If thought-leadership-top-voices on LinkedIn make you feel inadequate, this newsletter issue is for you. Anyone who prompts you to disengage from your authenticity is not doing you favors.
Last week, John Cutler published a post on how all LinkedIn posts resemble each other.
He’s right.
To diversify our newsfeed and enable LinkedIn users to create beautiful, diverse content, I decided to share my LinkedIn methodology to empower you to post creatively without feeling the need to imitate.
Let’s get to it!
Things to avoid imitating
Outline. It doesn’t help that everyone on LinkedIn feels they need to follow a specific format to be relevant.
You know what I’m talking about— a sentence, followed by a space, followed by a sentence. Repeat ten times or sometimes thirty, and wrap up with a question.
Landing page content. Backstory creep won’t kill your content. Boring content will kill your content. Keep it interesting. And, please, no kitty videos.
Public letters. Sometimes it feels like everyone wants to stick their spoon in, in whatever is trending on LinkedIn. But unless you have something meaningful to add, your voice is best reserved for other things.
👉 More on that. Posts that are public letters to a public conversation that we are all privy to can get droll fast.
Do you know what I’m talking about? No. That’s ok. Let’s elaborate.
👨🏻🦱 Bob publishes post-A that takes a high contrarian stance on an arbitrary subject to generate commotion and get likes or comments.
For example: “I believe that we should impose a blanket ban on all use of electricity after 10:00 pm. Electrical lights pollute the night sky! Everyone who is a polluter is a terrible person. The only way to live is with impressive views of the Milky Way! Agree?”
👩🏼 Janet sees this and is furious. Janet is a night owl. At 10:00 pm, she’s just beginning to wrap up her tasks and send emails for tomorrow’s deliverables. Janet replies with post-B, an open letter about how people who take absolute stances on the use of electricity are tyrannical overlords, and they should be silenced for their despotic tendencies.
Bob sees post-B, smiles, and flexes his fingers over his keyboard, ready to refute.
But you, my friend, open the app, swipe up on your screen, and yawn. 🥱
What can you do?
Here’s a very simple list of steps you can take today, so your posts don’t read like everyone else’s.
And, to quote one of my favorite movies, no one will be impressed that you majored in History of Polkadots unless they care about you. Why do people care about you?
Because they feel they know you.
To do this, you need to feel comfortable talking about yourself.
Step One: go to your activity on LinkedIn and browse through all the things you’ve liked that have nothing to do with work.
While looking, ask yourself, what type of person am I? What do I appreciate? What triggers my engagement?
Now, don’t censor! If you find you like things that are sarcastic, snarky, and humorous, then that’s ok. That’s your voice. When you set out to write a post, don’t start with:
“The difference between Agile and Scrum is that Agile is a methodology where other frameworks, among them Scrum, can be found. In other words, they are not interchangeable-“
You get the picture.
Step Two: Look at your LinkedIn recommendations. What do people say about you?
Do they say you are easygoing? Do they say you are fun to work with? Do they appreciate your spontaneity?
If that’s the case, try to add personal anecdotes to your stories. Most likely, you are a likable person, and people will read your posts and hear your voice. It will strengthen your online relationship with them.
Step three: What do you do in your free time?
Do you read philosophy, do you love science, do you have a deep appreciation for fashion or art?
Then ask yourself why and how that hobby reflects who you are.
For example, I read novels and follow courses on how to write better stories. Why? Because trite stories bore me. Sometimes I can tell the whole plot of a movie from the first two minutes. If that happens, I get sad.
👉 To me, this tells me that I love adventure and surprises. So if I write a post, I have to discover the story as I write it.
Like George Saunders says (but the PG version), if you are going to write a story about two dogs licking, and you write a story about two dogs licking, congratulations, you’ve written a story about two dogs licking.
So my dear friends, what have we learned in this exercise?
TL;DR: Let’s simplify.
To harness your voice to write original LinkedIn posts, ask yourself these three questions:
Step one: what do you like?
Step two: what do people say about you?
Step three: what do you do when no one is watching?
So for me:
I like funny, snarky engaging content.
People say I’m a professional that’s passionate about marketing and is a good communicator.
When no one is watching, I write little stories on my notepad or work on my novel.
With this in mind, what type of content should I write?
I should write content that makes me smile at least once while I read it.
It should be related to marketing, work, or how to develop effective communications.
Finally, I should incorporate stories because that’s what engages me most.
That’s it!
If you give it a try, let me know. I’d love to know if it worked for you.