Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
Overall Excellence > Social Media Account of the Year

Title of entry: 
Tax Notes LinkedIn

Issue or Publication date:
4/28/2025; 6/26/2025; 5/16/2025; 10/23/2025; 12/3/2025; 1/14/2025; 11/15/2025; 11/25/2025; 2/5/2025; 2/18/2025

Publication name: 
Tax Notes

View Website home page:
taxnotes.com

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Entry Essay: 
Tax Notes is a portfolio of publications offered by the nonprofit publisher Tax Analysts, which was founded in 1970 to foster a free and open discussion about taxation. Tax Notes writes about tax policy at the federal, state, and international levels.

Most of our subscribers are tax lawyers, academics, and other tax professionals who are closely engaged with developments in tax law and administration. One of our primary social media goals is to reach this core audience where they are with the news that matters most to them. LinkedIn has always been an important channel for us to accomplish this objective.

However, during a year marked by sweeping changes to the IRS workforce by the Trump administration, that goal — and that platform — became even more salient. We leaned into experimenting with multimedia to capture attention and more effectively explain the news to professionals affected by the administration’s actions.

We utilized podcast audio and webinar footage to create videos, designed shareable graphics, and began training our journalists to report the news on camera for short video explainers, which we recorded with basic audio equipment and our iPhone cameras.

As a result, we saw a 24.8% increase in impressions and a 41.5% increase in engagements on LinkedIn, with posts about changes to the IRS workforce and leadership dominating our high-performing content. For example, a clip we cut from a webinar about the future of the IRS received over 1,000 clicks and was our most-commented-on LinkedIn post of 2025.

The sustained, substantive engagement on these posts demonstrated that our coverage was not only informing audiences — it was also facilitating a constructive space for dialogue among former IRS employees and other stakeholders to process the news.

This engagement was accompanied by a significant expansion in reach. The combined impressions of our top three posts increased from 58,528 in 2024 to 105,058 in 2025.

In addition to promoting our coverage, we also found ways to build a sense of digital community on LinkedIn. In February, we hosted our annual #TaxValentines contest on the platform and saw enthusiastic engagement. Our first-place winner is now a two-time champion. This year, he was so excited that he ordered himself a custom belt (last year, it was a trophy). The contest is a fun way to drive engagement and bring the tax community together, but it also helps us turn audiences into contributors: our winner published his first piece of commentary with us this year.

LinkedIn is also an important platform for us to promote commentary from external authors. A post promoting an opinion piece about ChatGPT had impressive reach and prompted a spirited discussion in the comments. One commenter ended up submitting a Letter to the Editor about the piece, which we published and promoted on LinkedIn.

Heading into 2026, we hope our LinkedIn account continues to inform, engage, and invite participation from across the tax world.