Free linkedin post generator for a stronger first draft.

Take a quantity surveyor who has spent three months on a dispute about a variation that should never have been a dispute, and wants to write something useful about it without naming anyone. The inputs are what the form asks for. Subject: a variation agreed verbally on site and never confirmed in writing, argued about for three months. Audience: contractors, site managers and other surveyors. Point: the confirmation takes four minutes and the argument takes three months. Tone: matter of fact.

The post those inputs should produce opens on the concrete thing, because the first two lines are all that shows before the more button. Something like: A variation agreed in a two minute conversation on site cost three months of argument, because nobody sent the email afterwards. Then the middle: what the conversation was, why everybody remembered it differently and honestly, what the eventual resolution was, and what the four minute email would have contained. Then the general point, stated once and briefly. Then a genuine question: whether others confirm verbal instructions the same day, or have a better system.

What holds this up is that the general lesson arrives last and takes one line. The reader has already been given a specific situation to think about, so the lesson lands as a conclusion they partly reached themselves rather than an instruction. The question at the end is answerable from experience by exactly the audience the post is for, which is what produces comments from peers rather than compliments from strangers.

The version most people post instead inverts the structure. It opens with Communication is the foundation of every successful project, spends five short lines building to the revelation that a lack of documentation causes disputes, formats every sentence as its own paragraph for emphasis, and ends by asking readers to agree.

It is weaker because the first line, which is the only line most people see, contains a truth nobody disputes and therefore no reason to expand the post. The single line paragraphs signal a format rather than a thought. The lesson arrives before the evidence, so the evidence becomes an illustration of a point already made rather than the thing that makes the point. And a closing that asks for agreement invites reactions rather than replies, which is a lower quality of engagement and a considerably less interesting comment section.

Do not post about a live matter involving a client, an employer or a dispute that has not concluded. Anonymising rarely works as well as the writer believes: the people involved recognise themselves immediately, and on a professional network the audience frequently overlaps with the parties. If there is any chance the post would be uncomfortable read by the person it is about, the useful assumption is that they will read it.

Skip the generated draft when you have no actual position. Posts assembled from general professional wisdom read as filler because that is what they are, and a run of them lowers the response to everything else you publish. Having nothing to say for a fortnight is a normal state and is much cheaper than posting through it.

Be careful with confidential figures, unreleased work and anything covered by a contract. Project values, client names, internal metrics, photographs of sites and screenshots of systems all commonly sit under obligations the poster has genuinely forgotten. The general shape of a lesson is nearly always publishable; the specific number often is not, and it is rarely the number that made the post good.

Watch the reflex to perform vulnerability. Posts framed as difficult admissions that resolve into the author being admirable are recognised by this particular audience faster than by any other, and the response is quiet rather than hostile, which makes it hard to learn from. If the story does not include something you would rather not have to say, it is probably not the story you think it is.

LinkedIn collapses a post after roughly two lines, and expanding is a deliberate act most people do not perform. Everything about the opening should be built around that: no preamble, no throat clearing, no statement of a principle everybody already accepts.

Open on the specific and slightly unresolved. A number, a situation, a decision that went wrong, a sentence somebody said. The reader should reach the end of the second line with a question they want answered, and that is a mechanical requirement rather than a stylistic preference. Draft the post, then look at it in the feed and read only what is visible before the fold, because that is what almost everyone is judging.

The common structure puts the lesson at the top and the story underneath, which is the wrong way round on a feed. A lesson stated first is an assertion the reader can accept or ignore without reading further. The same lesson stated after a specific account is a conclusion they have partly arrived at themselves, which is considerably more persuasive and much more likely to be argued with productively.

Keep the general part to a line or two. The most common way a good post is spoiled is a closing section that extracts three broader principles from a story that supported one. If the story was good, the reader does not need the principles enumerated, and enumerating them converts a piece of experience into a piece of content.

Breaking every sentence onto its own line was once a reliable way to hold attention in a feed and is now mostly a signal that the writer is following a template. The same applies to arrow bullets, alternating one word paragraphs and the habit of ending on a single dramatic fragment.

Use paragraph breaks where the thought changes, which on a phone means somewhat more often than in print but not on every sentence. Use a list where the content is genuinely a list. The aim is that the shape of the post reflects the shape of the thinking, since a reader can tell the difference between structure that helps them and structure applied afterwards to make a thin post look substantial.

A closing question is the main lever on whether a post produces a conversation, and most closing questions are rhetorical, which produces reactions rather than replies. Agree? and Thoughts? ask for endorsement. What do you do instead asks for information, and people who have information enjoy providing it.

Then reply to the answers, properly, in the first few hours. A comment section where the author has responded substantively to the first several replies attracts more replies, and it is the part of posting that most people skip because it takes longer than writing the post did. It is also where nearly all the professional value of the platform actually accumulates, in conversations rather than in impressions.