How audiences get built · Part 2 of 4
The creators who did it well, and how.
Nineteen LinkedIn accounts that went from a profile nobody read to an audience that stayed. For most of them you can point at the month it changed. What changed was usually small: a new kind of post, kept up.
September 2026 · 8 min read
Susan Chen's typical post, in one month
August 2025. Eight years of near silence before it, thirteen months of growth after.
Howard Chi's typical post, March 2023
Up from one the month before. One short video set the pattern he has kept for three and a half years.
Arfa Farheen's wait
Eighteen months with a typical post scoring 40 to 250 before the account paid off.
The shape they all share
A long flat stretch, a change you can date, then a new level that holds. Find the date, then read what came after it.
01 · The shape
Flat, then a turn, then it holds
We picked nineteen LinkedIn accounts: seven with more than 50,000 followers and twelve with fewer. Each has a typical post that rose and stayed up. And each has a date you can point at.
Two words first. A post’s score is its engagement: reactions (likes and the other buttons), comments and reposts, added together. The typical post is the median: the one in the middle when you line them all up by score. If you pay a creator, plan on the typical post, not the lucky one.
Look for the shape below first. Follower count comes last.
Flat
Years of posting to almost nobody. Sometimes the account is not posting at all.
The turn
One month. Something about the posts changes.
Holds
The typical post settles at a new level and stays there.
Susan Chen
Jul → Aug 2025
2→72
Twenty carousels a month instead of one post.
Howard Chi
Feb → Mar 2023
1→957
One short video, then 15 to 24 posts a month ever since.
Oana Labes
Jun → Aug 2022
12→143
Document carousels instead of plain text.
02 · The dead accounts
Eight years of nothing, then thirteen months of growth
Susan Chen has 76,653 followers. For eight years she posted invitations to meditation classes and almost nobody answered. In August 2025 one post a month became twenty.
She switched to image carousels, a post made of several pictures you swipe through. Her typical post went from 2 to 72 that month, climbed for thirteen months in a row and reached 3,500 to 4,000 in 2026.
Susan Chen, typical post by year
median engagement per calendar year · 449 posts
The turn is August 2025. The 2025 column is built from 122 posts and the 2026 column from 249.
Howard Chi has 77,536 followers and eight silent years of his own. On 9 February 2023 he posted a video with a caption of just 110 characters: “Who can relate? Tag someone who needs to see this.” It scored more than 1,000. From then on, 15 to 24 posts a month. His typical post over the last twelve months scores 1,390.
Susan Chen
susan-s-chen · 76,653 followers · 7 Jul 2026
Failure isn't final. Giving up is.
People wait for luck to find them…
Howard Chi
howardchi · 77,536 followers · 24 Oct 2023
Gone are the days when a hefty paycheck was the sole magnet…
One thing to know about Howard Chi. His two best posts ever, 32,901 and 31,428 in October 2023, carry the tag #postbooster, which is linked to paid groups whose members react to one another’s posts. The post above is one of them. The rest of his climb happened without them.
03 · Working harder
Posting more did nothing. Changing the format did everything.
Oana Labes has 423,257 followers and a typical post of 588 over the last twelve months. Before that, eight years of posts that typically got fewer than ten.
In May 2022 she started working harder: more posts, longer posts, still plain text. Nothing moved. In August 2022 she switched to document carousels, a PDF you swipe through page by page.
May 2022 · she posted more
- Posts a month2.7 → 10.7
- Characters per post568 → 1,701
- Formatplain text
25
typical post
Aug 2022 · she changed the format
- Formatdocument carousel
- Posts end with“unlock the free PDF”
- Share of all her engagement in 202353%
12→143→362
typical post, month by month
One warning. More than half of everything she has ever earned came in 2023. A format can peak, then wear out.
Year by year since then, her typical post has gone 1,525.5, 665.5, 666, 606.
Oana Labes
oanalabes · 423,257 followers · 5 May 2023
Accounting vs. Finance Cheat Sheet
Because Accounting is Not Finance.…
Arfa Farheen
arfa-farheen · 60,794 followers · 24 Jun 2025
Your LinkedIn profile is a goldmine. (But only if you know how to use it.)…
04 · One format, kept
Find one thing that works and do it every time
Arfa Farheen has 60,794 followers. She got there by steady work, not one spike. Her top ten posts make up only 7.5% of everything she has ever earned. What drives it is a handful of carousels she runs again every few months.
Daniel Hemhauser has 99,616 followers and a typical post of 634 over the last twelve months. He restarted in October 2024. The turn is December 2024. His posts grew from 794 to 1,263 characters, still plain text. Each one is a list of “I don’t” lines building to a point. One post he ran twice did better the second time.
Arfa Farheen
one carousel, three times
Jun 2025
3,427
Sep 2025
1,863
Jan 2026
2,039
Daniel Hemhauser
one text post, twice
May 2025
5,780
Jul 2025
9,272
Most people see a post once. Anyone who followed you after it went out never saw it. A post that already worked is worth running again.
The biggest accounts here did one thing over and over.
of Alex Xu's posts are one format
1,031,564 followers, built since January 2022 on a diagram of numbered steps ending with a link to a PDF. A diagram post typically scores 2,794, a text post 233.
of Saheli Chatterjee's lifetime engagement came in one year
In 2022 she switched to long, personal posts about her own life. She wrote 145 of them. The typical one scored 1,992.
of Saheli's lifetime engagement is her biggest post ever
A joke about a wedding scored 49,157. The format did the work, not the one big post.
Daniel Hemhauser
danielhemhauser · 99,616 followers · 16 Jul 2025
I don't care how many certifications you have.
I don't care how perfect your project plan looks…
lingabson
lingabson · 11,993 followers · 13 Aug 2026
The difficult stakeholder isn't always the problem. Your response to them might be…
05 · The small accounts
The same shape at a tenth of the size
Twelve accounts with between 10K and 50K followers show the same shape. They are named by handle, the end of their LinkedIn address.
Six turns in the 10K to 50K band
the typical post in the first month of the climb, next to the typical post in the latest month
monicafederico
lkpryzant
iamdavisnguyen
lingabson
vojtechvegh
paula-hansen
Every one of these climbs came from changing the posts, not from getting followers first.
Each has one specific kind of post. paula-hansen, President at Docusign, swapped links to other websites for pictures posted straight onto LinkedIn. jonrosemberg lays quotations out as images: a typical image post scores 499 and a text post 9. vojtechvegh, a chef working on food waste, found one carousel format and has kept to it for two years. lingabson writes one numbered list per post.
Posting more is not the point. danielylee halved his posting in 2025, from 63 posts to 22, and his typical post doubled anyway, from 224 to 571.
06 · What to do
Four things to check before you pay a creator
- 1
Find the date the account changed, then look at what came after.
A spike that fell back is not a turn. It is one lucky post.
- 2
Read how the posts end.
Eighty-two per cent of Oana Labes's posts and 93% of lkpryzant's end with the same request to like, comment or repost. If you pay them, that request will be part of your post too.
- 3
Prefer the account whose engagement is spread across many posts.
An account that lives on two posts can lose it all the next time LinkedIn changes what it shows people.
- 4
Do not pay for followers alone.
monicafederico went from 75 to 737 with the same number of followers. The posts changed. Nothing else did.
Sources · show
- Creator report, The creators who did it well, September 2026. Follower counts, turn dates, medians and caveats come from here.
- our post database: every post shown, and the yearly figures behind the Susan Chen chart. Susan Chen and three other creators promote one another’s posts. Her yearly figures before 2025 rest on one to eight posts each, apart from 2022, which had sixty-one.
- The Howard Chi post shown is one of his two #postbooster posts: 28,560 + 838 + 3,503 = 32,901.
- Two of lkpryzant's top fifteen posts are word-for-word repeats. danielylee's record rests on a single batch of data. ameliachristiemiller's videos score 123.5 against 278 for an image.
- Small-band follower counts are rounded as the report rounds them. Arfa Farheen's yearly figures are by calendar year; every other turn is dated to the month.
- Photographs: Pexels, free licence. The six posts shown are public LinkedIn posts, linked above.