How to Use LinkedIn’s New Collaboration Posts Feature and Why Small to Medium Brands Should Pay Attention
LinkedIn debuted a new Collaborative Posts feature at Cannes Lions 2026, and it's a bigger deal than it sounds.
Here's the gist: two or more accounts (personal profiles, company pages, or both) can now co-author a single post together. Every collaborator's name shows up at the top, and the post publishes to all of their networks at once instead of living on just one feed. Right now, it's in limited testing with a small group of creators and brands, but LinkedIn has said wider access is rolling out over the coming months.
How it works
Once it's live on your account, you build the post like normal, then add collaborators through the platform, similar to Instagram’s feature launched in 2021. They get an invite, and once they accept, the post goes live across everyone's profile at the same time, with all names listed together at the top.
A few things worth knowing as it rolls out:
It works for personal profiles and company pages
Engagement pools across everyone's audience instead of splitting between separate posts
Page admins need to turn on collaboration settings before a page can be tagged
LinkedIn hasn't confirmed yet how many collaborators a single post can have, or whether everyone gets full access to analytics
Why this matters for small to medium businesses
It's easy to assume a feature like this is built for big brands and celebrity creators. It's actually a much bigger opportunity for smaller teams. Here’s why:
You don't have a big budget for paid reach, but you do have people. Most SMBs are sitting on an underused asset: the founder, the ops lead, the customer success manager who actually has relationships with your audience. Collaborative posts let you combine your company page's credibility with a real person's network, instead of choosing one or the other.
Personal profiles already outperform company pages. Data from Metricool's 2026 LinkedIn study found personal profiles see a 63% higher engagement rate than company pages, with 238% more comments per post. Smaller brands have always known this informally. This feature finally gives you a native way to act on it instead of just posting the same thing twice from two accounts.
It's a natural fit for partnerships. If you're a CPG brand working with a co-packer, an affiliate, a collaborator on a product launch, or even a creator partner, this is built for exactly that moment. Instead of two disconnected posts that split engagement, you get one shared post with both audiences seeing it at once.
It rewards the work you're already doing. Founder storytelling, team milestones, product launches. These are the moments smaller brands tend to undersell because the post lives on a company page with limited reach. Collaborative posts put the right name next to the company page and let both audiences see it together.
What to do now:
You don't need access today to get ready for it.
Make sure a super admin on your company page has collaboration settings turned on once they're available
Start identifying who on your team should be the "face" behind key announcements: launches, partnerships, milestones
Look at your current content calendar and flag the posts that would benefit most from a shared byline (think product launches, partner collabs, or team wins)
The brands that figure out their collaboration strategy early will have a head start once this rolls out to more users. If you want help building that strategy into your content calendar, let's talk.
