4 Creating Content
The question I get asked most about social media is “what should I post?” Everyone has a different style and what works for you will be different for what works for me but here’s a starter guide.
4.1 The Basic Principle
Post things that are useful, interesting, or engaging to people in your field. That’s it. Everything else is details. You are well-placed to educate because you have expertise. You do not need to be the world’s leading authority on a topic to have something worth sharing. If you know something that others in your network might find useful, share it.
4.2 Time investment
I also want to recognise upfront that building a social media following that will be genuinely useful and impactful takes time. My network and reach is now large enough that I think the time I spend on social media gives more than it takes - I get invites for talks, papers, collaborations, and it does spread my work. This took years.
I’ve spoken to colleagues who logged on, posted the link to their paper, and then decried it as useless because it didn’t go viral. That’s not how it works, it takes a sustained presence . You don’t have to do this. If you want to network by going to conferences and other more traditional routes, go for your life but they also take effort so don’t expect anything less from social media.
4.3 What Works
4.3.1 Scheduling posts
Unlike Twitter’s chronological feed, LinkedIn’s algorithm prioritises content based on relevance, engagement, and user relationships rather than purely temporal ordering. This fundamentally changes how we should approach post scheduling. Where Twitter rewarded frequent, real-time posting, LinkedIn favours strategic timing and consistency over volume.
Industry analyses consistently identify mid-week posting (Tuesday to Thursday) as generating higher engagement on LinkedIn, with morning hours (7:00-9:00 AM) and lunch periods (12:00-1:00 PM) showing particular strength (Hootsuite, 2024). However, these represent aggregate patterns across millions of users, and your optimal posting time depends on when your specific network is active. For academics, consider institutional rhythms.Posts published during term time typically receive more engagement than those during holiday periods and posting in the early afternoon UK time often captures both European afternoon and North American morning activity.
To schedule posts, use LinkedIn’s native scheduling functionality by selecting the clock icon when creating a post, which allows you to compose content and select a future publication time directly within the platform.
4.3.2 Sharing your own work
Share papers, preprints, and resources you have created. When you do:
- Explain what the paper is about in plain language
- Highlight why it matters and who should care
- Include a key finding or takeaway
- Link to an open access version if possible
- Tag co-authors who are on LinkedIn
- All posts benefit from images so e.g., take a screenshot of the abstract or a graph from the paper.
Here is an example:
4.3.3 Sharing others’ work
You do not have to create everything you share. Sharing papers and resources from others with your own commentary is valuable.
Add your perspective: why is this worth reading? What did you learn? This does more than share a link, it explains what makes the paper noteworthy and positions you as someone with expertise. It is entirely possible to build a following by being a person who shares a lot of stuff people find interesting and have none of it be your own work.
4.3.4 Reflecting on experience
Posts that share genuine experience resonate strongly. What you have learned, what challenged you, what you wish you had known earlier. This can work because it shares specific insights from real experience.
4.3.5 Asking questions
Asking questions can invite engagement and can also be a really useful way of getting information. Remember that specific questions get specific answers and vague questions (“Any tips for teaching?”) get vague answers.
4.3.6 Images
Include images when you can. They make posts more visually distinctive in the feed and increase engagement. Even a screenshot of an abstract or a figure from a paper is better than plain text.
If you give a talk, take a photo of the room or your slides. If you are at a conference, document it. If you are reading something interesting, photograph the book. These do not need to be professional quality. They just need to break up the text and give people something to look at.
4.4 What Does Not Work
Pure self-promotion without value. “Excited to announce my paper was accepted for publication!” with no link or preprint a link. Give your audience something useful (the paper to read).
Generic inspirational content. LinkedIn is full of this already. Unless you have something distinctive to say, skip the motivational posts.
Engagement bait. “Like if you agree!” or “Comment YES for more content!” This is annoying and increasingly penalised by the algorithm (see Chapter 2).
Excessive posting. A couple of posts a week is sustainable long-term; once a day is fine if you have the content, but more than that and you risk becoming noise.
Controversial takes for the sake of engagement. Hot takes can work if you genuinely believe them and can defend them. Manufactured controversy is transparent and tiresome.
4.5 Being Mindful About What You Share
Not everything should be posted.
4.5.1 Confidential and sensitive information
Some things are confidential. Internal discussions, strategic decisions, personnel matters, anything covered by agreements or policies. Do not share these, even vaguely or anonymously.
Be particularly careful about students. Even positive stories can be problematic. “I had a student who…” posts can be identifying, even when you think they are not. Students read LinkedIn. Your colleagues read LinkedIn. What feels like a heartwarming anecdote might feel like an invasion of privacy to the person involved.
Before posting anything about students, ask: would I be comfortable if they saw this? Would I be comfortable if their parents saw this? If the answer is no, do not post it.
4.5.2 Institutional sensitivities
Your institution can see what you post and these days your institution almost certainly has a social media policy you should be aware of. Before sharing strong opinions about policies, decisions, or directions, consider whether it could create problems, either by violating policy or just by coming across to your colleagues as someone they don’t really want to work with. This does not mean you cannot be critical and fReEdOm Of SpEeCh still exists. It means being strategic about what you say publicly versus what you say in other contexts.
4.5.3 Personal content
How much personal content to share is your choice. Some people keep LinkedIn strictly professional where others share personal updates, hobbies, and life events. I have always had a proportion of my posts be more personal in nature, I share about climbing mountains and my wife and sometimes just stuff I find funny. I try to keep this to less than a third of my overall content so it’s still firmly professional but I think there is a benefit to showing some personality, particularly in the age of generic AI slop.
However, there is no right answer and it doesn’t come without risk so think about what you are comfortable with being permanently public and what you are willing for the world to know about you. LinkedIn posts are searchable and current and future employers, collaborators, and students may see them. Share what you are genuinely comfortable with and don’t worry what other people are doing.
4.6 A Note on AI-Generated Content
LinkedIn is saturated with AI-generated content. Generic posts, obvious ChatGPT copy-pasta, comments that say nothing. It’s awful but if you have even an inkling of a personality this creates an opportunity for authentic human voices to stand out.
Do not use AI to write your posts. The point of LinkedIn is building genuine connections, and you cannot do that with content that could have been written by anyone. People connect with people, not with smoothly optimised content.
Is the above post slightly unhinged? Yes. But it’s very clearly an unhinged human.
AI may be able to help with checking grammar and brainstorming ideas (that you then write yourself), but as with everything, the distinction is AI as a tool supporting your thinking versus AI replacing your thinking.
Be yourself, even if it is messy. Rough but genuine beats smooth but generic.
(I do fully appreciate the double-standard in saying this in a book I have used AI to help write)