LinkedIn Growth

The feed rewards attention, not approval

A like is a tap taken in half a second. A comment costs the reader a sentence they have to compose, and time spent reading before that. The second signal is worth more, and posts that generate conversation tend to keep moving long after the ones that merely collect reactions have stopped.

This changes what a good post looks like. A post engineered to be agreeable gets likes. A post that takes a position someone might argue with gets replies — and replies are what put you in front of that person's network rather than only your own.

You are writing for three lines

Only the opening survives before “see more”. Whatever you wrote underneath does not exist until someone decides, from those few lines, that it is worth expanding. The opening is not an introduction to the post. It is the pitch for reading the post.

Which means the two most common openings are both fatal: the throat-clearing windup — “I have been thinking a lot lately about…” — and the rhetorical question every reader has learned to skip. Start at the moment something changed, or with the claim, not the preamble to it.

Why AI-written posts read as AI

Ask a model for “a LinkedIn post about leadership” and it produces the house style: a question, three bullets, a closing invitation to comment. That shape is not a flaw in the model. It is what you get when the brief contains no audience, no angle, no voice and no constraints — the model fills the vacuum with the most average version of the form.

The tell is not that a machine wrote it. It is that nothing in it could only have come from you. A post built from a specific incident, with a specific opinion and the clichés explicitly ruled out, stops being interchangeable — regardless of what drafted it.

Your profile is a landing page

Every post that works sends people to your profile, and most profiles are written as a CV for a job the person is not applying for. The headline in particular is doing real work: it appears beside your name in every feed, every comment and every search result, far more often than the profile itself is read.

A headline that states who you help and with what will outperform a job title, because a job title answers a question nobody asked.

Where to start

Take your last five posts and read only the first two lines of each, as they appear in the feed. If you would not click “see more” on your own writing, that is the problem to fix before frequency, hashtags or timing.