The LinkedIn Credibility Gap: Why Your Corporate Account is Being Ghosted

We’ve spent years using company pages to drive top-of-funnel awareness and leads, but in 2026, the algorithm has shifted the goalposts. Company pages now appear in just 5.37% of user feed slots, while Google AI Overviews pull 83.1% of their LinkedIn citations from individual profiles.

Personal profiles are also driving 561% more reach and 5x more engagement than company pages publishing identical content. The reason is simple: platforms are looking for proof of life. Real people, real expertise, real authority.

Brand pages still have a role in credibility and official updates, but they can no longer carry the strategy alone. This is where B2B influencer strategy, using both internal experts and external voices, becomes one of the strongest ways to get your message into the right rooms without it feeling forced.

Reclaiming the Feed with Voices Buyers Already Trust

A brand page will always have its limits, because even at its best, it can still feel like the company talking about itself.

That does not mean the answer is to bring in the slickest influencer you can find. In B2B, the better question is: who does your audience already trust, and what job do you need them to do?

Because not every influencer plays the same role. An analyst or industry commentator might be right for opening up a category conversation and building awareness. A founder or senior leader might be better placed to explain why the issue matters now. A product expert, consultant or customer-facing specialist might be the person who makes the value feel practical enough to act on.

The point is to match the voice to the moment. Look at an influencer’s expertise, the credibility they have with your buyers, and how ready their audience is to engage with a commercial conversation. Then check the basics: who they have partnered with before, how sponsored posts land in their feed, and whether the comments show real interest.

That is how influencer strategy becomes more than reach. It becomes part of the comms ecosystem, working alongside executive visibility, employee advocacy and paid amplification. 

Your Measurement Gold Standard 

If you’re moving your strategy towards influencers and personal accounts, you have to stop chasing vanity metrics. High impression counts can look impressive on a report and still tell you very little about whether the right people cared.

Make sure your influencer is sharing the right metrics with you, too. Front-end data matters: audience breakdown, reach, engagement, clicks, saves, shares and any useful feedback from DMs or comments. Without that, you are only seeing half the picture.

Look for quality signals:

• Who’s really engaging: is the engagement coming from your actual ICP, or mostly your own employees and that guy you went to school with who always likes your posts?
• Sliding into the DMs: is the content sparking conversations beyond the comments, including in private messages?
• High-intent questions: are people asking “how can we apply this?” rather than simply hitting like?

A thoughtful response from the right person is worth more than a hundred passive reactions from the wrong audience.

Theory in Practice 

Boots Online Doctor nailed this with its Misinformation Medics campaign, which won Gold for Best Social Strategy at the Campaign Media Awards 2026.

The insight was simple: younger audiences were turning to TikTok and Instagram creators for health advice, but much of what they found was wrong. So Boots didn’t just run ads. It paired popular creators with medical experts, using influencer credibility to intercept false health tips in-platform and replace them with trusted advice.

The result? Web traffic doubled, and hayfever remedy sales rose 260% week on week when the campaign tackled seasonal allergies.

M&S has taken an employee influencer approach with its Insiders Programme, using store colleagues and creators like Kathryn Turner to bring products to life across social channels. As Marketing Week reports, the strategy works because these voices are closest to the product, understand what customers want, and can speak with the kind of credibility a brand channel often struggles to create.

The lesson for B2B brands: the strongest influence often comes from the people your audience already trusts, especially when those voices can translate expertise into practical, timely advice.

The With Editor

One More Woman Webinar 

More than 150 people signed up for our One More Woman webinar, where we shared new research on why more representative expert voices matter.

With speakers from UN Women, Sky News, Google and corporate comms, the session explored how internal marcomms leaders can build more diverse speaker benches and improve visibility for women experts.

LINK BUTTON: Pledge your support to One More Woman 

LINK:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc3cRHsuSBVWzQdSrqG6ZUu5A9l_tEW_46knwkXnpFelyLX5Q/viewform 

Why AI answers need PR discipline

LLMs favour content that is clear, structured, specific and easy to verify. That makes GEO less of a technical acronym and more of a communications challenge: brands need consistent facts, accessible content and credible third-party signals if they want to appear in AI-generated answers.

LINK: https://welcometowith.com/why-press-releases-work-for-llms-ai-search-optimisation/ 

Award Winning AI 

With and Fastly won Communicate’s AI Comms Award for AI, Bots & Scrapers! Oh My!, a campaign that paired With’s strategic media expertise with trailblazing AI-supported comms techniques to turn a complex publisher challenge into a clear, compelling media story.

LINK: https://www.communicatemagazine.com/article/winners-of-the-ai-comms-awards-2026-revealed/