LinkedIn Creator Mode no longer exists. LinkedIn dismantled it in early 2024 — the profile hashtag bar went in February 2024, the toggle itself in March 2024 — so if a tutorial tells you to go to Settings → Visibility → Creator Mode and flip a switch, that tutorial is describing a control that has not been there for years.
Nothing was taken away from you. The features Creator Mode gated were either turned on for everyone by default, moved into normal settings, or quietly retired. What changed is that a few things you used to get in one click now need to be configured individually — and almost nobody does, because the guides still ranking for this query never mention it.
Here is the accurate map, as of July 2026.
What Creator Mode Actually Was
Creator Mode was a profile-level switch introduced during LinkedIn's push to keep content creators publishing on the platform. Turning it on did four visible things:
- Changed your primary profile button from Connect to Follow
- Added a Featured Topics bar of hashtags under your headline
- Moved your Featured and Activity sections higher up the profile
- Unlocked creator tools — newsletters, LinkedIn Live, audio events — plus a creator analytics view
Our LinkedIn Creator Mode glossary entry covers the original mechanics in more detail. The important part for anyone reading in 2026: it was a packaging decision, not a feature set. Once LinkedIn decided most professionals were creators, the wrapper stopped making sense and got removed.
Where Each Feature Went
| Creator Mode feature | Status today | What you do instead |
|---|---|---|
| Follow as primary button | Still exists, now a standalone setting | Turn it on manually in your visibility settings |
| Featured Topics hashtag bar | Retired | Put those keywords in your headline and About |
| Featured / Activity section order | Normalised for all profiles | Curate what is in Featured; the order is no longer yours to toggle |
| Newsletters | Open to eligible members and pages | Start one from the article composer |
| LinkedIn Live | Open to eligible members and pages | Schedule it as an event in advance rather than going live on impulse |
| Audio events | Retired at the end of 2024, folded into LinkedIn Live | Run it as a scheduled Live event instead |
| Creator analytics | Folded into standard analytics | Everyone sees post and audience data now |
| "Creator" label under your name | Retired | Nothing replaces it — your headline does that job |
Read the table the right way round: most of the migration was a promotion, not a removal. Newsletters and live video used to sit behind a toggle a large share of members never found. They no longer do.
The Three Things You Now Have to Set Manually
1. Make Follow your primary button
This is the single setting worth acting on today, and it is the one people lose when they go looking for the old toggle and give up.
If you are building an audience rather than a rolodex, Follow should be your primary profile action. Connect requests create a two-way obligation, come with a limit on your total connections, and put a decision in front of a stranger who just wanted to read more of your posts. Follow is a one-click, no-obligation action with no ceiling.
Find it under Settings & Privacy → Visibility → Visibility of your LinkedIn activity → Followers. LinkedIn moves menu labels around fairly often, so if the path does not match, search the settings screen for "followers" and look for the option that makes follow primary.
Leave Connect as the default only if your LinkedIn value is genuinely two-way — recruiters, business development, consultants selling into a small named list of accounts. Founders, freelancers, educators and anyone publishing weekly are better served by Follow. The LinkedIn profile optimization guide covers the rest of the intro card once this is set.
2. Rebuild the topics bar as plain keywords
The Featured Topics bar was doing two jobs: telling a human visitor what you talk about, and giving LinkedIn's search a hint. Both jobs still need doing, they just need doing in text.
Pick three to five topics you actually want to be found for. Then place them where LinkedIn indexes and humans read:
- Headline — one or two of them, naturally phrased, inside roughly 120 characters so the line does not truncate in the feed. The LinkedIn character counter will tell you before you save.
- First two lines of your About — this is the visible portion before the "see more" fold, so it carries the most weight with both audiences.
- Skills section — the closest thing to a structured topic list LinkedIn still offers.
- Featured — two or three items that demonstrate each topic rather than assert it.
Our LinkedIn SEO guide goes deeper on how profile and post text feed search results. The short version: a keyword in your headline outperforms a keyword in a hashtag bar that no longer renders.
3. Stop treating hashtags as the discovery channel
A lot of Creator Mode advice was really hashtag advice — pick your topics, follow the tag feeds, get surfaced. That model has weakened considerably. Hashtags on LinkedIn today work best as light topical labels, not as a distribution mechanism, and stacking ten of them on a post buys you nothing but a cluttered caption.
One to three genuinely relevant tags is the current sensible ceiling. Everything else that used to be attributed to hashtags — who sees your post, how far it travels — is decided by dwell time, early engagement and topical relevance to each reader, as covered in our breakdown of how the LinkedIn algorithm works. If you want a fuller current position on tagging, see the LinkedIn hashtag strategy guide.
Three Things Creator Mode Never Did
Because the myths outlived the feature:
It never boosted your reach. LinkedIn positioned the toggle as a change to how your profile presented itself and which tools you could see, never as an algorithmic multiplier. Treating it as one is how a generation of "turn this on for 3x impressions" posts got written.
It never gated your analytics forever. Post-level and audience data is standard for everyone now. If your last impression of LinkedIn analytics is "you need Creator Mode for that," start again with the LinkedIn analytics guide.
It never made you a creator. The badge under your name did not change who read you. Publishing on a schedule did.
What Was Always Doing the Work
Every genuine benefit people attributed to Creator Mode traced back to the same thing: the people who turned it on were the people who had decided to post regularly. The toggle was a symptom of that decision, not a cause — which is the awkward part of the retirement. A follow button with nothing arriving behind it converts nobody.
So split the work honestly:
- The profile is a one-time job. An hour, once, then a light refresh when your positioning shifts. That is the part this article covers.
- The publishing is the ongoing job. Two to four posts a week, sustained for months, is what actually compounds — see LinkedIn posting frequency for how to pick a cadence you can hold.
The second part is where most people fail, and it fails for boring logistical reasons: a good week produces four drafts and the following week produces none. That is the gap a scheduling queue closes. In SocialKit, you write a batch of LinkedIn posts in one sitting, drop them onto the visual calendar, and let auto-publish handle the delivery — including on the days you are heads-down on client work. If you also publish on other networks, you can compose once and adjust the caption and media per platform instead of rewriting the post four times. Practical walkthrough here: how to schedule LinkedIn posts.
Pair that with our best time to post on LinkedIn reference to place the slots, and the profile work you did above starts getting traffic to convert.
Start Here: A 20-Minute Pass
Do these in order. It is one sitting, and it replaces everything the old toggle used to do.
- Set Follow as your primary button — Settings & Privacy → Visibility → Visibility of your LinkedIn activity → Followers. Skip only if your LinkedIn is genuinely network-first.
- Write down three to five topics you want to be known for. These are your retired Featured Topics, on paper.
- Rewrite your headline so one or two of those topics appear naturally, and check the length before saving.
- Fix the first two lines of your About — they are the only lines most visitors read.
- Refresh Featured with two or three current items, one per core topic.
- Audit your hashtag habit — cut to one to three relevant tags per post.
- Check whether newsletters make sense for you. They no longer need any toggle; the LinkedIn newsletter guide covers whether the commitment is worth it before you launch one. If live formats fit better, the LinkedIn Live and events playbook is the equivalent.
- Fill a calendar for the next four weeks so the profile has something to convert. Start from the LinkedIn content calendar template if you are staring at an empty grid.
Then leave the profile alone and go publish. If you want the longer arc — positioning, content pillars, the slow build of recognition — the LinkedIn personal branding guide and our guide to how to grow on LinkedIn pick up where this checklist stops.
The toggle is gone, and it mattered less than the tutorials claimed. Spend the hour on the settings above, then spend the next six months on the queue.