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August 3, 2026 · 10 min read

LinkedIn 'Talks About' Topics for Thought Leaders

Your LinkedIn 'Talks About' hashtags aren't decoration—they tell the algorithm your lane. Here's how to choose 5 topics that get you surfaced for the right queries.

By Alexander Willard, Founder of Linvi

Most people treat the LinkedIn "Talks About" section like an afterthought. They slap on five hashtags at 11pm, pick whatever sounds impressive, and never think about it again. #leadership #innovation #growth #AI #entrepreneurship. Done.

That's a mistake, and it's costing you reach.

Your linkedin talks about hashtags are one of the few explicit signals you hand the platform about what you're an authority on. They sit right under your name. They shape which searches surface you. And in 2026, with LinkedIn's ranking engine leaning hard on semantic relevance, those five choices carry more weight than the average person realizes.

This is a positioning decision. Not a decoration. Let me show you how to make it deliberately.

What the 'Talks About' section actually does

When you switch on creator features, LinkedIn lets you list up to five topics under your name. Those become hashtags displayed on your profile — your public declaration of "this is my lane."

But the visible hashtags are the smaller half of the story. The bigger half is what happens behind the glass.

LinkedIn's recommendation system reads your profile as a bundle of signals: your headline, your About, your post history, your engagement patterns, and yes, your stated topics. It builds a model of what you're relevant for. When someone searches "fractional CFO for SaaS" or scrolls a feed the algorithm thinks matches their interests, your profile competes for that slot based on how tightly your signals cluster around the query.

Five topics that all point the same direction? Tight cluster. Strong signal. Five random buzzwords that contradict your headline? Muddy signal. You get shown to nobody in particular.

This is why I keep telling people to stop thinking about hashtags and start thinking about topical authority. If you want the deeper mechanics, we broke down how the ranking works in LinkedIn's 360Brew algorithm and profile reach. The short version: the engine rewards consistency. It wants to know, with confidence, who to show you to.

The buzzword trap (and why it kills your reach)

Here's the pattern I see constantly. A talented operator picks topics like:

Every single one is technically true. Every single one is useless.

Think about it from the algorithm's side. "Leadership" describes forty million profiles. It's so broad it carries almost no discriminating information. When someone searches for a specific problem — "how do I fix onboarding churn in B2B SaaS" — the word "leadership" doesn't help LinkedIn decide whether you are the answer.

Generic topics also fight your own positioning. If your headline says you help e-commerce brands cut customer acquisition costs, but your topics say "innovation" and "transformation," you've just handed the engine two different stories about who you are. It splits the difference and surfaces you for neither.

The fix isn't more topics. It's narrower, truer ones.

The 5-topic system: how to choose

Treat your five slots as a hierarchy, not a list. Here's the framework I use.

1. The category (what field you play in)

One slot goes to your broad category. This anchors you. #B2BSaaS or #CommercialRealEstate or #HealthTech. Yes, it's broad — but you're only spending one slot on breadth, and it tells the engine the neighborhood you live in.

2. Two signature topics (what you're specifically known for)

These are the heart of it. The one or two things you genuinely go deep on. Not what sounds prestigious — what you could talk about for an hour without notes.

If you're a demand-gen leader, maybe it's #PipelineMarketing and #AttributionModeling. Specific enough that when someone cares about exactly that, you're a strong match. Broad enough that you'll post about them weekly.

3. One audience or outcome topic (who you help, or what changes)

This connects you to the people searching for a result, not a discipline. #FounderLedSales or #RevOps or #ScalingStartups. It's the bridge between what you do and who needs it.

4. One adjacent topic (where you expand)

Your edge. The territory next door that makes your take distinctive. A supply-chain expert who also talks #Sustainability. A CFO who talks #EquityCompensation. This is where you stand out from people who share your first four.

Five slots. One anchor, two signatures, one audience, one edge. Every one of them earns its place.

Why they all have to echo each other

Here's the part almost everyone skips.

Your topics can't live on an island. They need to say the same thing as your headline, your banner, and your About section. When all four elements repeat the same core language, the algorithm gets a clean, reinforced signal — and human visitors get an instant, unmistakable read on who you are.

Let me make this concrete.

Before — signals pulling apart:

What's this person known for? No idea. The algorithm doesn't know either. This profile gets shown to nobody specific.

After — signals stacked:

Same person. Same experience. But now every element repeats the same three or four ideas. The engine reads it in one pass. When a Series A founder searches for outbound help, this profile is a magnet.

That coherence is the whole game. Your headline for thought leaders should name the same specialty your topics do. Your About should expand on it. The topics are the summary; the rest is the proof.

A worked example: the fractional CMO

Let's walk one all the way through, because frameworks are easy and application is hard.

Meet Dana. She's a fractional CMO. She's worked with eight DTC brands, mostly in the $2M–$20M revenue range, and her thing is fixing retention and lifetime value — not top-of-funnel acquisition, which is where most marketers crowd.

Bad version of her topics: #marketing #CMO #branding #growth #leadership. Generic. She's now competing with every marketer on earth and matching no specific search.

Here's how she'd build it with the system:

Now every post she writes about winback flows or subscription churn reinforces four of those five. Her headline reads "Fractional CMO for DTC brands | I turn one-time buyers into repeat revenue." Her About opens with the exact pain: brands pouring money into ads while their retention leaks out the bottom.

When a DTC founder types "how to improve customer retention ecommerce" or a peer tags a post about LTV, Dana surfaces. Not because she games anything. Because she told the platform, clearly and consistently, exactly what she's about.

That's the difference between five hashtags and a positioning system.

Common questions I get pushed back on

"Won't narrower topics limit my reach?" It feels that way. It's backwards. Broad topics don't get you more reach — they get you diffuse reach, which is no reach. Precision is what makes the algorithm confident enough to surface you at all. You'd rather own a small pond than be invisible in the ocean.

"What if I do several different things?" Then you have a positioning problem, not a topics problem. Pick the lane you most want to be known for over the next year and commit your five slots to it. You can pivot later. A profile that tries to be about five unrelated things is about nothing.

"Do I really need creator features on?" To display the "Talks About" topics, yes, you need the creator tools switched on. If you're unsure how that works now, here's what happened to Creator Mode and how to build a creator profile. It's worth the two minutes to enable.

How to audit yours in 15 minutes

Open your profile right now and run this check:

  1. Read your five topics out loud. Do they describe a specific person, or forty million people? If any topic could belong to a total stranger in your field, it's too broad.
  2. Cross-check against your headline. Does your headline use words from your topics? If there's zero overlap, one of them is lying.
  3. Check your last 10 posts. How many actually relate to your five topics? If you claim #AttributionModeling but never post about it, the engine notices the gap. Match your topics to what you genuinely publish.
  4. Kill the vanity words. Any topic that's there to sound impressive rather than describe your real work — cut it. Replace with something truer and narrower.
  5. Say it as a sentence. "I talk about [topic 1] and [topic 2] for [audience], especially [edge]." If that sentence sounds like a real person with a real specialty, you're done. If it sounds like a mission statement, start over.

The whole thing takes fifteen minutes and it's the highest-leverage fifteen minutes you'll spend on your profile this quarter. For the bigger picture of how topics feed into being seen as an authority, we go deeper in building thought leadership through topical authority.

The point most people miss

Your topics aren't a tagging exercise. They're the smallest, clearest statement of your positioning — and they only work when the rest of your profile agrees with them.

Five slots. Choose them like they matter, because they do. One anchor, two signatures, one audience, one edge. Then make sure your headline, banner, and About are all telling the same story. When they line up, the platform stops guessing and starts putting you in front of the exact people who need you.

That's the difference between showing up in search and being invisible.

FAQ

How many topics should I list in 'Talks About'?

All five. LinkedIn gives you five slots — use every one, but make each deliberate. Don't pad with generic words to fill space. One broad category, two specific signature topics, one audience/outcome, and one adjacent edge is a proven split.

Should my LinkedIn talks about hashtags match my content?

Yes, tightly. If you list a topic you never post about, you create a gap between what you claim and what you actually do — and the algorithm reads your posting history. Match your topics to what you genuinely publish week to week.

Can I change my 'Talks About' topics later?

Absolutely, and you should revisit them every few months or whenever your positioning shifts. Just don't churn them weekly — consistency over time is part of what builds topical authority. Set them deliberately, then let them run.

Do broad topics like #leadership hurt my reach?

They don't hurt so much as waste a slot. Broad topics carry almost no discriminating signal, so they rarely match specific searches. Spend at most one slot on breadth and make the other four specific enough to actually match the people you want to reach.

What's the difference between topics and just posting with hashtags?

Post hashtags help a single post get discovered in the moment. Your profile's "Talks About" topics shape how the platform understands you over time — feeding your overall relevance model. Both matter, but the profile topics are the standing signal.

Choosing five topics is the easy part. Making your headline, banner, and About all echo them — that's where most people stall, because it means writing copy and designing visuals that actually agree with each other. Linvi builds that whole system in one sitting for a flat $99: a research-grounded headline, an About section, three banner concepts, and headshots from your own photos — all pointed at the same specialty, so the algorithm reads your lane the first time. It's a $5,000 brand designer, photographer, and copywriter, minus the six-week wait.