What Should an Executive Even Talk About on LinkedIn?
Every CEO I work with hits the same wall: “I know I need to be visible, but I don’t know what I’d say.” It is the single most common objection, and it is almost always wrong. The real problem is not that you have nothing to say. It is that you cannot see what is already there.
Across 500+ CEO conversations a year, three tactics reliably surface a leader’s content sweet spot.
1. The Keynote Question
Ask yourself: if you had to give a keynote tomorrow to a room full of people in your industry, what would it be about? What would you want them to walk away believing? That single prompt tends to unlock content ideas in under a minute, because it bypasses the blank-page anxiety and goes straight to the conviction you already hold.
2. The Venn Diagram
Find the overlap between two circles: what you know deeply, and what your audience actually needs. Plenty of your expertise is not interesting to anyone but you, and plenty of what your audience wants you cannot speak to credibly. The content sweet spot lives in the intersection — where your hard-won knowledge meets a real question your buyers, peers, or future hires are asking.
3. Mine your own conversations
The best material is not invented; it is captured. The things you say in sales calls, board meetings, and hallway conversations — the explanations you give over and over, the takes that make someone lean in — are your content. You have already written it; you just have not published it. Start listening to your own conversations for the lines worth keeping.
Two principles that make it work
Once you know what to talk about, two things keep you going.
Let data build the strategy. You do not need the perfect plan on day one. Organize your content into a few “swim lanes” — a handful of themes you rotate through — and give it about 90 days. The signal in the data will tell you which lanes land and which to drop. Strategy emerges from publishing, not from planning.
Repetition is a feature, not a bug. New leaders worry about saying the same thing twice. The most effective communicators say the same core ideas everywhere, constantly. Your audience is not memorizing your feed; they are catching one post in ten. Repetition is how a message actually lands.
The wall is real, but it is made of fear, not emptiness. You have plenty to say. The work is learning to see it — and then saying it on repeat.