The bookmark icon used to be the least interesting button on LinkedIn. It is now the one Chris Donnelly points at first.

Donnelly is a useful person to listen to on this, partly because of scale. He has 1.2 million LinkedIn followers, owns The Creator Accelerator, and co-owns SayWhat, a company that analyses millions of posts weekly.

What he told Forbes contributor Jodie Cook in January is the part coaches keep missing. LinkedIn's update, which Donnelly said is called 360 Brew, "now shows your content more accurately to your ICP if you give it the right signals." His advice is to set your profile up so it looks like a specific job within a specific sector.

Your profile is now part of the ranking

This is the structural change. The algorithm reads your headline, about section and experience to verify your authority before it distributes your posts. If your content topic doesn't match your stated expertise, LinkedIn limits how far the post travels: a healthcare professional posting about cryptocurrency will see distribution drop because the platform questions whether they know the subject.

For coaches, that's a problem of their own making. The generic multi-hyphen headline — coach, speaker, author, founder,投资者 of nothing in particular — reads to a language model as somebody with no verifiable domain at all.

Why saves became the signal

When someone bookmarks your post, LinkedIn interprets it as content worth coming back to. That is a different instruction to creators than "get engagement." A like rewards a hook. A save rewards something referenceable.

Third-party analysts have been circling the same conclusion. AuthoredUp's data indicates saves drive around five times more reach than a like and twice that of a comment, and LinkedIn added Saves and Sends to post analytics in late 2025. Check yours. Most coaches have never opened that number.

Consistency, not volume. And skip the polls.

Donnelly's position on timing is unsentimental: "There has never been a golden hour," he says, and posting consistently "isn't about the algorithm directly. It's so your audience expects you to post then, and can conveniently engage."

Polls, the old reach cheat code, get a warning. He says they are "top for reach but very low for follower growth or conversion." Document carousels now face penalties for low completion rates, which means eight to ten slides maximum and real visual storytelling. Hashtag stuffing does nothing, because the system now scans the actual text of your posts to categorise them.

One caveat on links

The January reporting said links can now be in posts. By summer, Cook's reporting had shifted. Her July piece reported reduced reach for outbound links, even in comments, as the platform prioritises keeping readers on-site.

So test it on your own account rather than inheriting a rule from a screenshot.

The volume problem is the real context here. LinkedIn has roughly 320 million monthly active users, and around 3 million people create content, producing some 2 million posts, articles and videos a day. Donnelly's verdict: "it's still a massively outsized opportunity to generate leads if you adapt to the new style of what is working."