After building a community of nearly 150,000 followers, I’ve learned that LinkedIn works best when you treat it as a living portfolio and a carefully curated network, not a digital resume.
By: Megan Clarke, Talent Acquisition & HR Manager, Open Influence
If you polled creator marketing professionals about their favorite platform of the moment, there are overwhelming frontrunners. My colleagues in this industry live on Instagram, TikTok, and Meta—platforms built around velocity, virality, and the endless scroll.
LinkedIn, by contrast, has a reputation as the platform you dust off when you’re polishing your resume or posting a “thrilled to announce” update nobody asked for.
As I reluctantly claim my title of LinkedInfluencer on the platform everyone loves to hate (LinkedIn calls us “Top Voices,” but I prefer a bit more whimsy), I’d like to make the case that we’ve been using it wrong—in two specific ways.
Most people reduce LinkedIn to an online resume and job board, missing its potential as a living portfolio of their work and the story behind it. Others log on, find the feed noisy and irrelevant, and abandon it without realizing that one structural decision can completely change the experience.
Over the last five years, I’ve built a community of nearly 150,000 followers on LinkedIn. Here’s what I figured out.
The Portfolio Problem
My career has moved through a lot of rooms over the last decade. I’ve worked in public-sector arts and higher education. I’ve built teams of artists, programmers, and writers for PlayStation titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Wolverine. I’ve staffed animated productions at Disney Television Animation, helping connect creatives with projects that reach millions of fans. Today, at Open Influence, I lead recruiting for an agency whose entire business is helping brands tell authentic stories through the power of creators and their audiences.
My resume holds the bullet points: a decade of work summed up in ATS expertise, hiring metrics, org charts, and KPIs.
My LinkedIn holds the throughline. Across games, animation, higher education, and creator marketing, the common thread has been building smart, scalable recruiting programs and connecting storytellers with opportunities that allow them to do their best work. That’s a much harder story to tell in a resume. LinkedIn is a platform uniquely equipped to hold that narrative.
So I started treating my profile like a living portfolio rather than a career timeline. I add project links, articles, photos, and speaking engagements directly beneath each role. I celebrate launches and awards from the teams I’ve helped build, right alongside my own accomplishments. I document volunteer work that has shaped my perspective on community and mentorship. I update my Experience section regularly, even when I’m not job-seeking. Over time, my profile has become a living record of the teams I’ve built, the projects they’ve launched, and the people who’ve influenced me along the way.
The Network Problem
The part of my strategy that surprises people most isn’t what I post—it’s how I structure my network.
Most LinkedIn users treat followers and connections as interchangeable. They’re not.
LinkedIn allows you to choose which action visitors see first: Follow or Connect. Those options create fundamentally different relationships.
Followers consume your content. Connections shape your feed.
I keep my connections intentionally tight—fewer than 3,000 individuals. I typically only accept requests from direct collaborators, Talent Acquisition peers, and thought leaders whose perspectives consistently add value. My followers list, on the other hand, is open to anyone.
The result: my daily feed is a concentrated signal of what’s actually happening across my industries. Every day, I’m learning from recruiters, creators, executives, and industry experts whose work I trust. I then amplify those insights, conversations, and opportunities to an audience of 150,000 people who follow me because they find my lens valuable.
If your feed is noise, your content eventually becomes noise. If your feed is curated, you become a trusted filter—and in an era of information overload, trusted filters are increasingly valuable.
LinkedIn rewards consistency of purpose more than consistency of posting. My audience didn’t grow because I showed up with original content every day. It grew because every time I showed up, I was there for the same reason—to share something genuinely useful, amplify high-quality content, celebrate people doing great work, and make my unconventional creative career path a little more visible for the people coming up behind me.
If you work in creator marketing and you’ve written LinkedIn off as the boring one—I get it. But we spend our days helping clients tell stories and build authentic audiences from the inside out. It might be worth asking why we haven’t done the same for ourselves.