How Do You Share A LinkedIn Post

In plain terms: LinkedIn gives you three completely different ways to share someone else's post, and they behave nothing alike. Repost sends it out under your name with no context. Repost with your thoughts adds your commentary above it. Send as a message keeps it private between you and one person or a group. Pick the wrong one and your share either says nothing or reaches nobody.

I share other people's content on LinkedIn most days, either mine to promote or other people's when it's useful to my audience. The mechanics look simple until you notice how differently each option performs, and how many people default to the laziest one without realising what they're giving up.

The three share options, and what each one does

Under any post, click the paper-plane style Send icon, or the Repost icon depending on where LinkedIn has it positioned for you that week (LinkedIn changes this layout often). You'll see:

• Repost, this shares the post instantly to your own feed, exactly as it appeared, with no box to add your own words. Your name sits above it as "reposted this"
• Repost with your thoughts, this opens a text box above the original post where you write your own commentary before it goes out to your network
• Send, this sends the post as a private message to a specific person, several people, or a group chat, and never touches your public feed at all

Why "Repost" alone is nearly always the weaker choice

A bare repost, no commentary, tends to get buried. LinkedIn's feed algorithm rewards posts that generate a comment or a reaction in the first hour, and a plain repost gives your network nothing to respond to beyond the original poster's own words, which they may have already seen once. I've tracked this across my own account for years: a repost with even two sentences of my own view attached consistently gets three to five times the engagement of the same post shared with no comment.

Step by step: sharing with your own commentary

1. Find the post you want to share, click the Repost icon underneath it
2. Choose "Repost with your thoughts" from the menu that appears, not the plain "Repost" option
3. Write two or three sentences that say why this matters, who should read it, or what you'd add or disagree with. Don't just write "Great post!", it adds nothing and readers can tell
4. Tag the original poster with @ if it feels natural, it notifies them and often gets you a comment back that boosts the post further
5. Post it. It now shows in your feed with your commentary on top and the original post embedded below it

Here's a rundown of the latest LinkedIn algorithm update and what it means for your posts. Thinking about promoting a post? Learn how to boost a post on LinkedIn and what to expect.

Sharing privately instead of publicly

If the goal isn't visibility but getting a specific post in front of a specific person, the "Send" option is the right tool, not a repost. Click Send, pick the person or group from your connections list, and add a short note about why you're sending it. This is the option I use constantly for client work, sending a competitor's post or a relevant industry update straight to the person who needs to see it, rather than hoping they scroll past a repost in their feed at the right moment.

Reactions are not the same as sharing

Worth separating out, because people conflate the two: reacting to a post with a like, celebrate or insightful button is not sharing it. A reaction shows up in your own activity feed to some of your connections, but it doesn't repost the content itself, doesn't add commentary, and carries far less weight for the original poster's reach than an actual repost does. If someone asks you to "share" their post and you leave a reaction instead, you haven't done what they asked. It's a common mix-up, and it matters if you're tracking whether a favour was really returned.

Copying the link instead

There's a fourth, often overlooked route: click the three dots on any post and choose "Copy link to post". This gives you a direct URL you can paste into an email, a Slack message, or a newsletter. It's the only option of the four that works outside LinkedIn entirely, and it's the one I reach for when I want to reference a post in a blog article like this one, rather than embedding a LinkedIn share.

What happens to engagement when you repost

A detail that surprises people: when you repost (with or without commentary), any comments or reactions on your repost count separately from the original post's numbers. The original poster doesn't automatically see your repost unless they're tagged or notified some other way, and your repost doesn't add to their original like or comment count. Two versions of the same content, tracked completely separately. If you want the original creator to know for certain that you shared their work, tagging them isn't optional, it's the only reliable way LinkedIn tells them.

A mistake worth avoiding

I once reposted a client's article with a generic one-line caption because I was moving fast between meetings. It sat in my feed with almost no engagement for two days. I deleted it, reposted with three specific sentences about why the framework in the article had changed how I ran a particular campaign, and it picked up more comments in four hours than the plain version had in two days. The content was identical. The only thing that changed was whether I'd bothered to add a point of view.

Sharing to a Page versus sharing from your personal profile

If you manage a LinkedIn Company Page, the sharing options look almost identical but the reach behaves differently. A repost from your Page goes out to Page followers, who are typically a smaller, more self-selected audience than a personal profile's network. In my experience, personal profile shares with genuine commentary consistently outperform Page reposts for reach, LinkedIn's algorithm still favours personal accounts over brand pages for organic distribution, even in 2026. If a piece of content matters, share it from your personal profile with commentary first, then repost it to the Page separately rather than relying on the Page alone.

If this helped, you'll probably like LinkedIn post character limit.

What "sharing" looks like on mobile versus desktop

The mechanics are the same on the LinkedIn app and the desktop site, but the icons sit in slightly different places and LinkedIn moves them around during updates more often on mobile. On the app, the repost icon usually sits alongside like, comment and send beneath the post; tapping it brings up the same "Repost" versus "Repost with your thoughts" choice. One practical tip: writing your commentary on desktop tends to produce a tighter, better edited couple of sentences than typing on a phone keyboard between meetings, and it shows in the engagement.

I've also covered how to tag someone on LinkedIn in posts in a separate guide.

Sharing your own post versus someone else's

Everything above works the same whether you're resharing your own older post or someone else's. Resharing your own content periodically, with fresh commentary each time rather than a plain repost, is a legitimate way to get more mileage out of something that performed well, particularly if your network has grown since you first posted it. I do this with evergreen posts roughly once a quarter, and it consistently reaches people who missed it the first time, because LinkedIn's feed is chronological-ish and short-lived, most of your network never saw the original the first time round.

A practical follow-on is how to share a post on Facebook.

When not to share a post at all

Not every post is worth reposting, and the temptation to reshare anything that agrees with your worldview is a trap I see people fall into constantly. Before reposting, I ask myself whether my own network would get something real from it, a new idea, a useful stat, a fresh angle, rather than whether it simply flattered a view I already hold. A feed full of reposts with no original thought behind them reads as noise, and it trains your network to scroll past your name rather than stop for it. One considered repost a week, with real commentary, beats five empty ones.

I have written more around this on the site: Should Your Business Have a LinkedIn Profile? Here’s My Honest Take After Running Both, Week 6: I Spent This Week Conquering My Inbox Instead of My Blog Posts (And I’m Not Even Sorry), 25 LinkedIn Algorithm Hacks That Work in 2026 (Not the Stuff Everyone Else Is Flogging).

Related question: Does LinkedIn post your work anniversary automatically?

Frequently asked questions

Does reposting a LinkedIn post notify the original author?

Not automatically in every case. If you tag them with @ in your commentary, they get a notification. A plain repost without a tag may not reliably surface to them, so if the goal is for them to know you shared it, tag them directly.

Can I edit a repost after I've published it?

You can edit the commentary text on a "repost with your thoughts" after posting, the same way you'd edit any LinkedIn post. You cannot edit the embedded original post itself, that stays exactly as the original author wrote it.

What's the difference between reposting and just copying the text into a new post?

Reposting keeps the original post embedded and clearly attributed to its author, with a "reposted" label. Copying someone's text into a brand new post as if it were your own is a completely different thing, and it's the sort of move that damages trust fast if people recognise the source.

Does LinkedIn limit how many times I can repost in a day?

There's no published hard daily limit on reposts the way there is on connection requests, but LinkedIn's spam detection can flag unusually high volumes of activity in a short window, so spacing reposts out through the day rather than firing off a dozen at once is sensible practice.