the cringe factor. Being one of “those people” who write on LinkedIn. I have no problem with it. I think of LinkedIn as my blog, and having it has been an incredible advantage in my career. The pros outweigh the cons. And at the end of the day, I’m writing about marketing, not politics. (Although sometimes when we start talking about MQLs, you can’t tell the difference.)
6. Don’t know what to write? Start in the comments.
Brianna’s advice for anyone trying to break in was the best line of the panel. Don’t pressure yourself to start posting. Start in the comments.
Find five people in your space whose posts you actually like. Leave thoughtful comments. Not “great post.” A real take. A counterpoint. A specific example from your own work.
You’ll find your voice. You’ll get on the radar of people whose audiences overlap with yours. And you’ll start collecting prompts for your own posts. (I do this every week. By the end of my coffee I have three post ideas I didn’t have when I sat down.)
The hardest part of LinkedIn is that the results take time. But any proven CMO would tell you this: it takes time to build up incredibly powerful brand channels and that’s what LinkedIn (remember, the new PR) is.
It’s the same reason most people don’t stick with the gym. You go for a month, you don’t see anything, you stop. The people who keep going for a year look completely different. Same thing here. Mr. Beast was making YouTube videos every week for seven years before he took off. It will have taken me 10 years to cross 200,000 199,000* followers on LinkedIn. That’s a long time and not that many followers.
But the compounding is real, if you’re willing to play the game long enough.
LinkedIn is the #1 PR channel for B2B right now and I can make the case in two ways.
- People buy from people (faces over brands)
- LLMs are increasingly relying on signals from social (LinkedIn, Instagram, X, etc.)
I could go on forever but producer Dan is telling me I am at my word count. See you Thursday.
– Dave
P.S. Still reading? Reply back. It gets lonely over here. Tell me a big win for you in marketing recently, I’ll reply.
* Producer Dan here 👋, please note Dave has 199,000 followers on LinkedIn and not quite 200,000 followers as his orginal draft stated. If you’d like to help him get to 200,000 please click here to follow him.
