LinkedIn is changing as a platform, but it's still the best place to find verified professional audiences. If your target clients are executives at KPMG, tech professionals, or business owners, they're on LinkedIn during work hours because their companies are telling them to be.
In this episode of Craft on Tap, Faustin Weber and Stephen Beach share what's actually working right now: the 'Waffle House' strategy for commenting (yes, really), why you should stop engaging with other advisors' posts, and the latest algorithm updates heading into 2026.
👇 Watch the full discussion below:
LinkedIn feels like a love-hate relationship for most advisors (and marketers). Faustin calls it his "arch nemesis" because while it's incredible for professional development and finding verified prospects, the platform has made it much harder to get organic impressions without paying.
Posts that used to reach most of a user's followers now only reach a fraction, sometimes just 10% of the total follower count. LinkedIn has even started showing messages prompting users to "boost your post" just to reach their own followers.
But what hasn't changed? LinkedIn remains the best place to find professionals like KPMG executives, tech employees, and business owners. Faustin shares that he once spoke with a KPMG executive whose company was actively pushing employees to post and engage on LinkedIn during work hours. That's the green light advisors need. Their prospects are on the platform, and they know when they're most active.
The data (meaning the people and their profiles) is more identifiable and accurate on LinkedIn than on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. When someone books a discovery call, advisors can research them easily. When trying to understand a target audience better, LinkedIn provides verified professional information that other platforms simply don't offer.
Before worrying about what to post, an advisor's profile needs to convert viewers into followers. Faustin calls these the "table stakes" of LinkedIn marketing. The nonnegotiables include:
As Faustin puts it, "Your profile page is like another website page for you. We want that to be an incredible first impression." Think about all the work that goes into commenting, engaging, and creating awareness across LinkedIn. When that effort finally drives someone to click on a profile, everything needs to be dialed in to convert that view into a follower or connection.
The "About" section matters too, along with making sure credentials and experience are up to date. But those three elements (profile photo, headline, and banner) are the foundation. Get those right before anything else.
This is where LinkedIn gets interesting. Faustin introduces the "Waffle House" analogy, and it's brilliant.
Waffle House researches where Walmart builds stores, then sets up locations on the high-traffic roads leading to those Walmarts. Why? Because they know Walmart shoppers are their ideal customers. They're targeting the same demographic, and they want to capture that foot traffic.
On LinkedIn, advisors need to find their "Walmarts" (the big accounts and influencers their target audience follows) and set up their "Waffle House" by leaving high-value comments on those posts.
The strategy works like this:
The beauty of this strategy? The comment sits there for days as the post continues to get traffic. If it's good enough, LinkedIn will surface it to the top of the comments, and advisors keep getting profile views long after they hit "post." People scroll through, see the original post, then look at the top comments to see what others are saying. That's where advisors want to be positioned.
Faustin is passionate about this approach: "If you can spend 10 to 15 minutes a day just doing like three or four or five comments, it goes so far." LinkedIn's algorithm rewards reciprocity. Comment before and after posting your own content. You'll get engagement not just from the people you commented on, but from their audiences too.
Stephen adds that if advisors commit to 30 minutes of commenting before they post and 30 minutes after, they will see a guaranteed spike in impressions and profile views. Craft Impact has seen this with clients over and over. The data doesn't lie.
Advice from Kendra Wright and Taylor Schulte might sound harsh but makes strategic sense: filter other financial advisors out of the feed.
Advisors naturally want to stay connected with peers and learn from others. But if they're serious about business development, they have limited time and mental bandwidth. Every minute spent engaging with another advisor's content is time not spent in front of target clients.
Think about it this way: An advisor has maybe 10 to 20 minutes to scroll LinkedIn and engage with content. If their feed is filled with posts from other advisors talking about practice management, marketing strategies, or industry trends, that's valuable for professional development. But it's not helping them get in front of prospects.
The solution: Advisors can still stay connected with other advisors, just filter them so they don't appear in the feed. That way, when logging in, they're only seeing posts from the people they want to prospect or the influencers those people follow. This ensures that limited engagement time is spent strategically.
One exception: if someone is in a role like Faustin's where professional development is literally part of the job, they get a pass to follow other marketers and industry peers. But for advisors responsible for business development? Focus the feed on prospects.
Another tip from Samantha Russell that Faustin loves: block 15 minutes every Friday to connect with everyone met with that week. Over time, this systematically grows an audience with the right people (prospects and clients who know the advisor and want to stay connected). It's simple, systematic, and effective. The beauty is that it makes perfect sense why an advisor would connect with someone they just met. No weird outreach message needed. Just: "Great meeting with you this week. I'd love to connect here on LinkedIn."
Justine Czeka coined the term "Marketing Waiting Room," and it's changed how Craft Impact thinks about LinkedIn content.
Most people (95%) aren't in the "Sales Waiting Room" ready to hire an advisor right now. They're in the Marketing Waiting Room, meaning they're aware of the advisor or their firm, but they're not actively looking. The job is to occupy mental real estate so that when they do need an advisor, the firm is top of mind.
Think about it as trying to lock the advisor away in the prospect's brain as the person associated with a particular topic or challenge. Then, when that prospect eventually moves into the Sales Waiting Room and is ready to compare vendors or actively look for an advisor, the firm is already on the shortlist.
The content mix Craft Impact recommends:
Marketing Waiting Room (5 posts): Educational content, storytelling, solving complex challenges prospects face. This is where advisors build trust and demonstrate expertise without selling. Talk about the complexities that the target audience struggles with. Share stories (without using actual client names) about how those challenges were solved. Educate and differentiate at the same time.
Sales Waiting Room (1 post): Client testimonials, team spotlights, firm differentiators, new service announcements. This is bottom-of-funnel content for people ready to move forward.
Use a 5:1 ratio. Don't just talk about the firm and services all the time. That's exhausting for audiences and doesn't build the brand equity needed to stay top of mind. Give value, tell stories, and weave in personal reflections.
One Craft Impact client wrote about hiring a personal trainer and related his hesitancy to dive into something new to how prospects feel about getting financial help. There were real emotional challenges in that decision: accountability, vulnerability, not knowing if he could do it himself. He integrated that beautifully into a discussion about how his target audience struggles with similar feelings when seeking financial advice. It was personal storytelling woven into educational content, and it performed incredibly well.
Faustin notes: "The best posts on LinkedIn are ones that weave some personal storytelling into the educational learning." It's a high bar, but those are the posts that continue to perform best.
Based on data from Richard van der Blom, a LinkedIn algorithm researcher (Faustin's 'friend from Europe' - they've never met, but Faustin follows his work closely), what's working in late 2025 heading into 2026:
Video Posts Are Down: Short-form video reach is down 36% and engagement is down 23% compared to earlier in 2024. Video had a huge bump last year, but LinkedIn has neutralized that advantage. Video isn't dead, but it's not getting the algorithmic boost it used to.
Text-and-Image Posts Are Up: Standard posts with an infographic, selfie, or image are up 15% in engagement compared to 2023. These are performing well right now. A compelling image paired with strong text remains effective.
Long-Form Articles Are Surging: LinkedIn newsletters and articles are up 48% in reach and 45% in engagement. If advisors have lengthy disclosures or want to write deeper content, articles are a great format. They keep people on the platform longer, and LinkedIn is rewarding that behavior. Craft Impact recently used a LinkedIn article for an announcement that required three pages of disclosures. It was a nice way to thread the needle of keeping people on LinkedIn while meeting compliance requirements.
External Links Are Less Penalized: Posts with external links are up 6% in reach. LinkedIn used to heavily suppress them, but that's easing. Interestingly, posts with three or more external links (think: providing multiple resources) are doing even better than posts with just one link. That said, advisors should still keep the core value on the platform when possible.
Stephen notes that if advisors are linking externally just to push people to their website without giving value first (like "Check out our tax planning page"), those posts will still underperform. Give the value in the post itself. If a link adds context through references, resources, or additional reading, that's fine. But don't make the entire post a vehicle to drive traffic off LinkedIn. The algorithm still doesn't love that, and more importantly, audiences don't love it.
Everyone asks: "When's the best time to post on LinkedIn?"
The real answer? It doesn't matter as much as advisors think. Craft Impact has seen posts perform well on Saturday afternoons and poorly on Tuesday mornings at 9 AM. The algorithm has changed so much that timing is less important than consistency, engagement, and the quality of the content itself.
Faustin's take: "We usually err on like Tuesday to Thursday in the morning, late morning being a pretty good timeframe." But the bigger point is that advisors shouldn't obsess over finding the perfect time slot.
What matters more: pick a time that works for the schedule so commenting can bookend the post. If an advisor posts at 8:30 AM on Tuesday and has 30 minutes before to comment on other people's posts and 30 minutes after to reply to anyone who comments on theirs, that's infinitely better than stressing about whether Tuesday at 8:30 AM is better than Thursday at 4 PM.
Also, don't forget to reply to everyone who comments on posts within the first hour. That reciprocity signals to LinkedIn that the post is generating engagement, which prompts the algorithm to show it to more people. Engagement begets engagement. If someone takes the time to comment, thank them. Add to their comment. Ask a follow-up question. Keep that conversation going.
Treating LinkedIn like an afterthought won't help you grow your business. Having an action plan keeps you on track.
The action plan:
Your LinkedIn strategy should make sense for you, your brand, and your audience. But that gets tricky when what's working and what isn't working is changing this quickly. This conversation is only a starting point.
Whether you are looking to build a Waffle House strategy or just want to know where to find your "Walmarts," we are here to help. For more insights on growing your RIA through digital marketing, listen to Craft on Tap. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts.
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