LinkedIn Organic Marketing for Tech Founder & Investor
Lauren Holliday
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
How I generated 2.1M+ impressions and 12K+ new followers on LinkedIn with NO pods or paid ads
tl;dr:
In less than one year (August 1, 2024), I’ve ghostwritten 340+ LinkedIn posts and left 400+ genuine, human-generated comments on relevant posts that my client’s target audience engages with already.
This has resulted in 12,000+ new followers (with an average of 1,000+ followers each month), two million post impressions, ~3,500 comments received, 18,000+ likes and 632+ shares.
As of July 2025, he has nearly 28,000 followers, and he’s even getting featured in influencer roundups, alongside highly prominent LinkedIn personalities in his niche.
It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when no one was posting on LinkedIn, and it was easy to become “LinkedIn famous.” That’s so far from the case today, with 4.7M people posting on LinkedIn weekly – a 56% increase since 2019.
“For 95% of creators, reach has steadily declined, with a significant drop of nearly 50% by February 2025 compared to a year ago. Engagement, although slightly more resilient, has also seen a downward trend, settling at 75% of its previous levels. Perhaps most striking is the slowdown in follower growth, which has declined to just 59% of last year’s benchmark.”
I’m proud to say that isn’t the case for a LinkedIn marketing client, who I’ve been managing his LinkedIn for nearly a year now (since August 2024).
While I can’t disclose the person I do this for, I can say he’s a founder, tech operator and investor in San Francisco, who came to me with the goal of increasing his reach on LinkedIn in order to grow a community he started alongside a well-known VC firm.
And here’s the kicker: I’ve done all of this with ZERO paid advertising or boosting and NO pods. Wild, huh?!
Process
Create a LinkedIn content marketing strategy.
My first step was to ask a lot of questions to get to know my client — his personal and professional background, his experiences, who he wanted to reach and what he wanted to share with them.
I also needed to learn his top business goals with LinkedIn, so I could decide on the right KPIs and strategy direction.
In addition to my questions, I did my own due diligence in the space he wanted to operate in. I reviewed all the insights about his current community members, which was very helpful.
I also researched tons of influencers in his niche, to see what topics were performing well, as well as people outside it, so I could see what post formats were doing well that maybe his industry hadn’t tried yet.
These curated lists of influencers posed extremely useful down the line, which I’ll get to in a bit. I also used tools like Kleo, now deprecated, to help me find the most popular posts of great LinkedIn creators.
Finding LinkedIn influencers in his space at this time was a little difficult though, because most of them were still using X/Twitter. Also, the tech niche tends (or used to tend to be) pretty dry, repetitive and, well, boring.
After the audience and topics were figured out, I created post pillars — one type for each day of the week. Each one had its own objective, such as “get saves” or “get comments” — something to do with the LinkedIn algorithm.
These post pillars changed over time as new learnings came in on what was performing well vs not so much. We definitely didn’t hold ourselves to publishing these pillars just because that’s what we originally agreed to in the beginning. Strategies are an iterative document, as you continue to learn.
Post daily - 7 days / week.
My client wanted daily posts. So a week before the end of each month, I’d send him a Google Doc of a backlog of posts for the upcoming month, giving him time to make or request edits. We left numerous slots open for trending story opportunities, real-time news and monthly promotions.
Example posts
Leave genuine, human-generated comments 3 days/week for 30 minutes/day.
A few months into our engagement, I mentioned that LinkedIn comments were becoming increasingly important, and so we decided to give it a try — at the perfect time, mind you, because that’s when LinkedIn started rolling out comment impressions, which is responsible for around 30% of his search appearances now.
Example comments
Get the necessary LinkedIn marketing tools
Tools used:
Aware for scheduling, reporting and creating curated feeds
Canva for graphics
I also use Crunchbase Pro and Notice.co to help me create posts with original data that people don’t have access to unless they pay for it.
Since I was posting daily, I needed a LinkedIn scheduling tool. At first, I chose AuthoredUp, which was pretty decent, except for a few bugs with the analytics, and I wasn’t a fan of how you had to post on LinkedIn in a new tab and not in its dashboard.
So after a few months, I requested that we switch from AuthoredUp to Aware, because that’s around the time I noticed comments were popping off and getting way more reach than posts.
Aware has this super awesome feature that allows you to create different curated feeds of people you want to engage with, which is awesome, because LinkedIn tends to show you irrelevant posts from the same people over and over again.
I started by importing the list of influencers I made note of during my research phase. I also created a list of all of his community members, so we made sure to engage with them as well.
Aware also curates big lists of influencers for a wide variety of niches, and I used those as well to find relevant posts to leave comments on.
It’s awesome because you can also filter each curated feed by how old the posts are that you want to see and how many posts you want to see by the same person each time.
Monthly KPIs & Results
The first week of every month, I send a monthly report that shows how his LinkedIn performed that month and MoM.
My report includes:
Number of new followers (+ MoM % increase)
Number of impressions (+ MoM % increase)
Top posts based on impressions and learnings as to why they worked / resonated
Year 1 Results
In ~1 year, from August 2024 to July 2025, I’ve written (without AI) 340 LinkedIn posts and left 400+ genuine, human-written comments on others’ posts.
These outputs have resulted in an increase of 12k+ followers (an average of 1K+ followers per month), 2M impressions, nearly 3,500 comments, 18,000 likes and 635 shares.
And on a qualitative note, my client is even being featured in influencer roundups, featured alongside some of the most well-known influencers in his space.
I want to stress I grew this account organically, while everyone else’s reach is decreasing, and this is because I don’t spam LinkedIn with AI-generated comments and vague, boring platitudes and fake personal stories that only pod engagers like and comment on. I actually do a deep dive into your audience segments and generate original, clever ideas that people love.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I get the same results, or is trying to grow on LinkedIn pointless now?
More than 1.7 million LinkedIn users view feed updates every 60 seconds.
And according to recent research, 72% of mobile LinkedIn users spend an average of 1.27 minutes per session, viewing 18 posts per session, while 28% of desktop users’ sessions last, on average, 2.42 minutes, and view 12 posts per session.
You may think, well, those are great numbers, but how many people are actually posting? As I mentioned at the beginning, 4.7M LinkedIn users are posting weekly, which is a 56% increase since 2019.
Don’t let those stats scare you away from trying. If you have someone like me — a trained journalist with a marketing mindset — who understands humans, which means I know how to capture their attention with phenomenal content (that has personality), and it will make viewers stop mid-scroll.
Why shouldn’t I post to my company page?
In short, people follow people, not companies, and LinkedIn gives little to no real estate to company pages in its feed.
Organic reach on LinkedIn has declined sharply for company pages. According to the Algorithm InSights 2025 report from Richard Van Der Bloom, a typical company page post is shown to only 1.6% of its followers – a 15% drop from late 2023.
This decline mirrors broader feed dynamics: brand posts now account for just 1–2% of the LinkedIn feed, down from 7% in 2021. In other words, unless heavily boosted or externally engaged, most company page posts go largely unseen.
Should leaders and founders be the only ones posting on LinkedIn?
According to research there’s a major performance gap between personal posts and company posts…
Employee posts generated 2.75× more impressions and 5× more engagement than the company page, despite 46% fewer followers.
Company posts are often filtered out of user feeds, especially if they lack external interaction. Personal posts, in contrast, benefit from relational amplification through comments, reactions, and shares.
Even founder profiles with 98% fewer followers than a company page can match or exceed its engagement.
Additionally…
Employee networks are 10× larger in aggregate than company follower lists.
Posts by employees are 2× more likely to be engaged with than those by brand pages.
Trust in personal content is 3× higher than in brand-published material.
Decision-makers prefer content from real people.
According to Edelman and LinkedIn studies, thought leadership shared by individuals is viewed as significantly more credible than official brand communication.
This dynamic also impacts pipeline:
IBM found that leads sourced via employee content convert 7× more often than those from paid channels
Engagement with a team member’s content often serves as a “dark social” pre-touch before conversion
What began as a trend is now table stakes. Forward-thinking SaaS companies have shifted from page-first to people-first strategies:
Founders are building in public
Sales and product teams are sharing customer insights
Marketers are elevating narratives through team-led distribution
Rather than broadcasting from the brand page, these companies mobilize internal voices to create reach and resonance.
In fact, as of 2025, 71% of CMOs report increased investment in internal influencer programs.
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Posted Sep 10, 2025
I created and executed an organic LinkedIn strategy for a founder, tech operator and angel investor in SF, dramatically growing his account MoM.
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Timeline
Jul 31, 2024 - Jul 22, 2025
