What should I post about on LinkedIn?
Post about your specific expertise, lessons from real work you've done, and honest opinions on developments in your field. The strongest LinkedIn content comes from firsthand experience — a decision you made, a mistake you caught, a pattern you've noticed repeatedly — rather than generic advice that could have been written by anyone in any industry.
The question "what should I post about" usually signals that someone is looking outward for topics instead of inward at their own work. But the most reliable content source is what a person already does every week: the decisions, disagreements, mistakes, and small wins that happen inside their actual job. These are naturally specific, which makes them naturally differentiated — nobody else had that exact client conversation or debugged that exact production issue.
A useful way to organize this is across a few recurring categories: lessons (what you learned from doing something), opinions (a stance on how your field does things, ideally one with some friction), observations (a pattern you've noticed that others might not have named yet), and process (how you or your team actually gets something done, made concrete with specifics rather than abstractions).
The content to avoid is repackaged motivational language — "success isn't a straight line," "your network is your net worth" — because it carries no information specific to the author and blends into thousands of similar posts. It might get passive likes, but it doesn't build recognition. Recall that the goal of any single post is to reinforce a consistent, specific identity, and generic content can't do that no matter how polished it is.
One common mistake is confusing specificity with confidentiality — sharing a real decision or lesson doesn't require naming clients, disclosing numbers you're not authorized to share, or breaking a confidence to make a point. The useful detail is usually the reasoning and outcome, not proprietary specifics, so it's possible to be concrete about what you learned without exposing information that isn't yours to share.
Key Points
- Draw content from actual work: decisions, mistakes, client conversations, technical problems
- Organize ideas into recurring categories — lessons, opinions, observations, process
- Opinions with some friction are more memorable than safe, universally agreeable statements
- Generic motivational content gets passive engagement but builds no recognition
Example
A UX designer stuck on what to post starts logging one specific decision from each week's client work — why they rejected a stakeholder's design request, how they resolved a usability test contradiction — and turns each into a short post; engagement roughly doubles compared to their previous posts quoting general design principles, because readers were getting a real decision instead of a repeated maxim.
Related Questions
Should I post about my industry news on LinkedIn?
Only if you add a specific opinion or implication — reposting news with a neutral summary rarely performs, but reacting to it with a clear stance or prediction gives readers a reason to engage.
Is it okay to post about failures on LinkedIn?
Yes, and failures often outperform wins — a specific mistake with a clear lesson reads as more credible and useful than a highlight reel, as long as it's framed around what you learned rather than pure venting.