Most guides in this category are additive. They hand you more to do. This one starts by taking things away, because the single biggest reason founders abandon LinkedIn is not that it's hard — it's that the standard advice describes a full-time job, and most of that job is optional.
One data point before the list, and it's the only credential I'll offer. In roughly twenty years of running B2B marketing, across several companies and a lot of teams, I was never once asked to run any of the things below. Not a pod, not a posting-time experiment, not a hook formula. The work was continuity of message, deliberate keyword choices, and a clear CTA on every post — usually pointing at a webinar, an event, or an asset we wanted people to download.
If the goal is to be more convincing to people who already have a reason to look you up, then a large share of conventional LinkedIn practice is optimising for a number that has nothing to do with your goal. Here is what you can put down, and the reasoning for each. Most of these things do something. What they do is rarely what you need.
Connection games
Mass-connecting to get past 500, connecting in order to pitch, tracking who viewed your profile, sending connection requests with a note designed to be accepted rather than read. All of it optimises the size of your network.
Network size is a proxy for reach, and reach is a proxy for being seen by the right people. Two layers of proxy, and each one leaks. A network built by volume is composed mostly of people who cannot buy from you, will not hire you and won't refer you — and because the feed is ranked on engagement, filling it with people who don't care about your subject actively teaches the ranking that your posts aren't interesting.
The version worth keeping takes about a minute a week: accept the relevant, connect with people you actually met, ignore the rest.
Engagement pods
A group of people who agree to like and comment on each other's posts within the first hour, on the theory that early engagement buys distribution.
Set aside whether it works mechanically. Assume for a moment it does. What it buys you is distribution to the networks of the people in the pod — a group selected for their willingness to join a pod, not for their relevance to your business. You've paid real time and some of your credibility to be shown to the wrong audience.
And it is visible. Comments that arrive in a burst and say nothing specific read as exactly what they are, to precisely the attentive reader you were trying to impress.
Posting-time folklore
Tuesday at 7:48am. Never on a Friday. Wednesdays are the new Tuesdays.
Two problems. The first is that this advice contradicts itself across every source that publishes it, and a real effect doesn't behave that way. The second is more fundamental: the studies these claims come from aggregate across enormous numbers of accounts that look nothing like yours, in industries that aren't yours, addressing audiences in other time zones. Whatever average they found has almost no bearing on whether the eleven people who matter to you see your post.
At two posts a week, timing is noise. What is real, and much simpler, is that your audience is at work when you post and that you're available to reply for an hour or two afterwards. That's it. That's the whole timing strategy.
Hook formulas
“I lost €40,000 in my first year. Here's what nobody tells you:” The confession opener. The number opener. The contrarian-statement-then-line-break. The single-word first line.
These worked by borrowing an emotional register the reader wasn't expecting on a professional network. Readers have now seen thousands of them, and the register no longer signals this is worth your attention — it signals this was constructed to hold your attention, which is a different message and a worse one.
There's a deeper problem for a founder specifically. A formula is by definition the shape everyone else is using. The only durable advantage you have on this channel is that you know things about your market that your competitors don't and can say them in a way that sounds like you. A formula spends that advantage to buy a scroll-stop.
What survives from the idea: the first line should tell the reader what they're about to get, so someone uninterested can leave. Call that courtesy rather than a hook.
Format chasing
Carousels, then polls, then documents, then whatever the platform is currently promoting. There is usually some truth in it — platforms do favour formats they're pushing — but the window is short, the production cost is high, and you'll always be arriving late, because by the time the advice reaches you the window has been open a while.
A founder who reformats a good argument as a ten-slide carousel has spent an hour and improved nothing about the argument.
Comment-farming and follower counts
“Comment GUIDE and I'll send you the template.” This inflates engagement with a signal that means nothing, and it costs you something specific: it tells your most attentive readers that you're running a play. Once someone has classified your account as running plays, every subsequent post is read through that.
The follower count belongs in the same bin, for the reason covered in the first post of this series: a follower is not a reader, and the number is available rather than meaningful.
What is actually worth your time
This post would be dishonest if it only subtracted. Four things genuinely work, and they're the boring ones:
- Your profile itself. It is the page people land on when they look you up, which — per the first post — is the whole point. A headline that says what you do rather than what you are, an About section that reads like a person wrote it, and a company page that isn't empty. Fix it once, revisit it twice a year.
- Replying to comments on your own posts. The one piece of engagement work that is unambiguously real, because a reply is a conversation with a named person who is interested enough to have typed something. It's also where a surprising number of conversations actually start.
- Commenting substantively on other people's posts. Not “great post!” — an actual contribution, on posts in your field, a few times a week. It puts you in front of a relevant audience with something to say, which is the same thing posting does, at a fraction of the cost.
- Consistency. Showing up on a rhythm beats every tactic on this page combined, and it's the hardest of the four. There's a whole post in this series about why.
What you're left with
Strip out the games and the folklore and what remains is unglamorous: decide what you're saying, write it in your own voice, ship it on a schedule, and talk to the people who reply.
One caveat I'd add, having watched a lot of people try. Writing badly is worse than not writing. Authenticity is the ideal and it's the right target, but not everyone is a natural communicator — and the job still needs doing. If the honest answer is that you can't write well and won't enjoy learning, that's worth knowing before you commit to a rhythm, because a feed of poor posts costs you more than an empty one.
That sounds like relief, and for the first week it is. Then you discover that everything left on the list is the hard part — the part the tactics were a way of avoiding. Deciding what you're saying turns out to be a real piece of work.
Rowan Lemley is Founder and CEO of Groundworks AI. Before that he spent nearly two decades as a B2B SaaS marketing leader at mid-sized international software companies, writing several hundred LinkedIn posts under his own name — most of them tied to a product launch, an event, or a programme built around a single anchor asset.
He has only been a founder for a short time. This series is what he knows about doing LinkedIn properly, and an honest account of why he no longer does most of it himself.