A blog used to be enough.
Do your keyword research, get SME insights, and hand the project to your caffeine-addicted writer. Repeat. You’re golden. This is how companies used to gain trust with their audience.
And while that still works (kinda), it’s not enough to gain the same level of trust to keep people interested, let alone buying. Call it a characteristic of human nature: people buy from other people. There are a couple of other reasons why more buyers are on LinkedIn. Right now, we’re in the age of personalization, and the no-nonsense opinions of a LinkedIn account often center around a very specific niche problem. Plus, it’s where your customers spend so much of their time.
It’s why 82% of people are more likely to trust a company when its senior executives are active on social media.
It’s also why LinkedIn personal branding has been our most sought-after service for over a year now. Here’s how we do LinkedIn brand management differently from other service providers out there — yes, including your Claude agent. But first, let’s recap where we are now.
I’ve worked with dslx for about three years now and ever since we started providing this service. I’ve run strategies and content calendars for about 7 different brands. Here’s my honest take.
What LinkedIn brand management gets you (vs what it doesn’t)
You’re here because you’re wondering if it pays to post on LinkedIn. Honestly…not always.
As more people jump on the platform, a specific type of poster has come out of the woodwork. We call these “LinkedIn sloppers.”
People have realized that LinkedIn can get them leads. But instead of creating authentic content sharing genuine experiences about their industry, they opt to use as many shortcuts as possible to invade our feeds with AI-generated content. Yuck.
If you’ve been on LinkedIn, you’ve likely seen monstrous constructions like:
- Any business jargon like “transform”, “leverage”, “game-changer,” etc
- It’s not X, it’s Y
- I am both humbled and proud to announce
- Here’s what [insert everyday occurrence] taught me about B2B marketing
…or some lazy alternative to these.
Perhaps you’ve even been tempted to take the easy road and shoot your shot on the AI slot machine. Pro tip: don’t. This is exactly why so many people outside of LinkedIn view the platform as cringe. AI content doesn’t work. It rings hollow. People know it’s fake. Not only does this approach ruin the platform by making authentic, real human content harder to find for the rest of us, but it also ultimately hurts, not helps, your reputation.
When I was writing the first draft of this post, there was no way for people to channel their AI-fueled rage. Now there is. LinkedIn has since introduced the “Report AI slop” button. It literally came out the day after I wrote the first draft of this post.
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There are no penalties yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the algorithm collects flagged posts to analyze what constitutes AI writing and hand out penalties in the form of suppressed reach.
Whenever you post great content (and that takes effort), you’ll be handsomely rewarded by people who actually want a reason to buy your service… and even the algorithm. As it turns out, LinkedIn itself wants to push more original content on feeds and boosts it through a combination of tactics like:
- Semantic fingerprinting: LinkedIn's NLP scans your post for genuine domain expertise and specificity, not just keywords; it can tell a real insight apart from a recycled take.
- Originality prioritization: Posts that read as templated or AI-flattened get quietly throttled, while distinct voices and clear points of view earn wider distribution.
- Dwell time and depth: The algorithm tracks how long someone actually lingers on your post before scrolling past, treating that pause as a strong quality signal.
I believe that LinkedIn will soon start penalizing AI-created content outright. I don’t have any numbers to back this up, but I do have the fury of thousands of irritated writers and disgruntled users behind me. It’s a question of sentiment, reading the room.
The bad news is that you can’t AI your way into hacking the algorithm and blowing up on LinkedIn.
The good news is:
1. Real, authentic content stands out all the more (people are starved of it).
2. We can help.
How we build the fundamentals of a LinkedIn presence
LinkedIn personal brand management has been our most popular service since we introduced it two years ago. Since then, we’ve helped companies generate over 50 inbound partnership DMs and reach over 69K brand and industry leaders across clients.
This is the first time we’ve revealed our process to anyone other than clients. You’re welcome.
1. The strategy: Writing before the writing
There’s no winging LinkedIn. It needs careful consideration, just like a content plan for a blog or other social media channels. Screaming in the void won’t get you much traction, lest you be met with the digital echoes of an empty inbox. Seriously, it gets you tumbleweeds and cricket chirps unless you figure out who you need to talk to and what you need to talk about.
That’s why we start working with every new client with our LinkedIn workshop.
This is a personalized, interview-style meeting where we gather insights into what success means to you and the best way to pursue it. We ask questions like:
- Why do you want to be on LinkedIn?
- Who is your ICP? What are some of the solutions you offer them?
- Is your aim to build a LinkedIn presence, build long-term trust, or get leads?
- Do you own, or have you ever owned, an espresso machine? (Weirdly great icebreaker. People with coffee machines have strong opinions.)
We let you spit your fire; the more raw and unfiltered, the better. We love nothing more than when a client talks about the time their coworker drove them up a wall, the time they had an existential crisis sparked by a bad quarter, or their admittedly unhealthy obsession with a niche industry problem.
We then take everything you said and piece it together to create a coherent LinkedIn strategy. We answer the questions:
- Who are you talking to?
- What are you talking about?
- Why do you want to talk about it?
- How will we go about getting results for you?
2. The content: You can’t make this stuff up
Anybody can write content.
I know how that sounds; I’m a writer. But not everyone can write content that makes somebody do something (like reach out to buy your product).
That’s a much rarer skill, and it’s what we specialize in at dslx. Part of that comes from our years of experience and expertise in writing. The other part, dear reader, comes from you. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at a slide from one of our workshops:
Once we have a strategy in place, we schedule what we call ‘content connects.’ These are regular interviews where we ask strategic questions about your business and place in it. Our goal is to learn all about the insights that keep your lights on. We mean the messy stuff, the questions that kept you up at 1 am over a few pots of coffee and thinking, “Does this month’s revenue mean I have to sell that 90s pinball machine… I just got a lease on that thing…”
Once we learn about your deepest, darkest thoughts, khm… I mean your big business insights; we map them into a full-on strategy. Based on that same strategy and your insights, we write posts that will make people want to follow you and buy from you.
Next, we schedule it into a content calendar.
In fact, we made our own social media planner for this exact reason. We were tired of all the bells and whistles of big SAAS companies like Asana or Trello. Our personalized dslx calendar is designed to have a 0-learning-curve, and you’ll be granted free access. We’ve found clients prefer it this way. It makes it easier for us to deliver content, and easier for you to review, request edits, or approve for scheduling.
3. The community: A case against echo chambers
A while back, our Director Ray Slater Berry uttered a few words that redefined the way I look at growing on LinkedIn. We were going back and forth, aligning on clients, talking about the best books we read, when he mentioned: “It helps to think of LinkedIn as a content engagement platform, instead of social media.”
That phrase is a great shorthand insight into explaining how the platform works. It’s why our entire service is built around growing your community on LinkedIn. We regularly engage with people in the comments, turning their opinions into future posts, getting into the weeds of the industry by hosting conversations, and even managing our clients' DMs.
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4. Our secret PR-flavored sauce
You’re a founder. The day doesn’t always go the way you want it to. Things break. You expect a quiet lunch, but by 1:00 PM, you’ve already:
- Rewritten a statement after a headline broke faster than your comms plan
- Signed off sponsor assets with the launch an hour away and legal still reading
- Briefed your CEO for a broadcast interview that just moved up to this afternoon
- Got a federation, a sponsor, and your legal team to agree on one line for the press conference
In short, life happens. Inspiration strikes. You want to talk about it. Our LinkedIn service is built around these authentic moments that perform so well on LinkedIn.
If you’ve attended a real-life function, people expect to see posts on the same day. You want to get there first to scoop up the engagement, and we get that to you.
We’ve designed a workflow around a less than 24-hour turnaround time. That means that if you’ve attended an event today, you get a post talking about it that very same day. Staying on top of your daily schedule has also helped us grow accounts, as posting on social media amplifies your presence. It’s one of the reasons our clients think of us as partners.
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Get leads, partnerships, and more through dslx LinkedIn brand management
LinkedIn personal branding rewards the people who show up with something to say. If that sounds like more work than you have hours for, then it’s work for us. You talk, we turn it into content that sounds like you on your sharpest day: strategy, posts, comments, DMs, and the same-day turnaround when something worth posting about actually happens.
You can keep pulling the AI slot machine and hope the algorithm blinks first. Or, you can build a presence that people stop scrolling for, one that brings in partnership DMs, podcast invites, and buyers who already trust you before the first call.
Book a call, and we'll start with the workshop.
