I stopped writing linkedin posts from scratch and my engagement tripled. here's the workflow.
social media manager for a B2B consulting firm. the partners want linkedin content but they refuse to write it themselves. so my job is to turn their expertise into posts that don't sound like they were written by an intern who's never been in a boardroom.
for a year I was interviewing each partner, taking notes, then trying to write posts in their voice. the posts were fine but they sounded like me pretending to be them. flat. generic. the kind of linkedin content you scroll past without stopping.
what changed: I stopped writing from my notes and started writing from their actual words. I now have a 15 minute monthly call with each partner where I ask them one question about something happening in their industry. ""what are your clients getting wrong about supply chain resilience right now?"" or ""what's changed about M&A due diligence in the last 2 years?"" they talk for 10-15 minutes. I don't take notes. I just listen and ask follow-up questions.
right after the call I dictate the 2-3 things they said that would make good posts into willow voice. the stuff that was opinionated, specific, maybe a little contrarian. then I paste each transcript into claude with ""turn this into a linkedin post, under 200 words, keep the specific examples, maintain a direct confident tone, no hashtags, no emojis."" claude drafts 3-4 posts per partner per month from that single call.
the difference is the input. when the source material is someone talking passionately about their area for 10 minutes, the AI has real substance to work with. when the source material is my typed notes from a conversation I half-remember, the AI produces filler.
our engagement rate went from about 1.5% average to over 4%. the partners started getting DMs and inbound calls from posts for the first time. the content works because it's their ideas and their language, just formatted for the platform.
other social media managers making content for executives, what's your process? I feel like this problem is universal and nobody has a clean answer for it.