15 Proven LinkedIn Post Ideas for Lead Generation

As we round out the end of 2023, social media is in a rough spot.

• Twitter, now X, is rapidly failing despite being one of the only sources for rapid news.
• Facebook is suffering from a lack of interest, the youth moving on and the stagnation of interest, while the CEO wanders off to VR failures.
• Instagram tries to claim some of Twitter’s lunch with Threads to a resounding “meh.”
• Newcomers like Bluesky and Cohost work on growth slowly but haven’t yet taken off.

Throughout it all, though, one social network has remained the same as it ever was, trucking along quietly in the background, free of drama or catastrophe or ill-advised redesigns and systemic changes. That network is, of course, LinkedIn.

While ostensibly, LinkedIn is a network focused on professional development, career advancement, and job hunting, they’ve slowly grown their offerings over the years.

One of the most useful to us marketers is, as you might imagine, is the ability to use it as a brand-building, thought-leadership-provoking, authority-gathering blogging platform.

LinkedIn Blogs are just like blogs on any other domain you don’t own; the content you publish there sits on a domain other than yours but can link to yours and can provide benefits like traffic, links, viewership, and thought leadership by associating the content with your name.

In fact, a lot of entrepreneurs, especially in tech, use LinkedIn blogging to great effect. Anecdotally, I’ve also noticed that LinkedIn posts are showing up a little more often than they used to be in Google’s search results, though I couldn’t say if that’s just the circles I run in or if it’s a global effect. You’d have to ask someone with a lot more indexation and historical data resources than I have at my disposal.

Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation

LinkedIn can be a great platform specifically for lead generation.

Even though it’s one of the largest social networks in the world, it’s actually rather narrowly focused. The proliferation of business owners, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, content creators, and tech folks means it’s a large community of people all working from roughly the same perspectives. Unlike sites like Facebook, where the average viewer is just scrolling through memes and liking cat photos and doesn’t really care about your marketing posts, LinkedIn has people who are browsing it because they know what they want.

This makes LinkedIn uniquely situated to provide traffic, links, and value from the posts you upload to it.

When they’re well done, you can get a lot of interest, and it’s not just interest from people who want to read your content. It’s interest from people who want to read your content and then reach out to you to network, to guest post, to build services together, to partner together, to go into business together.

And, sure, maybe a lot of those leads won’t work out. That’s fine! Any lead is a potentially good lead, and even if someone doesn’t become a customer, they could become a follower, a partner, a brand advocate, or a fan.

It all starts from a rather more engaged audience than what you get on other platforms.

The key, of course, is the content. Since LinkedIn is LinkedIn and not your site, you have very limited branding and site design flexibility. You have your name – not your business name – attached to your content. You can upload images, but you can’t do any of the wild dynamic scrolling effects or unique widgets or embeds that you can on your own site. You have to stand out, draw in interest, and succeed solely on the merits of your headline, your intro, and your content.

Where do you start?

Here are the post topics and formats that I’ve found work the best, both in attracting people to my clients and attracting me to them.

Idea 1: Express and Back Up a Controversial Belief

One of the most time-honored ways to get engagement on a social media post is to say something controversial that gets people arguing about it in the comments. Obviously, you want to pick something controversial that is related to your industry and niche, not something general. It doesn’t do you much good to rally sports fans and annoy fans of the rival team unless you’re selling merchandise, right?

For example, in the realm of SEO, you might use topics like “Keywords Don’t Matter, and Here’s Why,” or take a stance on whether or not generative AI is good or bad, ethical or unethical.

Note that your primary controversy is in the headline and opening section. Your actual content can be deep and nuanced, and you can end up without a conclusion at all, and it still works.

Idea 2: Refute and Disprove an Industry Myth

Every industry is full of myths, whether they’re things that used to be true but have changed, things that spread despite no foundation in fact, or “myths” that are actually true.

Being an industry myth buster isn’t a novel idea, but it’s a powerful one if you can come up with the myths to bust. Pro tip: try asking your followers what they would like to see investigated.

Idea 3: Tell a Story of Overcoming Business Hardship or Challenges

One of the brilliant benefits of LinkedIn is that you’re building up a personal brand, not just a corporate brand. You have a more personal presentation and can show more humanity than you might on your business blog.

One good way to leverage this is to “drop your guard” and talk about challenges you’ve faced in running your business and how you overcame them. For some, you’ll be an inspiration. For others, an object lesson they can use to avoid the same pitfalls.

Idea 4: Provide an Actionable Tutorial for Narrow Success

The internet abounds with tutorials, and a lot of them – at least in the realms of business – are very generic. A tutorial with a step that just says “create a business plan” isn’t very useful, after all.

Pick something in your workflow that you feel like you have a good handle on, and produce a specific, detailed tutorial on it. As an added bonus, use your own service or product as part of the steps, both to prove that it works and to generate interest in using it.

Idea 5: Write a Usage Guide for a Free Tool

If your brand has any free tools you offer to the public, it can be very helpful to produce a detailed user guide on how to use it. Now, here’s the thing: don’t publish that guide on LinkedIn. Instead, make it a two- or three-step process.

Have a detailed usage guide and tutorial on your site on a stand-alone page linked to from the tool itself. Have a blog post on your site that covers it in detail but a little more generically. And, have a more pared-down version you post on LinkedIn and link to both the tool and the more detailed guides.

Idea 6: Attend, Liveblog, and Review an Industry Event

This one isn’t necessarily going to get you leads directly, but then, when you attend an industry event, you’re getting leads in person.

Instead, use your LinkedIn blog to update with details of what’s going on at the event, your impressions of speakers and presentations, and recaps of interesting conversations you had with other people in your industry (and who you can tag on LinkedIn to network.)

Idea 7: Solicit Influencer Quotes and Advice

Few things are as good at getting initial shares, comments, and engagement as expert round-ups. These are some of my favorite kinds of content to produce.

Just come up with a question, either something open-ended like “What’s one piece of advice you wish you knew five years ago?” or something specific like “What’s your most-used SEO tool?” and send that question out to influencers and authorities in your niche. A lot of them won’t answer, but those who do can be compiled in your post. As an added bonus, you can send the finished product to each person who responded, and they can share it.

Idea 8: Create Content Summarizing On-Site Pillar Content

One of the best ways to use LinkedIn is the same way you would use something like Medium or, really, any other social network: to promote the content you publish on your site.

My recommendation is to spend some real time and effort creating some 10x pillar content on your site and spin off a bunch of smaller summaries and partial posts on different sub-topics, all linking back to the core post for a “read more” link. It works really well if the core content is good enough.

Idea 9: Solicit Questions and Produce an FAQ

Another way to get engagement and ensure that you’re producing content that covers topics people want to see is to produce an FAQ.

To get the questions people ask, just solicit your audience, your network, and even industry-related hashtag discussions, Discover servers, Slack channels, and elsewhere. As an added bonus, combine this with the previous idea and link each answer to more in-depth content on your site.

Idea 10: Create a Top List of Something Relevant

It doesn’t really matter what the list is about, just so long as it’s relevant to your industry, your niche, and the timing.

A top list of tools you use, of sites to read, influencers to follow, podcasts to listen to, infographics with designs you love; whatever it is, you’re making link bait.

Idea 11: Copy the Topics of Other Influencers

A time-honored tradition in marketing is to watch what other people around you are doing and do the same thing with your own spin. My usual go-to is to look for things like top ten lists and write my own top 20 list.

Since a lot of other people are using LinkedIn for the same purposes you are, you can look for the most interesting, viral, and effective posts, study them to see why they’re so effective, and replicate that success by copying the strategy, format, and in some cases even the topic.

Idea 12: Analyze and Replicate Trends from Elsewhere

The internet abounds with trends, many of which are only viral and interesting for weeks, days, or even hours in some extreme cases. If you can tap into the most freshly breaking trends and memes from sites like TikTok, you can capture a lot of interest before others can replicate the same level of success.

This one is tricky, though, because you have to tread a narrow line between “how do you do, fellow kids” and just posting completely irrelevant content.

Idea 13: Share Testimonials and Dig Deeper into Comments

One interesting way to use LinkedIn is to take a decent testimonial you get for your product or service and dig deep into it.

You want testimonials that mention specific features so you can write about how you’ve put a lot of work into making that feature great. You can also use mid-range reviews that have some criticisms and either use a post to justify the choice or use it to announce a change based on the criticism.

Idea 14: Respond to Currently Viral Industry Content

Every industry has content circulating and popular throughout the circles of people keeping their fingers on the pulse. You can identify that content and, where relevant, respond to it with your own perspective.

Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t, or maybe you think it’s all a wash; either way, you can capitalize on those trends with your industry-style LinkedIn newsjacking.

Idea 15: Be a Little Self-Indulgent and Celebrate Milestones

One of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn is that people expect it to be more personal, which means you can celebrate milestones both as your business and as an entrepreneur or CEO. What does the milestone mean to you, how much of a story was it to reach it, and what are you predicting for the future? You can say a lot with a milestone post.

So there you have it: fifteen ideas for content you can publish on LinkedIn, all with links and ways to drive traffic and generate leads back to your core business. Good luck!

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