Ask a design studio, architecture practice or product brand where they should be posting, and the reflexive answer is almost always Instagram. Beautiful work deserves a beautiful feed, the logic feels obvious. But it also quietly writes off the one platform where the people who actually commission, specify and buy creative work are already spending their working day.

LinkedIn has an image problem within creative industries. It reads as corporate, humourless, a place for job changes and conference selfies, not somewhere to show a considered portfolio. That perception is understandable and almost entirely wrong. It is also expensive to hold onto, because it means ceding a channel to competitors with less craft and more confidence.

Where the Decision-Makers Actually Are

Instagram is where a finished project gets admired. LinkedIn is where the next one gets commissioned. Developers scouting a practice for a mixed-use scheme, procurement teams shortlisting suppliers, hotel groups briefing an interiors partner, trade journalists looking for a story, these are LinkedIn habits, not Instagram ones. They research there because it is where credibility signals live: who a studio has worked with, what a director has written, which projects a firm’s own people are proud enough to share.

This matters more for architecture, interiors, product design and art brands than almost any other creative category, because the buying decision is rarely impulsive. It moves through committees, budgets and long lead times. Somewhere in that process, someone opens LinkedIn to check a firm is real, current and credible before they pick up the phone.

The brief is rarely won on the feed everyone can see, it’s won on the one no one talks about.

The objection I hear from studios is that LinkedIn is full of their competitors and nobody else. That is usually true of their connections, which describes the account rather than the platform. When a practice starts posting the reasoning behind a decision instead of the finished render, the people who reply tend not to be other designers: they are the project managers, developers and suppliers who have sat through the same decision on their own scheme. I tell clients to write for that reader, and to accept that the numbers will look worse than Instagram and matter more.

What Actually Works There

The mistake is treating LinkedIn as a smaller, drearier version of Instagram. It rewards a different register entirely, closer to trade press than social media, and creative brands are well placed to supply it if they stop editing themselves out.

  • Process and point of view, not just polished outcomes, the thinking behind a material choice or a planning strategy
  • Founders and directors posting as people, not just the brand account posting as an institution
  • Project features written for specifiers and clients, not for an aesthetic audience
  • Genuine commentary on the industry, regulation, sustainability, the market, that trade press and peers actually read

None of this requires abandoning Instagram, and none of it requires a corporate voice the brand doesn’t recognise as its own. It requires accepting that the two platforms do different jobs, one builds desire, the other builds trust with the people who sign contracts, and that a serious marketing plan budgets for both. A creative brand that only shows up where it looks good, and never where it gets hired, is leaving half the commercial conversation to someone else.