There is a LinkedIn voice — one-line paragraphs, the unprompted lesson, the announcement of being humbled — and most people who dislike the site dislike that. The good news is that the voice is optional. The platform mostly rewards the opposite: a specific thing, said plainly, by somebody who clearly did it.
Write about work, not about yourself
The posts that travel have something in them: a number, a mistake, a before and after, a decision and the reason for it. “I learned so much this quarter” gives a stranger nothing to use. Something like “we moved invoicing to the day of delivery and were paid a week sooner” does.
A format that is easy to repeat
- 1What I was trying to do.
- 2What I did, in two or three sentences.
- 3What happened, including the part that did not work.
- 4One sentence a reader could take away.
That is a post. It takes ten minutes, it can be written on a Sunday, and it can be scheduled for Tuesday morning, when you will be too busy to do it live.
The part nobody mentions: the comments
A post opens a conversation; it is not the whole thing. Five minutes of replying in the first hour, and five minutes leaving a useful comment under other people’s posts, will do more for a quiet profile than a second post. If you do one thing besides writing, do that.
What to leave out
- Engagement bait: “agree?” with nothing behind it.
- Borrowed stories that did not happen to you.
- Tagging ten people who did not ask to be tagged.
- A block of hashtags. A few relevant ones are plenty, and many people use none.
You are allowed to post once a week. Nobody is counting. A weekly post that is true is worth more than a daily one you resent writing.