Executive and employee social In 2026
Executive and employee social In 2026
Your CEO has been throwing a party of 1. Time to send out the invites for something bigger.
We call great thought leadership programs a house party because everyone you need already lives here. They have the networks, the stories, and (judging by Slack) plenty of opinions. Somebody just has to open the door.
📚 Executive Social Survival Course
Download our social calendar template, hook grab bag, ToV quiz, and more in storyarb’s Executive Social Survival Course.
Hit the afterparty early!Ask a B2B Marketer who actually posts for their company on LinkedIn.
Most of the time, you’ll hear 1 name. Usually the CEO. Sometimes the marketer who’s reading this.
("Just post 3x a week! Be authentic! Build in public!
Also, run the company! 🚀")
Thought leadership is now distribution. Executives are now influencers. Content is now sales.
…duh.
Alex Lieberman and I built storyarb because we spotted this early. We’d both experienced firsthand how powerful a founder-led brand can be — for sales, for brand recognition, for attracting stellar talent and strong investors and phenomenal partners.
And the research supports what we’ve experienced:
of B2B decision makers spend at least an hour per week consuming thought leadership.
say a particular piece of thought leadership led them to research a product or service they weren’t previously considering.
senior executives agree intelligent thought leadership increases trust and makes them more likely to engage with a company in the future.
But the best part is, when you do it right, thought leadership is just so much fun.
You ground your brand in people, not logos. You get to bring more of yourself to work. You get to amplify your voice. You get to put your stakes in the ground and find the people out there who just get you.
So yeah. Let’s do this.
— Abby Murray, co-founder + CEO, storyarb
Want more Abby wisdom?
Check out our Executive Social Survival Course.
Every party has rules nobody reads. LinkedIn's got an update to theirs this year.
The platform replaced hundreds of specialized models with 1 system called 360Brew, built on the same kind of architecture as ChatGPT. It reads your profile, your posts, and the people who engage with them, the way an editor would.
Keep these 3 in your back pocket. They explain most of what’s happening in the room right now →
Or, if you want to nerd out a little more about the algo, we wrote all about it here.
recent interactions remembered per person, with the newest weighted most heavily
what the model optimizes for first, ahead of comments and shares, with likes last
what the model leans on most to decide what your post is about and who should see it (the technical name is “Lost in Distance”)
Or if you want to nerd out a little more about the algo, we wrote all about it here.
Your company page is probably the least interesting account your company has.
That doesn’t mean you should shut it down. It’s important for company announcements, team celebrations, and general “proof of life.”
But people’s accounts are a little more interesting to everyone. The average employee brings about 930 LinkedIn connections. At 100 people, that's around 93,000 people your company page might never reach.
So it’s worth having way more than just your CEO post.
Importantly, for B2B, multi-exec activation helps you speak to every person on the buying committee. Which, by the way, has gotten large — LinkedIn cites 20+ stakeholders in buying groups for B2B. And they take about 272 days to close, while 40% of deals are lost to “no decision.”
Your company's thought leaders
Your customers’ buying committee
The people you need to post are already sitting right there in the company Slack. What's missing, for most teams, is somebody enticing them to write.
The reach you want is already on payroll.
Folks just need the encouragement.
1 person
11%
2 - 5
57%
6 - 10
14%
11-30
9%
More than 30
9%
LinkedIn's 2026 report, The Credibility Code, finds that posts with a clear point of view see a median 43% engagement lift compared with simple announcements.
"We're thrilled to announce…"
"Proud to share this milestone!"
"Our platform helps teams do more."
"I shipped this on Tuesday."
"I was wrong about this for 2 years."
"Here's what customers keep asking me."
The Big Takeaway
Your company page can only do so much, and your CEO has been holding the mic since… well, forever. Time to pass it around.
of long-form LinkedIn posts are fully AI-generated, according to Pangram.
Disgusting.
Nearly 2 in 3 pieces of AI-generated content that Pangram detected across platforms came from LinkedIn.
Look, the bar for sounding like a person is in hell. Anyone at your company with an opinion and a specific story is already ahead of most of the feed.
Posts that feel organic and user-generated actually see a 52% engagement lift compared with polished, professional ones. And personal anecdotes drive a median 31% engagement lift.
So go ahead and do what you’ve always wanted permission to do: talk about yourself, boo.
If ChatGPT could have written your post, it probably wasn’t worth reading — because it’s missing your original thoughts.
3 posts, 1 human. Find the person.
How to play: Read all 3, then tap the one a person wrote.
In today's competitive B2B landscape, thought leadership has become more important than ever.
Here's what I've learned after 10 years in marketing:
✅ Authenticity drives engagement
✅ Consistency builds trust
✅ Value-first content wins
The companies that embrace this shift will thrive. Those that don't will be left behind.
What's your take? 👇
Most executives approach LinkedIn the wrong way.
They post about their company. They share press releases. They celebrate milestones nobody outside the building cares about.
The best executive voices do something different. They teach.
Ask yourself: Would a stranger save this post?
If not, rewrite it.
Our CEO went dark on LinkedIn for 3 weeks in December.
Nope, not on purpose. It was board prep, then a funding close, then an actual vacation.
When she came back in January, her posts were getting about 30% of the reach they had in November. Same writing done by the same person.
We'd built a program that lived inside 1 calendar and never noticed until the calendar filled up.
Post 3 is human-generated! You probably got it in about 4 seconds.
It has a month, a number, a reason, and an admission that makes the writer look more relatable. Nobody bothers inventing details like that, which is exactly how you (and LinkedIn's ranking system) can tell a person wrote it.
The Big Takeaway
In a feed clogged with AI, a specific human detail is the easiest way to stand out. Your team is full of them.
LinkedIn's new system weighs a person's most recent activity heaviest, so 2 dark weeks show up fast.
Founder-led content built a lot of great companies. It also shares a calendar with the person running the company, which is how a funding close turns into LinkedIn silence.
A LinkedIn program that goes on vacation with your CEO is just your CEO.
of marketers say sidelining top talent hurts thought leadership.
Exec posts drafted by a delegate (mktg/comms)
7,274
Exec posts the exec wrote themselves
2,625
Employee posts
2,642
The Big Takeaway
A program that lives and dies by 1 calendar is only as consistent as that calendar.
Most of your employees would post tomorrow. They're waiting for someone to say it's allowed.
LinkedIn's new ranking system got noticeably better for people with smaller networks.
360Brew is actively trying to surface content from people with fewer connections (think <1.5K followers). So your team's "I'm too small to bother" crowd is exactly who the algo is built to find.
The Big Takeaway
The people most likely to break through are the ones who assume they won't.
You track impressions, inbound, and sourced pipeline. But are you tracking how many people are driving all that action?
That number predicts next quarter better than anything else. It's also the easiest 1 to change.
To see what separates programs that grow from programs that stall, we looked at two different strategies.
The Solo Act
1 person posts for the whole company
The Full Houses
15 people post, each in their own lane
Every voice you add brings a
network you're already paying for.
Find out how many people are actually carrying your program.
How to play: Check everything that's true at your company right now.
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We can write you a better opening line.
The rules: Tell us your role. We'll hand back 3 ways to write the first line of a post: a number, an admission, and a disagreement.
11 tickets a week, down to about 1. Same team, 1 change.
This feature shipped 8 months late, and the reason was me.
The standard advice is to add process. We removed process, and things got better.
💡 Pro Tip
The model reads your opening to decide what a post is about and who should see it. A first line that stops the scroll and names the topic is doing both jobs at once.
☠️ Watch Out
If your opener would work for any company in your category, the algo has no idea whom to surface it to.
Every generic phrase is a spot where the algo (and your reader) checks out.
The rules: Tap each highlighted phrase to see what it's costing you.
In today's fast-moving business environment, we've been thinking a lot about how to optimize our internal processes.
After six months of work , we're excited to share that we've seen significant improvements across the board.
Learn more about our platform at the link below. Thoughts?
6 months of what? "6 months and 4 failed pilots" is a version people will remember.
💡 Pro Tip
If a phrase can't be pictured or argued with, LinkedIn can't categorize it and your reader won't remember it.
☠️ Watch Out
Yes, "Thoughts?" made the list. We're sorry too.
At CommaCon: Social Season, we asked 4 people who run these programs what they'd tell a marketer trying to grow a thought leadership program. They did not all agree, which is exactly why you ask more than 1 person...
"Never in the history of business has a leader come out to say, hey, everyone, you can trust us, and people were like, okay, fine. We have to recognize that credibility is a system, not a solo act. We have to think about not just what a brand should say, but what is the opportunity of the different voices that can help tell the story?"
“The memory of the internet is incredibly short. 99.9% of things you could say on the internet, the internet forgets about. And when you start posting on social, it is the smallest your audience will ever be. If you post for a year straight, likely 95% of your audience never saw that first post you were worried about a year prior.”
“Your follower should be better off after having engaged with your piece of content. Whether that’s inspiration, education, or pragmatic takeaways... If you write or film a piece of content and you can’t identify the value you’re providing, you shouldn’t ship it.”
“It’s not just about creating content and putting it out there. It’s about tying that to your sales enablement: is your sales team talking about what your CEO just said on LinkedIn? If they’re not, there’s no flywheel that ties it all together.”
At storyarb, 14 employees posting for 10 weeks pulled in more than 7 million impressions.
Last year, we ran a LinkedIn competition inside storyarb called Own the Internet. Most impressions over 10 weeks won $5K, with $1K for second place and $500 for third. About half of each person's posts had to tie back to our content pillars, and nobody was required to play. Co-founders weren’t eligible for prizes…besides bragging rights.
Feedback we got during OTI.
People wrote about music journalism, standup, playwriting, and parenting, right alongside posts about newsletters and hooks. It all worked. (Honestly, it worked better because we weren’t just writing about a narrow definition of “work-related stuff.”)
Impressions across the team
7 million+
LinkedIn followers
Up 54%
Impressions from our top 3 posters
1.7 million
New site traffic from LinkedIn
16%
Website sessions
Up 55%
Hires who found us through #OTI
1
7 million impressions ÷ 14 people =
about 500,000 impressions per person
Now hold that next to your company page's last quarter.
The Big Takeaway
The leaderboard did more work than the prize. Watching a coworker's number climb past yours beats $5K you've already assumed somebody else will win.
66 employees, 21,000 posts, and 40 million views, with 0 social media managers.
Buffer's people post about what they're known for, and the brand helps each of them find that topic. An engineer writes about AI workflows. Someone in finance writes about career growth.
Model:
The CEO goes first.
Signal:
A Slack emoji flags ideas worth posting before anyone opens LinkedIn.
Equip:
Everyone finds their topics.
Amplify:
The brand hands its reach back to the people who earned it.
Find out how big your audience already is.
The rules: Enter 2 numbers.
Results 🎲
On average, your employers' reach is [x]× times the size of your company page:
· [#] Your company page followers
· [#] Your team’s combined network
*We used an average of 930 LinkedIn connections per employee. If your team skews senior or sales-heavy, your number runs higher.
For our final party favor, we’re bringing you an Executive Social Survival Course that picks up where we leave off.
The report proves your best thought leaders are already on payroll.
The course turns them into people who actually post.
Everything you need to dominate exec social on Linkedin, starting off with 1 lesson via email a week for 6 weeks to keep you honest. Plus 1 idea per send, short enough to finish before your coffee goes cold.
Homework for you and your team. Every week ends with something you publish and something you run with a teammate.
A new tool every week. The take-homes above are where the course starts. Each week hands you the full kit behind 1 of them, from the profile kit and hook database to the employee activation kit we built Own the Internet on.
Our tone of voice quiz, built into week 4, so your team ends up with 4 voices instead of 4 copies of yours.
A "Steal this" at the bottom of every send. The Slack message, checklist, or invite you'd otherwise write from scratch.
Our Tone of Voice Quiz, for defining and defending a unique voice that speaks to your ICP.
Figuring out what marketing leaders are up against is most of our job. This report is a sliver of what we've learned.
Every week in The Standard, we break down how 1 marketing leader actually runs their team, plus the campaigns that got us talking. It's free and takes about 5 minutes to read.
