From our vantage point, LinkedIn has made one of the starkest transformations a social platform can — successfully evolving from a job-seeking platform to a vibrant hub for professional conversations, knowledge sharing, and editorial and trending news.
In this week’s episode of Earned, CreatorIQ CMO Brit Starr sits down with Katie Carroll, Sr. Editor at Large at LinkedIn to explore how LinkedIn fosters authentic dialogue and supports creators in building their personal brands.
To start, we dive into LinkedIn's transformation from job-seeking platform to a dynamic space for sharing ideas, fostering conversation, and building personal brands. Katie shares her insights on the shift towards authenticity and vulnerability in content creation, emphasizing the importance of genuine connections and the power of video content. We explore how LinkedIn News plays a crucial role in the editorial landscape and offers transparency and accessibility through original reporting and curated member perspectives. The discussion also explores the creator economy on LinkedIn, recognizing creators as entrepreneurs and brand owners who contribute significantly to the professional community. Katie shares her personal journey of manifesting a move to London, illustrating how authentic engagement on LinkedIn can lead to exciting opportunities. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in leveraging LinkedIn for professional growth.
Check out highlights from the episode below, or or tune into the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen!
The following interview has been lightly edited for concision.
Brit Starr: I'd love to talk about how you think about community on a platform like LinkedIn. I believe everyone can be a creator today—it's part of what makes our space so exciting. I have found fun exploring on platforms like LinkedIn, where I can kind of share thoughts in different ways that feel more relevant or comfortable. What do you think about the community on LinkedIn and, specifically, what role do kind of LinkedIn creators play on that?
Katie Carroll: I think everybody can be a creator and I think everybody who posts things is a creator. One of the things that I also love about LinkedIn is the fact that it is a very broad base of people who are starting conversations and sharing things that they're thinking about at work or in their industries. You have a lot of people from different backgrounds weighing in on things that are going on in the professional space. Professional itself is also a pretty broad category. But community is essential to that as well. We are a platform where people connect to each other, where you can build up those professional connections, and help build your brand.
But even more generally and outside of LinkedIn, I think that community aspect is core to what it means to be a creator in 2025. For all that, we have professional creators who are doing this for a living and they're making their money off of content. It is still about creating the dialogue between them and between their audiences. It is not just about sort of a broadcast world of content anymore, and I think that's really exciting.
The Top Voice has two different things going on. One is the Top Voices program. That is the blue badge that you can get by consistently sharing great quality content. We have a lot of really prominent voices who are talking about their businesses. Even more broadly than that, the people who are successful are the ones who are talking about things that their audience cares about. A lot of times that's timely news and trends, so things that are conversations right now, for whoever their audience might be.
It's having an authentic voice. Video is a great medium for that. You get much more of an authentic view of who the person is and that is something that members and content consumers can spot. They really appreciate when there is that level of authentic connection and communication. Something that has also evolved over time is the expectation that business leaders do share some of that authentic self. It's always been true that people can spot a press release a mile away and that kind of content doesn't resonate as much. It doesn't feel like it's coming from a human.
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