The LinkedIn Lowdown: How to Create Posts That People Actually Care About

Ah, LinkedIn: the social platform that launched a thousand B2B content creators. 

Plenty of founders and marketers understand the importance of LinkedIn as part of their marketing mix—but putting it into practice is a different question altogether. 

Steal these hacks to game the algorithm and… ha, gotcha.

This isn’t that kind of article. No shortcuts. No clickbait. These are tried and true LinkedIn tips from someone who makes a living creating LinkedIn content. Scratch that: It's not just a collection of tips; it's a beginning-to-end tactical guide for getting the most out of your LinkedIn content.

Whether you're an early-stage founder looking to build your personal brand or a newly minted Director of Brand Comms looking to refresh your company page, this is how you can build trust and meaningful connections with the right people on LinkedIn.

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Wait, Kate, you’re not a LinkedInfluencer. Why should I listen to you?

Hey, I’m Kate Erwin, and I make most of my income by creating LinkedIn content. You may not know who I am, but I can pretty much guarantee you’ve read my work whether you knew it or not. 

• I work with the Beam Team (Dream Team!) to create LinkedIn content for B2B SaaS companies. 
• I have a few clients of my own that you may have heard of like Chili Piper and UserGems. 
• I do a lot of executive ghostwriting, but I can’t tell you about that because, well, it’s a secret 🤫

I’ve been a full-time copywriter for a dozen years, and I’ve been creating LinkedIn content for myself and others for the past four years. I’m constantly learning the latest LinkedIn tips and testing out what works. You get to learn from my flops.

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What to do before you start creating LinkedIn content

The more intentional your content is, the better your results will be. So as much as you may want to start throwing content out there and seeing what stops the scroll, it’s a good idea to do some basic planning first.

Figure out your (personal) why

There are so many reasons to post on LinkedIn, but you need to find what resonates with you.

If you’re in Sales, maybe your goal is to get more DMs from potential customers. If you’re in CS, maybe you want to stay connected with your customers. If you’re in Marketing like me (hey, friend!), you might want to build an audience that you can use when you have a major company announcement.

In addition to these goals, though, think about what you personally want to get out of this. Maybe writing helps you process your ideas so you think more clearly. Maybe you love having a creative outlet. Maybe posting is your version of therapy. You’re not going to be motivated to do extra work unless you figure out why you personally love it.

Determine your core content topics

It’s not that you have to limit your content topics. It’s that having a focus will help you stay consistent and build the right audience. 

Alex Lieberman, Co-Founder of both Morning Brew and storyarb, suggests the following to find your ideal content pillar 👇

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What your ideal follower wants

If your desired audience doesn’t care, you might as well be writing in a diary or shouting into the void. Knowing your audience is the most important aspect of all content, not just on social.

What you know a lot about (or want to know a lot about)

The common advice is “write what you know” but you can also share what you’re actively learning about on LinkedIn. If you’re writing for a company page, for example, you may not be the best person to speak on a topic, but you can interview a subject matter expert to gain knowledge.

What you’d have fun creating content about

You need to enjoy creating LinkedIn content or you won’t stay consistent. Create the content you wish you saw in your own feed. (Yes, this still applies if you’re creating content for a company page as part of your job.)

For example, Beam encourages founders, CEOs, and other executives to balance product or sales-oriented posts, team and organization posts, and vertical thought leadership-type posts. And we have seen success when they’ve posted about their personal hobbies or intellectual curiosities. 

Make sure your LinkedIn strategy aligns with all your other content

LinkedIn is only one channel for your content. It’s also a rented channel. You don’t own your audience there—LinkedIn does. The plus side is that LinkedIn gives you better visibility so you can grow your owned audience.

Social has its place in the Connected Content Framework. You can take a section of your blog and turn it into LinkedIn content. You can test out long-form content topics on LinkedIn before investing more energy into them. You can build a community that you can later convert to newsletter subscribers. Make sure you’re not only thinking about LinkedIn, but content as a whole.

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The anatomy of a winning LinkedIn post

Is there an exact formula for a winning post? No, not really. In fact, people often grouse about how the post they spent five seconds on goes viral while the one they lovingly drafted gets a dozen reactions. There are, however, a handful of important things to keep in mind when writing.

Hook ‘em from the start

You want to start with a strong hook so your audience keeps reading. You don’t want to trick them with clickbait. 

Good hooks are often:

• Indicative of the audience the post is meant for or the topic it will discuss
• Provocative and contrarian
• Somewhat vague (so people click that “...see more” link)

Here are a few examples of hooks that performed well on the Chili Piper page 👇

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Get attention with visuals

As a professional writer, it pains me to say this, but it’s not always words that do the trick. 

It helps to add visuals like: 

• Carousels
• Graphics
• Screenshots
• Photos
• GIFs
• Memes
• Video footage (Descript is a great tool that even editing noobs can use)

One note, though: LinkedIn is a channel where you don’t want visuals to be super branded and consistent with your website’s graphics. 

Whether you’re sharing content on a personal account or a company page, test out raw formats like screenshots that feel more natural and less promotional.

Here are a few examples of visuals that worked:

• This photo of the lovely Amelia Taylor is from a takeover post on the Chili Piper company page. It feels like it comes from a personal account, but then the Chili Piper logo on her mug lets you know it’s related to the company.

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• This GIF may feel like it belongs in a Tumblr entry from 2007, but it actually worked in this UserGems LinkedIn post.

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• This meme made by Will Aitken may seem a little extreme for use on a company page, but it worked great on the Chili Piper account. (Not everyone is a meme master like Will, but it’s definitely a format worth trying even if you weren’t voted Class Clown in high school.)

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Add personality

There’s no need to imitate another person’s style. Find your own. Personality is the extra punch you need to get people to read your content, not just skim it.

If you’re writing on behalf of a brand, you can get a little weirder with your brand voice on LinkedIn and test its limits in ways you wouldn’t (and probably shouldn’t) do on your website or in other marketing materials.

Here are a few posts that added personality to the UserGems page 👇

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Wait, what should I know about the LinkedIn algorithm?

Yeah, yeah. The algorithm is kind of important. It should never be your focus, though. It’s the least important factor impacting your LinkedIn content’s performance. So many people try to game the system by doing what the algorithm says, but knowing all the tricks isn’t enough to make up for bad content.

However, understanding the basics of the LinkedIn algorithm still helps. You need to know the rules so you can break them.

Stop the scroll to increase reach

You’ve probably heard this before. It basically means that you want people browsing the feed to pause on your content. Of course, you want them to stop and read your post, but the other reason is that dwell time (the amount of time people pause) increases your reach (the number of people who see your post).

Create for the right people, not the most people

Getting lots of eyeballs on your content is great, but if you have a large following that doesn’t engage with your content, it can ultimately decrease your overall reach. It’s best to curate a smaller, highly engaged audience instead of trying to gain virality or build a huge following. It’s one of the reasons buying followers or participating in engagement pods doesn’t work out in the long run.

Native content > links

Whenever possible, you want to host all the content you want to share on LinkedIn vs. linking out to a landing page, blog post, or other external site. This makes attribution trickier, but it will improve your reach on LinkedIn. 

There are exceptions to this rule. If a video is more than a few minutes long, link to it. If you need someone to fill out a form (like for a webinar), link to it. 

Respond to every comment as quickly as possible

People always ask, “When is the best time to post?” And, of course, there’s not one perfect time to post. The first answer is, “When your audience is online.” The second is, “When you have time to respond to comments.”

Responding to comments continues the conversation, which increases your engagement and reach. It’s also just the polite thing to do. Think of it this way: If you say something to someone IRL and they ignore you, how do you feel? Would you try to talk to them again?

Not every comment requires a response (looking at you “great post!”), but the faster you respond to the people who are talking to you or your brand, the more views your post will get.

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What metrics matter most on LinkedIn?

Creating consistent LinkedIn content is step one. But how do you know if your content is performing well? There are so many metrics to track, but here are the most vital among them. People tend to call most of these “vanity metrics,” but there’s nothing shallow about keeping your target audience engaged in a noisy newsfeed.

Impressions

This is also called “reach” and measures the number of people who see your post in their LinkedIn feed. It’s important to note that an impression doesn’t mean the person read it. They could have scrolled right past your post. It does mean that they had the opportunity to read it. Impressions include both followers and non-followers.

Engagement

Impressions are great, but it’s way more meaningful to track who loves your content enough to engage with it. 

LinkedIn lets you track many engagement metrics for each post, including:

• Clicks
• CTR (click-through rate)
• Comments
• Reactions
• Reposts
• Engagement rate

For videos, you also get to see:

• Video views
• Lifetime unique viewers
• Minutes viewed
• Video viewer demographics (job titles, locations, companies)

Followers

So many people over-index on this metric. As mentioned earlier, it’s better to have a small, engaged following than a large one. However, you can track your following against demographic info to see how your following is growing among your ideal customer profile (ICP). That can be incredibly useful information.

Less trackable metrics that tie back to your personal “why”

In addition to tracking impressions, engagement, and followers, there are many less direct signs that social is working, including:

• Direct messages
• Tags in other posts
• Shoutouts on sales calls that show up through revenue intelligence software

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How do I keep track of my LinkedIn metrics over time?

For individuals

If you are thinking about your personal LinkedIn metrics, I recommend using Shield Analytics for LinkedIn. 

It gives you all the information you need, and then plenty more. The challenge is to actually simplify what matters most to you, otherwise you might get lost in the data. 

This is YTD data from Brooklin Nash.

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You can see broad trends, but where Shield really shines, is in its ‘Content Table.’

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You can organize posts by type (image, video, text), time posted, impressions, comments, shares and engagement rate. You can even add a search term, like ‘SaaS,’ and see the data on all the posts that include that term.

You can download this as a .csv and analyze what type of posts are working to your heart’s content. 

If you want to turn your analysis into action, download your top performing posts by criteria you’ve selected (e.g. more than X amount of comments, and/or more than X amount of impressions), and add these to a ‘social recycle bank’ in your project management system.

Re-use or repurpose those top posts by scheduling them several months ahead of time.

For all my data nerds out there, if you want to see even more details from an individual post, you can click in and see super interesting trends involving companies, roles, and regions.

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When it comes to data visualization, this is *chef's kiss*. You see the post in the top left, the macro numbers to the right, and details about the people engaging with the post below.

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You can see this post got a lot of traction from people at big tech companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.) and mostly from people in sales, software development, or business strategy. 

What delightful information for someone who gets most of their sales from LinkedIn. 

Now, for brand pages

For brand pages, you can use a variety of tools—but I believe in keeping it simple. You can download all the metrics you need directly from LinkedIn and save it in an Excel or Google Sheets workbook. We’re Google Sheets and Looker Studio fans at Beam.

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Once you get your workbook set-up, it should only take about 15 minutes per month to update your data. At Beam, we visualize this data in Looker Studio so that manual work is reduced and accuracy is retained.

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Like in Shield, you can filter the top performing posts to dig into trends that are working. You can also see the occupations of the people visiting and viewing your page. 

You can also visualize your target numbers, so you know if you are on track with your KPIs or not. 

We use a dashboard like this to help inform our clients’ social strategy for upcoming months, to compare their performance to their competitors, and to prove the value of brand social to the broader GTM org. 

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Time to start posting on LinkedIn

Congrats! You’re definitely ready to start posting on LinkedIn. If you’re still feeling timid, you can try this approach to ramp up:

Crawl—Curate, comment, and build a slow publishing cadence

Start reaching out to peers and people in your ICP to build your network. Click the bell on someone’s profile to make sure you see all their posts in your feed.

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By intentionally designing what content will pop up on your feed, you’ll start to see ideas that will validate, inform, and spark new ideas for your own posts.

But if you’re slow to start posting multiple times a week or even a day, start with comments.

Struggle to know what to comment in front of thousands of people you don’t know and need to build trust with? I get it.

Try some of these tips out:

💡 Share your personal experience or thoughts on their idea. Have you tried what they're talking about before? Have you seen what they're talking about done somewhere else? You can make observations, or just explain why you agree/like their idea. You can also say "I'm not sure about xyz, because in my experience, it's gone like this" if you're feeling spicy.

💡 Ask a question. What detail did they not cover in the post that you're interested in learning more about? You could ask them anything: "How did the team respond to that strategy?" /"How did you measure that?"/ "What would recommend for someone who is just starting this?" Etc.

💡 Copy/paste your favorite statement that they made: Put it in quotations, and tell them you loved the statement and why.

💡 Tag in somebody. "This post made me think of you, [name]! Would be curious to hear your reaction/thoughts to this." (Tagging in the team is also easy/takes the pressure off. "Sam, they're speaking your language 👀"

💡 If you don't feel like the post resonates with you, don't force it. You don't want to look like an AI bot.

Pay attention to the posts that stood out to you and had interesting conversations going on in the comment section. Use these as inspiration for your own posts, based on your own opinion or experience. 

Walk—Increase publishing cadence and commenting approach with a system

You’ve read this article. Seriously, you’ve got this. Don’t get too hung up on the format or the perfect copy. Let “done is better than perfect” be your mantra. You will only get better by posting. You will only get to know your audience by engaging with them in the comments. 

Experiment with your workflows:

• Do you need to batch your creative thinking time and schedule ahead of time?
• Do you need to wing it when inspiration strikes?
• What time of day do you think of your most helpful or entertaining posts?
• What rhythms and structures do you need to put in place to reflect on your progress to achieving your goals?
• Where do your random potential ideas live?
• How can you remind yourself in your calendar and/or project management system to publish, to comment, and to curate more important people you want to connect with?

Run—Assess your posts, build a strategy, and build real connections

Whether you are an individual executive or in charge of a brand page, we recommend you have a social strategy guide, time to reflect on what you want to post (we set up interview times with our clients to help them get ideas out), and time to analyze your data and take action on what needs to be reinforced or changed.

We recommend you create realistic goals based on your past performance and based on your ‘why.’ 

When it comes to building real relationships, don’t start out sending DMs offering services or asking for something from someone. Be a normal human—ask genuine questions based on their posts, be a connector between people who might benefit from knowing each other (when you actually know them), follow up with people you’ve jumped on networking calls with, refer people to others in similar lines of work when it makes sense. 

Give more than you take. 

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There is no perfect LinkedIn formula—be authentic and show up

You might be tempted to copy what others are saying because you see it working for them. But remember: only you know what you want to get out of LinkedIn. 

Buyers buy from people they trust. Partnerships begin with real human connection. Your reputation grows when you are consistently present. 

Simply stated, but hard to do: the way to stand out is to be you. 

Got valuable thoughts in your head but struggle to get them in writing? Get distracted when you open up LinkedIn and don’t know where to focus? Simply, don’t have time even though you know it will spark meaningful conversations?

We help you show up on LinkedIn by running interviews with you and turning that into genuine social content you’ll be proud of. Let’s jump on a call—we’d love to help. 

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