How To Write A LinkedIn Post That Gets Read

LinkedIn shows about two lines of your post before it cuts to "see more". Everything else in the post is irrelevant until someone taps that.

So the first line is not the introduction. It is the entire pitch for the rest.

What a first line has to do

The job is to make the next line necessary.

The versions that work:

• A specific claim. "We stopped doing discovery calls and closed more." Specific, and slightly wrong-sounding, so people want the explanation.
• A number in context. "Three years of content and the post that worked took nine minutes to write."
• A statement of position. "Case studies do not win deals. They confirm decisions people already made."
• The middle of a story. "The client had already signed with someone else when they called back."

The versions that do not work: a question nobody is asking, a definition, and anything that starts by telling people what the post is about.

The rest of the post

Once someone is reading, you have their attention and you can lose it.

One idea. Not three. A post that covers three things gets remembered as nothing. If you have three ideas, that is three posts.

Short paragraphs. One to three lines. Not because of attention spans, because the feed is read on a phone and a block of text looks like work.

Something real in the middle. A number, a client situation, a thing that happened. This is the part most people skip, and it is the part that makes a post yours instead of generic. The same principle as training AI on your brand voice.

An end, not a fade. The last line should land. It does not need to be clever, it needs to be definite.

What to cut

The throat clearing at the top. Almost every draft has two sentences before the actual point, and deleting them improves the post every time.

The hedges. "I think", "in my opinion", "arguably". You wrote it, everyone knows it is your opinion, and the hedge only weakens it.

The engagement bait. "Thoughts?" "Agree?" People who want to comment will comment. Asking makes the post feel like it needed help.

Frequency beats perfection

Someone posting three times a week at a decent standard will beat someone posting monthly at a high one, and it is not close.

Partly reach, mostly practice. You find out what your audience responds to by posting, not by planning. Which is why the content system matters more than any single post, and why planning a year of content is worth more than agonising over this week's.

The comments do more than the post

A post that gets ten thoughtful replies from you in the comments outperforms the same post left alone, because every reply is another chance for the post to surface.

It is also where the actual business happens. People rarely message you off a post. They comment, you reply, and the conversation moves.

The measure

Not likes. Likes are the cheapest thing a person can give you.

Watch for: comments from people you would want as clients, profile views in the day after, and messages. Those are the signal. Everything else is noise, and it is the same metrics problem that shows up everywhere else.