Video is the fastest-growing format on LinkedIn, with total watch time up 36% year over year according to platform figures LinkedIn reported across 2024 and 2025. Over the same stretch, audits of Fortune 500 CEOs found that fewer than 5% of those who use social media post as often as once a week (Influential Executive, 2024; Everywhere Agency/SocialHP, 2025). That pairing, a format growing this fast and executive participation this thin, is the entire opportunity in two sentences.
This is a sourced roundup of LinkedIn video statistics for executives, founders, and the marketers who support them. Every number is attributed to its source and year, and where the research comes from a platform or a vendor with an interest in the result, we say so plainly.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- How fast LinkedIn video is growing, according to the platform’s own reported figures
- What B2B decision-makers say thought leadership does to trust, RFP inclusion, and incumbent suppliers
- How wide the gap is between CEO presence on LinkedIn and actual CEO activity
- What these numbers suggest a Dallas executive should do in 2026
How fast is LinkedIn video actually growing?
Fast enough that LinkedIn rebuilt part of its product around it. Per figures the company reported in 2024 and 2025, total video watch time on the platform rose 36% year over year, video uploads rose 34% year over year, and members now create video at roughly twice the rate of any other post format. LinkedIn has also been rolling out a dedicated vertical video feed, a swipeable format borrowed from consumer platforms and pointed at a professional audience.
One honest caveat: these are platform-reported numbers, surfaced through LinkedIn’s own announcements and trade coverage. Platforms publicize the metrics that flatter them. Even discounted for that, the direction is unambiguous, because a company does not build a new feed for a format in decline.
The broader business context points the same way. In the Wyzowl State of Video Marketing survey (2025), 91% of businesses said they use video as a marketing tool and 87% said video has directly increased their sales. Note that Wyzowl is itself a video production vendor surveying an audience already interested in video, so treat those figures as directional rather than definitive. Directionally, though, they match what the platform data shows: video is where professional attention is moving.
Do buyers really trust thought leadership?
By their own account, yes, and more than they trust your marketing. The Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report (2024) found that 73% of decision-makers consider an organization’s thought leadership a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capability than its marketing materials. About 75% said thought leadership led them to research a product or service they were not previously considering.
Two findings in that report matter most for anyone who sells on reputation. First, 86% of decision-makers said they are more likely to include a company that produces consistent thought leadership in an RFP. Second, 70% of C-suite executives said a rival’s thought leadership has made them question an incumbent supplier. Read those together: publishing is offense and defense at once. It gets you onto shortlists, and its absence leaves your current clients open to persuasion.
The attention is real, not theoretical. The same 2024 report found 52% of decision-makers, and 54% of C-suite executives specifically, spend an hour or more per week consuming thought leadership. Roughly 9 in 10 said they are more receptive to sales outreach from companies that publish consistent, high-quality thought leadership. The 2025 edition added a finding about why it works: 81% of decision-makers said strong thought leadership reveals challenges they had not recognized. It teaches before it sells.
Disclosure applies here too. The study is co-produced by a communications firm and by LinkedIn, both of which benefit when companies invest in publishing. It remains the largest recurring survey of its kind, and its core findings have held steady across editions, but it is self-reported buyer sentiment, not transaction data.
How present are CEOs on LinkedIn, really?
Present in name, absent in practice. Audits of Fortune 500 CEO social accounts (Influential Executive, 2024; Everywhere Agency/SocialHP, 2025) found that 98% of CEOs who use any social platform use LinkedIn. It is, by an overwhelming margin, the default channel for executive presence. Yet the same audits found fewer than 5% of those CEOs post weekly. The profile exists, the headshot is uploaded, and then almost nothing happens.
These audits are agency-conducted, and agencies that sell executive-visibility services have an obvious interest in finding a visibility gap, so hold the exact percentages loosely. The pattern they describe, however, is easy to verify by scrolling: most executive profiles are dormant.
Here is the part that should interest you more than the dormancy. The 2024-2025 audits put average engagement on CEO posts at about 2.5%, a response rate most corporate brand pages would be glad to claim. When leaders do show up, audiences respond. The scarcity of consistent executive voices is precisely what makes each one stand out.
What do employees and hires expect from leaders?
They expect to hear from you, and they check. Brunswick Group’s Connected Leadership research (2021-2022) found that 74% of stakeholders expect business leaders to communicate publicly on social channels, and 93% of readers of financial news expect to hear from a CEO online during a crisis. Silence is no longer neutral; it reads as a choice.
The recruiting implications are just as concrete. In the same Brunswick research, 60% of prospective hires said they review a leader’s online presence before accepting a role, and employees preferred working for socially engaged leaders by roughly five to one. A candidate weighing your offer against another is very likely looking at your profile this week.
Flag the source as always: Brunswick is a communications consultancy, this is comms-firm research, and the fieldwork dates to 2021-2022. But the behavior it describes, candidates and employees researching leadership online, has only become more routine since, not less.
What does this mean for a Dallas executive in 2026?
Three practical conclusions fall out of these numbers.
Consistency beats virality. The Edelman-LinkedIn finding that matters most, the 86% RFP figure from 2024, rewards companies that publish consistently, not companies that had one post take off. A steady cadence of useful, watchable videos compounds. A single viral moment does not.
A library beats improvising. The reason fewer than 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs post weekly (per the 2024-2025 agency audits) is not that they lack opinions. It is that finding time to produce content every week, from a standing start, loses to every operational fire. Executives who sustain a cadence almost always batch: record a deep session once a quarter, then publish from the library. The recording happens when it is scheduled; the posting happens even when the quarter gets loud.
Professional production signals seriousness. LinkedIn’s vertical feed is filling with hastily shot phone clips. In that context, a well-lit, well-edited, properly captioned 45-second video carries the same signal a tailored suit carries in a casual room. It tells a buyer, before you say a word, that you treat your public statements as seriously as your client work. If you are budgeting for this, our social media video cost guide breaks down what Dallas production actually costs, and our guide to video marketing KPIs covers how to measure whether it is working.
How Image Media Lab turns these numbers into a library
Everything above argues for one thing: a repeatable system that produces consistent executive video without consuming your calendar. That is what The Executive Session is built to be.
It is one directed half-day session, at your office or a Dallas location we arrange. You talk, on camera, guided by an interviewer who knows how to pull out the specific, contrarian, experience-backed points buyers actually watch. From that single session we deliver 8 captioned vertical videos cut for the LinkedIn feed, a story film for your profile and website, and a set of executive portraits. Posted weekly, the video library alone covers roughly two months of consistent presence from one morning of your time. The fee is fixed at $4,500, no day rates, no change orders.
Frequently asked questions
How often should an executive post video on LinkedIn?
Consistency matters more than frequency. A weekly cadence you sustain for quarters outperforms a daily sprint that collapses in three weeks, because the trust effects documented in the Edelman-LinkedIn 2024 report attach to consistent publishers. The practical system is a quarterly recording session feeding a weekly posting queue.
How long should executive LinkedIn videos be?
For feed video, 30 to 75 seconds is the working range: long enough for one complete idea, short enough to be watched to the end. One point per clip. Longer cuts have a place on your profile or website, but the feed rewards brevity.
Do polished videos outperform phone selfie videos?
Neither wins outright, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one of them. Authenticity wins on relatability; production wins on authority. A quick reaction to today’s news can be a phone clip. A statement of your firm’s position, the kind a buyer might watch before an RFP decision, deserves production quality. The format should match the weight of the message, and a strong presence usually mixes both.
Where do the 8 videos come from?
From one directed interview session. Rather than scripting eight separate videos, we run a single long-form conversation, then our editors identify the eight strongest standalone moments and cut each one vertical, captioned, and ready to post. That is the core of The Executive Session, and it is why the session takes half a day instead of eight separate shoots.
Final thoughts
The statistics tell one coherent story. Video is LinkedIn’s fastest-growing format by the platform’s own 2024-2025 figures. Buyers say, across two years of Edelman-LinkedIn research, that thought leadership shapes trust, shortlists, and even loyalty to incumbent suppliers. And by every available audit, most executives are still sitting out. Gaps like that do not stay open. The executives who build a consistent video presence in 2026 will be established voices by the time their competitors decide to start.
Written by Sem Maltsev, founder of Image Media Lab. Since 2013 the studio has produced corporate films in New York and Dallas, including 80+ interviews with Nobel Prize and Lasker Award winners for The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Last updated: August 18, 2026.