LinkedIn for speakers: what the new network feed changes

LinkedIn announced on 15 October 2026, in a post introducing new features, that it is testing a dedicated Network feed showing posts from your connections and from people you follow. The test is rolling out in select markets, starting with the USA, India, the UK and Australia, and in the same announcement LinkedIn presents a creator dashboard that will roll out globally in the coming weeks. For speakers who want to reach organisers and programme committees through LinkedIn, this moves their own network to the front, because a feed of this kind shows your posts to the people who are connected to you or follow you. The announcement says nothing about a change to the main feed, and you can use the time until any wider rollout to build connections with the people who decide on the programmes of the conferences you want to speak at.

LinkedIn is testing a Network feed in four countries

According to LinkedIn, the Network feed is a dedicated feed with posts from your connections and the people you follow. The announcement places it among a set of features meant to help members nurture professional relationships and build an audience around their expertise. In the FAQ further down the same page the UK is missing from the list of test countries, which names only three.

The announcement leaves open whether the Network feed appears as an additional view alongside the existing feed, how it orders posts and when further countries will follow. LinkedIn gives no date for Germany, Austria or Switzerland. What was announced is therefore a test in four markets, from which no change to the algorithm for all members can be read.

For speakers based in Germany the test still matters. Many international conferences are organised in exactly these countries, and if you submit to calls for papers in the USA or the UK, you deal with organisers who may be among the first to see the Network feed. A call for papers is the public announcement with which a conference collects talk proposals. The programme committee decides on them.

Alongside the feed, LinkedIn announces a global creator dashboard

In LinkedIn's words, the creator dashboard is meant to let creators understand more easily what is working in their content and find everything around it in one place. It will roll out globally in the coming weeks, and in the app you reach it through your profile picture at the top left. The announcement does not describe which metrics it contains.

Through the dashboard, eligible creators can also join a programme for in-stream ads and earn revenue when pre-roll ads run before their videos, meaning short commercials shown before the video itself. LinkedIn is testing this with select creators and advertisers in the USA. Advice Sessions are also limited to the USA for now: they let you offer 1:1 advice directly from your profile, with LinkedIn handling booking and payment and hosting the video call. They are open to Business Premium subscribers, with more markets coming soon.

Several smaller features, which are useful at conferences, are announced globally. A digital business card that you can add to your phone's wallet will arrive over the coming months. There are also private notes on profiles for Premium subscribers, in which you can record where you met someone, as well as pinned comments, with which authors can place a helpful comment above all the others.

The figure on creators describes many speakers quite precisely, since anyone who speaks at conferences as a consultant or managing director writes on LinkedIn alongside their actual job.

In the Network feed you are seen by those connected to you or following you

In the existing feed a post can also reach people who do not know you, because LinkedIn distributes it beyond your network. A feed of connections and people you follow draws that line more tightly. The organiser you met at a conference will only read your next post there if you are connected or she follows you.

Programme makers are rare in most speakers' networks. Most speakers write to organisers by email or submit through a portal without connecting with them on LinkedIn afterwards. How to approach organisers directly is covered in Contacting conference organisers directly, and what a committee reads during selection is set out in What a programme committee looks for.

A sample calculation shows how often programme committees see your posts

Suppose that your LinkedIn network today includes 30 people who shape the programmes of conferences relevant to you, such as organisers, committee members or the leads of individual tracks. Suppose further that a post of yours appears in the Network feed of one in five of them, because not all of them open the app on that day. These 20 per cent are a working assumption, since LinkedIn has published no figure for this, and you replace it, like every value here, with your own.

You give six talks a year and write one post before and one after each, plus two expert posts a month. That makes 36 posts. With 30 programme makers and a visibility rate of 20 per cent, each post reaches six of them, which adds up to 216 touchpoints over the year, and on paper each of these people sees you about seven times.

Now the second scenario: after every conference you connect with ten people from the organising team and the committee whom you spoke to on site. After six talks you have 90 programme makers in your network. At the same visibility rate each post reaches 18 of them, and 36 posts turn into 648 touchpoints a year. You write just as much as before and meet the people who decide on programmes three times as often, because a Network feed looks only at your network.

The committee decides on a submission on the basis of the abstract, the short description of your planned talk. A name the members recognise from their feed does make a submission easier to place, however, and an invitation outside the call often comes about when someone thinks of you as a slot in the programme opens up.

Posts before and after the talk reach organisers through your network

The post before the talk announces topic and date and links to the conference programme. It shows the organisers that you are promoting their conference, and it reaches people in your network who plan programmes themselves.

The post afterwards carries more weight. It shows what you spoke about and which questions came from the audience, and so demonstrates that your topic works in front of a room. With a pinned comment you can bring the link to your slides or the recording to the top, so that it does not get lost among the reactions. How such posts grow into a brand is described in Personal brand as a speaker.

Use the creator dashboard to measure which speaker posts work

As soon as the dashboard appears in your account, make a habit of looking at it after every talk. Compare the posts before and after the event with your expert posts and note which kind gets more response. Since the announcement does not list the dashboard's metrics in detail, check what it shows when you first open it, and then choose two or three values to follow over the year. Alongside this, note after each conference how many programme makers are in your network, because that number is the starting value of the calculation above.

Five steps speakers can take now to grow their LinkedIn network

1. Count the organisers and committee members you are already connected with, and write the number down.
2. Within a few days of every conference, connect with the people from the organising team and the committee you spoke to, and mention the occasion in your request.
3. Write one post before and one after each talk, tag the conference and pin the link to your slides or recording as a comment.
4. Set up the digital business card as soon as it is available in your account, so that contacts made on site land directly on LinkedIn.
5. Open the creator dashboard as soon as it appears, and after every talk compare your speaker posts with your expert posts.