What should a founder post about on LinkedIn?

15%

of B2B buyers rate the overall quality of the thought leadership they read as very good or excellent, in 2024 research by Edelman and LinkedIn

What topics work best for a founder?

The topics only you can speak to. A marketing team can write about features and a news site can summarise the market, but nobody else has your view from inside the company. Readers follow a founder for that view, so the best themes sit where your experience meets the problems your customers care about.

Pick three or four themes and rotate through them. A useful starting set looks like this.

• The customer's problem. What people struggle with before they find you, the mistakes they make and the questions they ask on a first call.
• Building the company. Decisions you made and why, such as a hire, a pricing change or a feature you cut, including the ones that went wrong.
• Lessons learned. What a hard quarter, a lost deal or an early mistake taught you, told as a story with a point.
• Where the market is going. Your honest take on a trend in your field, especially where you disagree with the usual line.

Your own topics will differ, but each theme should connect to the people you want to reach. A post about your morning routine may get likes, yet it rarely brings the right reader closer.

What do buyers actually want to read?

Something useful, and buyers rarely rate what they read as excellent. In the 2024 research by Edelman and LinkedIn, about half of buyers called the thought leadership they read good, but only 15 percent rated it very good or excellent. The gap is an opening for any founder willing to be specific.

The same research asked what the highest quality content includes. Buyers pointed to strong research and data (55 percent), help understanding their own business challenges and opportunities (44 percent), and concrete guidance and case studies (43 percent). For a founder, that translates into real examples, figures from your own work where you can share them, and advice a reader could act on tomorrow.

Where do post ideas come from?

Mostly from the work you are already doing. A sales call surfaces an objection worth answering in public. A support ticket shows a misunderstanding many customers share. A decision in a leadership meeting becomes a post about the trade-off behind it. Each of these comes with a real example built in.

Keep a note on your phone and add to it whenever you catch yourself explaining something for the second time that week. When it is time to post, you choose from a list instead of staring at a blank screen, and the posts sound like you because they started as things you actually said. If writing is the bottleneck, talking an idea through first is usually faster.

What should a founder avoid posting?

Constant promotion is the most common trap. An occasional launch or hiring post is fine, but a feed of announcements reads like a company brochure and gives readers little reason to follow you rather than your company. Generic motivation and recycled advice have the same problem, because readers have seen them many times before.

Be careful with anything that belongs to someone else. Leave out client names, numbers and stories unless you have permission, and never let a tool invent an anecdote or a figure to fill a gap. If it didn't happen to you or your customers, it doesn't go in the post.