Most business owners with LinkedIn on their to-do list are asking the wrong question. They want to know what format to post in, how long the copy should be and whether carousels are still worth it. The answer to all of those questions changes every quarter, and it is probably not the reason their posts are flopping.
The reason is simpler. A recent study of a million posts across LinkedIn and Meta found that 64 to 67% of long-form LinkedIn content is now AI-written. The feed feels exactly like that, and the posts cutting through are the ones that cost the author something to write.
In Episode 23 of Raising The Bar, Mel Strutt and Monique Jecks break down a real example of two posts from the same MD in the same week: one that landed well and one that went nowhere. The difference had nothing to do with format or timing. It came down to whether the post felt written by a real human.
If you have 20 minutes a week and you want to know whether LinkedIn is worth your time and what to actually do with it, this one is for you.
Key Takeaways:
- The post that worked and why: A heartfelt dedication to a team member, a photo of an original cover letter and a tag. Unpolished, human and specific. The post that didn’t? A stylised quote image with long-form thought leadership copy. Both were well-written. Only one feels genuine.
- 64 to 67% of long-form LinkedIn content is now AI-written: The monotony you feel scrolling is not in your head. The greatest currency behind a good LinkedIn post has always been time, and AI has made it feel like time is no longer required. That is exactly why authentic posts stand out more than ever.
- Watch out for LinkedIn’s post enhancer: Pressing the enhance button on a well-written, human post strips out exactly what made it worth reading. If you have written something genuine, leave it alone.
- Format matters less than you think: Document posts, carousels and image posts all perform pretty similarly. Stop waiting for the right format and start posting.
- Know why you are actually doing this: 3BY2 has had two leads from the podcast in a year and one has converted. Mel keeps going because it reaches clients as an eDM, trains the team and she learns from the research. It’s also a major contributor to AI search results (GEO). Engagement is not the only metric. Know what you are trying to get from your content before you decide whether to persist.
- The 20-minute framework: Two posts a week, scheduled across the week, written from your own experience about a problem you solve. If your clients are not on LinkedIn, stop posting and go out for a beer with them instead.
Raising The Bar is a fortnightly podcast hosted by Mel Strutt, delivering blunt, experience-backed marketing guidance for Australian business owners. Joined by Monique Jecks, they address what matters, call out the fluff and raise the standard of what marketing must deliver for your bottom line.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Raising the Bar, a podcast giving no-nonsense marketing advice for Aussie business owners. Expertise takes experience, and that’s why we tell stories from lived experience to deliver marketing that raises the standard of what Aussie business owners should expect.
We’re back with another episode of Raising the Bar and tonight we’re talking about why that post flopped. Specifically that LinkedIn post. LinkedIn post because that’s what most business owners or MDs or people who have been charged with going and getting content, getting it on LinkedIn and getting people engaged with us. That’s what they’re usually using as their medium.
Yeah. And they all feel guilty if they are not doing it. I feel like it’s a common thing. Yeah. If you see that rocking up in your role scorecards, you’re like, “Oh, for goodness sakes.” So LinkedIn specifically and personal posts specifically, not business posts, is what we’re speaking about tonight. There’s a specific example. It’s actually my example, but I’ll let you roll it through because I got asked this by a client this week. So it was a managing director. They did two posts within the same week. One was really good, well received. The other one didn’t get much attention. What happened?
So specifically, that’s the question they asked me. I’ll explain those posts a little bit. And hopefully a little bit comes out of that. We can start to talk about a few other rules as it comes and things to care about and things not to. In this specific example, the post that really worked was a post that was a bit of a heartfelt dedication to an awesome team member. And what was most beautiful about it is that it had a really dodgy looking picture taken of the original cover letter that that MD had received from that staff member. What a beautiful thing that someone would keep that. I won’t call her out in case she gets a bit embarrassed, but that they would keep that and just a lovely post. And the other thing that that post did is it tagged that person. So straight away, it’s not just a post from one person’s page. It tagged another staff member and then the image just caught you straight away. Good old piece of paper that you miss a little bit sometimes. So the way that was written was very heartfelt. It tagged another person. The photo was brilliant. It captured your attention, not something you see every day. The post that didn’t work was a little bit more thought leadership. It still had a little bit of storytelling, but the image used was a reference image, like a text quote image, very stylised and branded at the bottom of the post, and then a long copy format post that was more of a knowledge expert post, like my view on something, more so than a heartfelt post. This person is actually pretty good. But you could just see it just didn’t have the same sentiment.
So that’s what I said to her and I thought, the thing I want people to take the most from this is that you really don’t have to care about every single one. Don’t overthink it. But in this case, there were some simple parameters that we could look at and it’s interesting to talk about them tonight.
Yeah. And I don’t know, when you flick through the feed of LinkedIn, is it genuinely a little bit worse now than it used to be? Or am I just over it?
No, listen, I think it’s overwhelming. But it isn’t just you because there’s data to back up the monotony of what it’s become. I’ll go back to an example of a beautiful LinkedIn post I always loved. There’s a few marketers I follow, but I’ll talk about a really Perth-based example. I loved, well before AI, and probably she might use it a bit more now, but Kath Leech wrote these beautiful posts. They were always from lived experiences and what I would always say is we valued them five years ago, four years ago, three years ago, because we knew that the greatest currency on earth had been given to prepare that for us, which is time. And now it doesn’t really take as much time to put that out there. So when you’re posting from yourself, the value, if you do that quickly and roll it through, is lost if you can tell that it’s been curated. The data to back that up comes from a really good recent study by Pangram. It was released in July 2026. They did a review of a million posts that went out, across LinkedIn and Meta. A third of the data, so around 330,000 posts, were LinkedIn specific, and of them, they had the highest percentage of AI use. They ran a tool that detects whether AI has been used to generate a post or not. And this is an independent tool, not one that they’re trying to sell. I think it was 64 to 67% of long-form LinkedIn content, so those posts with a lot of copy and text, were written by AI. So that’s probably why the monotony exists for us. The art of storytelling came from the time and investment of doing it and that’s what you want to encourage people to do. That’s why this one worked for that particular MD. That picture was what captured attention.
There is something worth pointing out. LinkedIn has an enhancer, like a word or post enhancer. It’s not very new. In LinkedIn, I would always be tempted to press it because of my Melisms, my little spelling and grammatical errors that have followed me through life. But as soon as you push that button, it’ll actually rejig your words. So something that is actually well human-written and a little bit more authentic can be made to sound very AI-generated quite quickly. And in a professional setting, people always read their posts six times and get someone else to check it before pressing the button. Because of that, I think we AI-ify our content a little bit more. Engagement is still there on LinkedIn, but there are formats that do better than others.
I was just reflecting back on what I thought were the best LinkedIn posts I’ve seen in the last six months. And I actually think it was someone we know that works in a bank who posted about having their first kid and taking a bit of time away from work, then coming back after being on parental leave. It was probably the one I remember the most. And you know, that one clearly took a lot more time to write. From the heart, hey.
So back to it. What content works well? Photos, carousels, reels? So there’s actually no data pertaining to individual posts from a personal profile directly. The data coming from Social Insider, which is a good source, and LinkedIn directly, is that number one at about 7% engagement is what they call document posts, or information posts, like being able to get research and post it as a document. That’s really been succeeding as a format. Then carousels and image carousels. Those knowledge posts, where it’s a bit of information and then a bit of information and a bit of information, tell the story quite well. The Harvard study found this, and then this other study found that. Really popular. But the important thing to point out is that document posts, then image carousels, then single video, then text and single image posts, it’s a fly’s wing between them. And it’s ever changing. I can re-read the data from a quarter ago and it’s slightly different, and this quarter is different again. And I think that tells the story that we overthink it too much.
I’m not a big LinkedIn player and I’m simply not a big LinkedIn player because most of my clients aren’t on LinkedIn. We have phone conversations and pop out to visit them. That’s how we get in front of people who are in workshops and meetings all day and are busy. I don’t think they even have the time to go and look us up. They probably look at our website.
But we do really good work for other people and we build brands around other people. And I think the biggest thing I see is that you really don’t sweat the small stuff. You realise it’s something that you’ve got to build on, that you’ll change it up, and some things will work and some things won’t. The content matters more. Carousels are going to be a good one. That deep knowledge, giving free value away, is the most popular. LinkedIn has jumped on that. The Social Insider report, quoted by someone from SEMrush, actually a woman named Julia, said: document posts perform well because they behave like free value on a platform where people actively want to learn. LinkedIn is one of the few social platforms where audiences are genuinely looking for takeaways, reports, frameworks and templates. Documents work really well because they’re downloadable.
It’s funny because when I read that I had an interesting thought back to the old days. SEO companies before I was even in the game used to encourage people. So if you were a recruiter, you should put together the five or ten tips for preparing for an interview, write your CV template, put all these things on your website to be found. Trying to get traffic to your website. But if you do not have people buying from you, then you don’t have a business anyway. And I’ve often found that anything we’ve ever given away for free or in reports, it’s generally been people who could never afford our service. Students doing work for uni, finding information, competitors. And so I sometimes wonder about the value because those things take a long time to put together. You put them out there, great, you get good engagement, but how many customers do you actually get? For me, I’d always be putting a case study on instead, or doing a really genuine piece where it’s me putting a video out there. I don’t really care about engagement because I wouldn’t try and win business purely from a LinkedIn post. All my B2B research first, see if I thought they were a good fit before I engaged. Look at the time and investment of putting that free stuff out there. You can spend all your time on LinkedIn. You can post for five, six, seven, eight years. You might never get a lead from it.
So know who your target audience on LinkedIn actually is, and whether this kind of content is something they’re going to download, or whether it’s actually reaching a side audience, what we’d call an affiliate audience to your company.
So our engagement isn’t great. Why keep doing this? It’s a good question. Because I don’t have an ego about it. I think if someone ever found the content, it would be good. But we know what we get from it. I think we’ve had two leads because they saw this and then went and looked for us. Yeah. And one’s converted. And if it’s the one I read at the end of the financial year, it’s a good lead. So knowing the costs and the time I invest in that, if that client stays a client for a year, that will be more than a five and a half times return on investment for what we’ve done so far for one client. Two leads. Where’s the other one? Thanks, K.
Why do it? Well, first of all, it goes to all our clients in an email. So I’m not sitting writing an eDM every fortnight to get this out to them. They’re getting it. They know we’re still on top of stuff. That really matters to me. They talk to me and our staff about having seen it, and that matters. But the other piece is that you use it in sales meetings. And it trains my team. And then a piece I never really thought would come, other than the fact I have to spend more time with you, is that I learn from it. Some of the questions make me realise I’m not up to date on something and I’ve got to do some research and put it together. That’s stuff that a business owner probably doesn’t have the time to do. So I’m really happy with what that’s delivering for me as well. And we don’t try and make it perfect, obviously.
One of our favourite business coaches came and presented to us at our exec offsite last week. Trav Thomas, I’ll call you out because I know you’re not doing it anymore and we miss you, but thanks for giving us attention still. And I was saying, Trav, I’m really happy we got leads from it. Should I persist? And he said, “I think we did 238 podcasts before we even got any traction whatsoever.” The number is 100 podcasts before you get anywhere. And when you hear it from someone like Trav, who has got a great following, you’re pretty happy to do it. Might be a mistake, but as long as it’s paying the bills, and it looks like it is at the moment, you’ve got to drop the ego on this stuff. What are you trying to get from it? Is engagement what you care about, or being seen, then researched, and getting a lead? I know what I care about more. I can buy likes. I can buy engagement. Can’t buy leads.
All right. I’m a business owner. I’ve got 20 minutes a week free, maybe. No marketing team. Give me a quick rundown. Round this out. What should I be doing? I’ll have to ask you a question first. Are your clients on LinkedIn? Yes. Okay. Well then, go for it. Be your authentic self. Is there a problem that you solve for the market that you can talk about from your heart and put out there? I don’t care if it’s a carousel or an image. If you can have a cool little image that goes with it, that helps a little bit. But next week it’ll be another trend and the week after that will be another one. What matters is that what you’re saying actually appeals to people and that you’re consistent with it. Two posts a week. Prepare two posts. Schedule one to go out a little later in the week, one at the start. Be visible in people’s feeds. It doesn’t matter if people are engaging. You will hit the jackpot one in fifty, and you’ll get lots of people liking it. Probably because it’s about something really nice where they know what to comment. And sometimes they’re going to suck. The reality is having the perseverance, the self-confidence, and not having the ego to just stick at it and give it a crack.
Now, if my clients or my prospective leads aren’t on LinkedIn, what do I do with my 20 minutes? Go out for a beer. Listen, there are so many ways and knowing your audience is what we always say first. But if your prospective clients aren’t on LinkedIn, find out where they are and pursue that angle, and you’ll be right. Sounds good. All right, let’s get to work.
