Understand the Conversation: Using Trends to Build a More Authentic LinkedIn Strategy

Starting your work day with coffee in hand, does your LinkedIn feed look a little something like this: 

• LinkedIn gurus touting grandiose claims (“Hack that algorithm with AI in just 342 steps!”) 
• Fed up and overwhelmed peers, fighting for their lives (*running 30 marketing campaigns across 30 channels, yet nothing works*)
• Robotic business reposts or AI-generated sales content (“We’re honored to announce our newest award…”)

…With a small handful of candid, funny, and valuable LinkedIn content sprinkled in?

We might be oversimplifying for dramatic effect, but there’s a kernel of truth here. Much of Linkedin content is less than helpful, because it’s challenging to show up there in an authentic and meaningful way. So, most follow the leader — repeating buzzwords and business bro hacks or lurking from the sidelines then logging off.

Let’s build a more intentional and human LinkedIn strategy in 2025 by leaving behind empty hooks and meaningless fluff.

We’ll go deep into this topic in our two-part series: Conversation, Content, and Connection: Using Trends to Build a More Authentic LinkedIn Strategy; where we’ll cover:

• Conversation: Learn how to discover trending topics on LinkedIn and beyond to open authentic conversations with your peers and prospects. 
• Content: Join the conversation with comments, original thought leadership posts, and integrated marketing content.
• Connection: Use those trending topics and content to engage your audience and grow your network and customer base.

If you find it hard to understand what your audience is looking for, you’re not alone! Recent MarketingProfs research found that 29% of marketers struggle with doing effective audience research. So, in this piece, we start with conversation by helping you learn what your customers are talking about and forever solve the ‘what should we post’ dilemma. 

Skip ahead to part two: content and connections. 

Balancing LinkedIn trends, automation, and authenticity  

LinkedIn is a lot like an in-person networking event. At any mixer, you want to find “your people,” learn from their experience, introduce your business, and advance your professional goals — not to collect a certain number of business cards or handshakes. 

In the same way, you’ll get more out of LinkedIn when you show up to build a meaningful and memorable connection, rather than rack up “likes.” 

By searching for your audiences’ trending topics (their key questions, concerns, and opportunities), you can understand, share, banter, and brainstorm on LinkedIn in a more authentic way. Best of all, you can do it at a scale that’s impossible in person. 

Let’s quickly double-tap on that last part: Is scaling through smart strategy and automation at odds with authenticity? 

We don’t think so. The right strategy and automation approach unlock authenticity by simplifying the time-consuming but necessary tasks that go in:

• Finding new voices, industry leaders, or potential customers.
• Introducing yourself or your business at the highest level.
• Sharing your expertise and differentiation with a larger audience.
• Understanding how you can make customers’ jobs or lives easier, better, or more profitable. 

Automating these common LinkedIn goals frees us to be focused and present for the valuable and connected work of adding value to an ongoing conversation, finding common ground, and forging real relationships. 

The first step to strategize and automate effectively is finding your audience’s questions, controversies, opportunities, and pain points. Then, you can create content that speaks directly to these topics, grabbing attention and initiating commentary, without coming across as salesy. 

Follow our audience research and LinkedIn social listening process to make consistent, customer-focused content creation less painful and more rewarding. This process starts internally with knowledge you already have, then moving outward to LinkedIn and external research tools.

Step 1: Look inward to build a customer-centered content strategy

Before you uncover the hottest topics on LinkedIn, you need to start closer to home by getting grounded in your own expertise and the needs of your customers. Remembering those things will point you in the direction of the kinds of topics that are relevant to your audience so you can comment on what matters to them (and likely stay out of the debates that don’t).

What you know: Topic curation from your daily experiences

First, take a step back and think about your own conversations, questions, and challenges navigating your industry and customer interactions. 

Start a topic list by considering: 

• What questions do you regularly answer?
• What advice do you frequently offer?
• What common aggravations do you hear?
• Where do you offer the most expertise and value? 
• What strongly held opinions do you have or hills will you die on?
• What was your favorite recent speaking session or webinar?

Answer these questions in a stream-of-conscious format to narrow down the key topics or questions you have the most experience and authority answering. 

What your customers know: Internal research from your interactions

Next, grow your topic list using internal research that is unique to your company and differentiates you from others in your space. 

Here are a few great starting points:

• Talk to others within sales and customer success: What common questions or objections do your colleagues receive? What gets customers most excited?
• Talk to customer service or the help desk and listen to recorded calls: What common frustrations do customers face? Where do they get stuck and need support?
• Check in with marketing: What campaign topics are most successful? What website content is most popular, and what generates the highest conversions?
• Lean on internal research: What original research or data does your company produce or have available? 

Combine these data points with your individual introspection and distill them into 3-5 key themes (AKA content pillars). This is your framework to consistently share findings, expertise, and perspectives, instead of jumping on every trend or viral moment. 

Stage 2: Start to find trends on Linkedin

Users’ LinkedIn feeds are personalized to include relevant influencers and trending topics — which is to your advantage! 

By using LinkedIn’s native features and external tools to understand on- and off-platform conversations, you can start showing up to share expertise in a natural and organic way.

Here are three of our favorite tools to find LinkedIn trends in 2025.

1. LinkedIn News – finding LinkedIn trends in 2025

From The Daily Rundown, to Today’s News & Views, and the news banner, LinkedIn offers multiple formats to source news and trending articles on both the desktop and mobile app experiences. 

The best part? Clicking an article reveals a list of “Top Perspectives” or “Editors Picks” curated by the LinkedIn’s editorial team — users who shared the news and their insights on the topic and received high levels of engagement.  

Think of these Top Perspectives as a cheat sheet of highly active conversations happening on-platform. You can follow the influencers, engage in the conversation, or repost with your thoughts. 

For articles that are highly relevant to your industry or audience, go a step further by using an automation tool like Expandi to find and follow the audience engaging with the post to curate a more relevant LinkedIn feed. 

2. LinkedIn Search 

Whereas LinkedIn news is autogenerated by breaking news and business trends, LinkedIn Search lets you seek out content, based on narrow, topical interest. 

LinkedIn’s content search engine uses semantic search capabilities to return hyper-relevant results for complex, multi-word, and natural language queries. 

Remember those key topics you identified? They’ll come in handy here as you search for them.

For example, if you search for “Lead Generation” and don’t apply any filters, your search results will return separate, curated content sections for:

• People with lead generation keywords in their job title or profile. Filter further by first, second, and third connections. 
• People asked, returning collaborative articles in a question/answer format. 
• Posts with filters for “from my network” or timeframes (past 24 hours/past week). 
• Services showing lead generation service providers and a “Request Services” button. 
• Products showing lead generation tools and solutions, linking to business pages.
• Groups focused on lead generation and similar strategies.
• Courses to improve your lead generation skills.

Plus, LinkedIn returns additional content blocks to ask people about lead generation, find new roles or potential job candidates, see upcoming events, or add like-minded professionals to your network. 

And that only scratches the surface. Apply deeper filters to narrow results and find hyper-focused content and audiences.  

Pro tip: Filters display across the top of mobile and desktop search experiences. Selecting “All Filters” opens up a right-side panel to easily combine filters. 

Example in Action

For example, imagine you sell a Lead Generation SaaS tool. 

Your sales rep searches “Lead Generation” and filters to “People”. From there, they:

• Filter further by location, narrowing the list to potential customers in their territory.
• Filter by 1st Connections to find people more likely to answer their messages.
• Or, filter by Connections Of a recent customer, to find connected individuals, in the hopes that name-dropping their mutual connection might open up conversations. 

Your product marketing lead, on the other hand, searches “Lead Generation” and:

• Filters to Posts to see active conversations about lead generation. 
• Filters by Mentioning Company name, returning posts where their product is mentioned. 
• Filters by Content Type to narrow the search to posts with images mentioning their product. 

Once sales or marketing narrows the search result to a desired volume, they can copy that search into Expand.io to build curated lists and create an automated campaign to reach out to each individual. 

Sales might introduce their product to their campaign list, whereas marketing might invite the people talking about their product to participate in a user group. 

The best part? Everyone running these searches gains a treasure trove of people who may have posted or commented about the topic in question or other related ones, so you can keep getting inspired by new trending ideas.

3. People also searched for

Like Google, LinkedIn autogenerates a list of related searches for each search query to help you discover related content. 

Click these related terms to widen your search, find new thought leaders, and approach the topic from a new angle. 

The additional search terms and conversations will reveal new perspectives, questions, needs, roles, and pain points. 

Use these keywords and phrases in LinkedIn posts, DMs, and marketing content to expand your audience and mirror their phrasing for more personal outreach. 

Whether it’s to find prospective customers, chime in on conversations, or hear the good, bad, and ugly to inform product development, LinkedIn enables professionals to better understand their audience and achieve target outcomes. 

Stage 3: Conduct external research to find industry trends to share on LinkedIn

You’ve combed LinkedIn to see what’s trending in your network and beyond. Next, let’s take our search off the platform to find additional trending industry topics and ideas to write more authentically in your space. These four tools will get you started.

1. Google Trends  

Using a scale of 0-100, Google Trends measures search query popularity (which signals trends) over time and can be filtered by date, location, category, and type of search (e.g. web, image, Google Shopping, or YouTube search).

Use Google Trends to compare search queries, measure topical interest, and see Related Queries to find new angles. Generate post ideas under your content pillars, and search for thought leaders and conversations on LinkedIn. 

Plenty of factors impact search volume, from the seasons to entertainment and breaking news. Try newsjacking or trendjacking by piggybacking on a trending news topic and putting your spin on it, to capitalize on higher levels of public interest. 

2. SEO research tools

SEO research tools can uncover everything from audience, search, competitor, topic, and market research tools to AI assistants, brand monitoring, and influencer analytics. 

Analyze keyword research to understand topical interest and keyword/phrase variations to find deeper information on a particular topic. Take note of common questions and gaps that your expertise can fill, and add these to your pillar framework.

Use Competitive Research tools to analyze competitors’ top-ranking content and keywords, looking for what’s performing well and what’s missing. Then, reverse engineer their strategy by creating LinkedIn posts that provide a more complete, bold, or practical approach to solving the problem. 

Dig deep to look for polarizing debates, unanswered questions, prickly points-of-view, and popular misconceptions to inform your LinkedIn content and customer outreach strategy.  

3. Audience Research Tools 

Audience research tools like SparkToro offer a detailed look at your audience’s sources of influence — the content, brands, phrases, and people that hold their interest. 

For example, use SparkToro to analyze:

• Behaviors: places users go online including websites, subReddits, podcasts, and search terms.
• Characteristics: topics of interest, commonly viewed content pages, apps and tools, and how users describe themselves in bios.
• Demographics: salary information, geography, years of experience, job titles, gender, age, interests, and more.
• Contact information for selected publications, podcasts, YouTube channels, and people. 

Uncover the websites, media, and thought leaders most influential to your audience. Then, find their LinkedIn business pages and thought leader profiles to follow and add to your network. Read their content, newsjack trending topics, show up in the comment feeds, and brainstorm content creation and syndication ideas. 

You can also use Expandi to generate prospect lists to follow or connect with influencers and their audience. Then, stay active in your new connections’ feeds by automating likes, comments, and profile views, helping you open the door to deeper conversations.  

4. Industry Associations, Media, and Slack Groups 

Read industry websites and publications to understand the news, events, concerns, and opportunities within your niche. Sign up for their newsletters to cut through the noise and get a curated list of content straight to your inbox. 

You can also participate in industry associations and attend in-person events to find thought leaders, grow your network, and uncover key challenges and opportunities. 

Finally, we’ve had great success joining industry Slack Groups and participating in the conversations there, before connecting and conversing on LinkedIn. When membership is industry-specific and by invite only, participants frequently share most candid, honest thoughts. They open up about  their grievances, issues, ambitions, and exciting news in a more informal way on Slack than they might on a public channel like LinkedIn. 

Then, follow up after events or active Slack Threads with personalized messages. Expandi makes it easy to dynamically insert personalized details (like event names,  or Slack thread conversation points) into connection requests or follow-ups. 

Create LinkedIn conversations or posts that show a nuanced understanding of customer workflows, strategies, and concerns. That’s how you’ll gain trust, credibility, and name recognition faster and more organically. 

Bonus tip: Google! 

This is a no brainer, but Google indexes LinkedIn results very well, by adding “site:linkedin.com” to any search query. 

Compare LinkedIn search results to Google’s to get ideas of topical coverage and content that the great Google overlords deem highest value. 

We know how to follow industry trends on linkedin — what’s next? 

LinkedIn doesn’t have to be a black hole of empty advice or boring announcements. It’s a powerful resource for uncovering customer insights and replacing generic sales tactics with memorable, one-on-one interactions in your space.

Use audience research and social listening to find the trends and topics your customers are talking about. Then, create expert posts, comment your two-cents, and personalize connections to open authentic conversations with peers on LinkedIn. 

Expandi enhances this process, automating key tasks and freeing you to focus on building meaningful relationships. Sign up for a free seven-day trial today or contact us to chat with a team member. Up next: get part two of our series focusing on connections and content. Now that you’ve found LinkedIn and other audience trends, turn those insights into thoughtful comments, successful posts, integrated marketing content, and personalized connections.