LinkedIn as a Practice
A guide to showing up as a human being on a platform designed to make that difficult.
There is a notification on my phone right now. “Your post is gaining traction. See who’s engaging.”
I looked at it for a moment and put the phone face down on the desk.
Not because I do not care about reach. I do. But because there is something specific and instructive about that notification. The platform did not tell me who read it and found it useful. It told me it was gaining traction. The language is mechanical. Velocity. Momentum. A thing moving faster than before.
Cold coffee on the left side of the desk. The cursor blinking on a draft I have been avoiding. Outside, the sound of a neighbour’s door. Ordinary things. The kind of morning where you sit with a notification and ask yourself: what am I actually doing here?
That question is the one this guide is built around.
Not how to grow your LinkedIn. How to use it in a way that does not hollow you out.
LinkedIn is a performative platform.
LinkedIn’s business model incentivises performance over authenticity
The algorithm rewards engagement, likes, comments, shares, which naturally pushes users toward polished narratives, humble-brags, and curated success stories. You see the same templates repeated. The “fired on a Friday, landed my dream job on Monday” post. The motivational quote with a career pivot. The humble accomplishment wrapped in gratitude. It works because the algorithm amplifies it, and people benefit from the visibility. That is not conspiracy. It is just how engagement-driven platforms operate.
Confident posts. Polished headlines. Messages that arrive feeling like they were written by someone who has never actually read your work.
I spent a long time on that platform doing the same thing. Optimising. Strategising. Finding the right people and saying the right things in the right order.
It worked, in a narrow sense. My numbers went up. But something felt off. Like I was performing a version of connection rather than actually connecting.
Then I started looking at what was actually happening underneath the surface.
And what I found changed how I think about the platform entirely.
The honest picture first
Before we talk about tactics, you deserve the structural truth.
LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Its primary business model is not your career. It is LinkedIn Premium subscriptions and Recruiter licences sold to companies. Every algorithm decision, every reach mechanic, every “your post is gaining traction” notification exists to serve that business model, not yours.
The penalty you feel when you stop posting for a few days. The weeks it takes to rebuild to your previous baseline. That is not a coincidence. It is deliberate friction, engineered to keep you producing content that makes the platform feel alive. You are the product. Your consistency is what they are selling to advertisers and recruiters.
The SSI score, the Social Selling Index, was built for B2B sales teams. It measures the behaviours LinkedIn wants from you, posting, connecting, messaging, engaging. It has almost no correlation with career outcomes for regular employees. But because it has a number and a dashboard, people chase it. That is the design working exactly as intended.
The spam in your inbox is not a bug. LinkedIn sold InMail credits and lead generation tools to thousands of sales teams. Your inbox was the product they sold. It will never be fixed because fixing it would reduce revenue.
I am not saying this to make you cynical. I am saying it because leadership, real leadership, starts with seeing clearly. You cannot navigate a system you refuse to understand.
What the platform does reward
Here is where it gets more useful.
The algorithm does reward one thing that is not pay-to-play. Comments from people with large, engaged followings. One genuine comment from someone with twenty thousand followers does more for your reach than fifty likes from regular accounts.
This means community is the real engine. Not content volume. The practice of reading other people’s work carefully, responding to it specifically, building actual familiarity before you ever ask for anything. That is slow. It feels inefficient. It is the only lever that consistently works without a budget behind it.
The platform also rewards specific, repeatable points of view over broad expertise. The people who break through without external credentials share one trait. They own a particular angle that a defined audience waits for. Not “leadership content.” Something narrower. Something like: what distributed engineering teams get wrong about trust, or why most engineering cultures confuse speed with urgency.
Specificity builds following. Following builds algorithmic signal. Algorithmic signal builds reach.
And external credentials, a book, a talk, a public body of work, unlock a different tier of visibility entirely. The platform is structurally biased toward people with proof that exists outside it. That is a long game. It is worth playing.
Building the profile that actually works
Before any of the tactics matter, your profile has to do its two jobs.
The first job is answering the question someone is typing at eleven on a Tuesday night. Not “who has leadership in their headline.” Specific words. The exact language the right person uses when they are looking for someone who does what you do. That language lives in job postings for the roles you want. In the way clients describe their problems in the first email they send. In the questions people ask at conferences when they are in pain. Use their words, not the impressive ones.
The headline is the most important line on your profile and the one most people get wrong. Most headlines describe what the person has. “Senior Engineering Manager at Company X.” That is a fact. It is not a signal. The headline that works describes what the person does for someone specific. “I help engineering teams lead through ambiguity without losing the people.” Or “Building the kind of tech organisations people do not leave.” The test is simple: would the right person read it and think, that is for me?
The About section is where most people write a third-person biography that nobody reads. The About section that works is a first-person paragraph that names the specific problem you solve, says something true that most people in your position would not say publicly, and ends with a direct invitation. Not a summary of your career. A perspective on something that matters.
Here is the structure that works:
The first sentence names who you are in plain language. Not your title. Your role in people’s working lives. “I work with tech leaders who are good at their jobs and losing faith in the organisations they are doing them in.” That sentence is for one person. The person who reads it and feels seen.
The second and third sentences say the thing you believe that most people in your field would not say in public. Not a take designed to provoke. A genuine belief, held clearly, stated without hedging. This is the Blood in the Water principle applied to your profile. The belief that makes someone uncomfortable is also the belief that makes the right person feel understood.
The closing sentence is a specific invitation. Not “let us connect.” A specific thing. “If you are in the first year of a management role and something is already feeling wrong, I want to hear about it.” That is an invitation that filters for exactly the person it is for and tells everyone else clearly that it is not for them.
The Featured section is the one most underused. It is the only place on the profile where you can show someone your actual thinking rather than describing it. One piece of writing that demonstrates your point of view. Not your most popular post. Your most honest one. The one that cost you something to publish. That is the one that does the work.
One last thing on the profile. The banner image. Most people leave it as the generic LinkedIn gradient or use a corporate photo. The banner is eight seconds of attention before anyone reads a word. Use it. A short line of text in your own words on a clean background works better than most professional designs because it is immediately personal rather than immediately branded.
What the algorithm rewards the engagement practice
The community-first principle named above needs a specific practice or it stays as an idea.
Here is what the practice looks like in concrete terms.
Identify twelve to fifteen accounts worth genuine engagement. Not the largest accounts in your space. The accounts whose thinking you genuinely find interesting, whose angle is adjacent to yours but not identical, and whose audience would find your thinking useful. These are the people whose comment sections you will inhabit not as a growth tactic but because the conversation is worth having.
The criteria for the list is simple. Would you read this person’s post carefully even if it had no algorithmic benefit? If yes, they are on the list. If you are calculating the follower count before you decide, they are not.
Engage with those twelve to fifteen accounts before you post anything on a given day. Not a like. A comment that demonstrates you read the post and thought about it. Two to four sentences. Something specific about what they said and one thing it connected to in your own thinking. No flattery without content. “Great post” is not a comment. “You named the thing I have been trying to articulate about psychological safety, which is that it is not a state you achieve, it is a practice you repeat in every meeting, and I have been watching teams get it right once and then slowly lose it because they treated the first success as the end of the work” is a comment.
Do this consistently for sixty days and the algorithmic effect is real. Not because you gamed the algorithm. Because you built genuine familiarity with people whose audiences trust their recommendations, and when those people engage with your posts, the signal is strong enough to move things.
The discipline is the resistance to doing this instrumentally. The moment the comment is written for reach rather than for the conversation, the person reading it can feel the difference. And they stop engaging. And the whole mechanism breaks.
The people who make this work treat it as reading practice with a social layer. Not outreach. Reading.
What to actually post
The article so far has made the case for owning a specific angle. Here is how to find it and what to do with it.
The angle is not chosen. It is noticed. It is the thing you find yourself returning to in conversation, the problem you have a different opinion on from most people in your field, the pattern you see that others seem to miss. You do not decide to have a point of view. You pay attention to where you already do and name it more precisely than you have before.
The test for whether you have found your angle is this: can you describe it in one sentence that contains a specific claim rather than a general category? “I write about leadership” is not an angle. “I write about what happens to new managers in the first six months before the organisation has finished deciding what kind of leader they are going to become” is an angle. Specific enough to exclude most people. Specific enough to make the right people feel it was written for them.
On post format. The posts that consistently perform, across every account I have watched carefully, share three structural features regardless of length or topic.
They open with a specific moment rather than a general claim. “My director forwarded an email at 6pm on a Friday with no context” lands differently than “Communication breakdowns happen in every organisation.” The specific moment is concrete. The general claim is something the reader already knows.
They hold a tension open longer than feels comfortable before they resolve it. The post that says “here is the problem” in paragraph one and “here is the solution” in paragraph two is a post shaped like a LinkedIn post. The post that sits with the complexity for three or four paragraphs before it offers anything resembling a conclusion is a post shaped like actual thinking. Actual thinking earns re-reads.
They end with a question that is genuinely open. Not “what do you think?” which is a call to engagement that signals you want engagement. A question that you actually do not have an answer to, about something the post raised, that a thoughtful person might want to contribute to. “I am not sure whether this is specific to engineering cultures or whether I am just seeing what I work closest to” is a genuinely open ending. “How has your organisation handled this?” is outreach dressed as a question.
On posting frequency. The advice you will find everywhere is to post every day. That advice is optimised for algorithmic growth and for burning out within sixty days. The sustainable frequency is the one you can maintain without sacrificing the quality of observation that makes the posts worth reading. For most people that is two to three times per week. For some it is once. The consistency matters more than the frequency. A post every Tuesday that is genuinely observed and honestly written compounds over eighteen months in ways that daily posts optimised for engagement do not.
The one thing to avoid. The performing post is not always obvious from the inside. Here is how to check. Before you post, ask: am I writing this because I believe it or because I think it will land well? The two are not always different. But when they are, the reader can feel which one it is. Your reader Kathleen, information-rich and suspicious of frameworks, will feel the performing post within the first sentence. She will not comment. She will scroll. And the algorithm will note the absence of early engagement and suppress the post.
Write the thing you believe. Even when it is smaller than you think LinkedIn wants. Especially then.
What this means for how you show up
This is where the template premise comes back.
The tactics in this guide work. The Boolean search strings, the Google X-Ray method, the connection sequencing, all of it is real and I have used every piece of it. But they only work if the intention behind them is honest.
Because LinkedIn is a performative platform. Everyone on it can feel performance. The message that arrived from a template. The post written to get shares rather than say something true. The connection request with a compliment that is obviously a setup.
People are tired of it. I am tired of it. You are probably tired of it too.
Leadership as a verb is the counter to that.
Not as a brand. Not as a content strategy. As an actual operating principle.
A verb requires action. Presence. Choosing, in each moment, whether you are performing leadership or practising it.
On LinkedIn that distinction looks like this.
Performing leadership is posting about the importance of psychological safety. Practising it is writing about the specific conversation where you got it wrong, what you said, what happened in the room, and what you would do differently.
Performing is optimising your headline for clicks. Practising is writing a headline that says exactly what you do and who you do it for, even if that is a smaller audience.
Performing is commenting “great insight” on posts from people with large followings to get visibility. Practising is reading their post properly, sitting with it for a minute, and writing the one thing it genuinely made you think about.
The difference is not always visible from the outside. But it accumulates. Over months, the people who showed up honestly become the people others come back to. Not because the algorithm favoured them. Because humans can tell.
The minimum viable practice
Given everything above, here is what actually makes sense as a sustainable approach.
LinkedIn has two jobs for most professionals. Not five. Two.
The first is discoverability. Recruiters, potential collaborators, and people considering working with you will search for you. Your profile is the answer to their question. It should be honest, specific, and built around the exact words the right people type into search. Not the words that sound impressive. The words that match what someone types at eleven on a Tuesday night when they need someone who does what you do.
The second is reputation confirmation. When someone hears your name, reads something you wrote elsewhere, or gets recommended to you, they will look you up. Your presence on LinkedIn should confirm that you are a real person with a real point of view. Not a resume. A perspective.
That is it. Everything else, the daily posts, the engagement pods, the SSI optimisation, is optional and often counterproductive if it pulls you toward performing rather than practising.
On reaching out
The outreach section of this template exists because sometimes you need to initiate contact. A potential employer. A collaborator. Someone whose work intersects with yours in ways worth exploring.
The frame I use is simple.
You are not looking for targets. You are looking for people you can genuinely help, or people whose work genuinely interests you, and making it easier for them to find that out.
A first-time engineering manager who just got promoted and has no idea how to lead their former peers is not a high-intent buyer. They are scared. The difference between those two framings changes everything about what you write and how it lands.
Write to the person. Not to the role, the company, the lead score, or the pipeline stage. The person.
That means doing enough reading before you reach out that you can reference something specific. Not “I loved your post about leadership.” Which post. What in it. Why it connected with something you are thinking about right now.
It means being honest about why you are reaching out. Not hiding a request inside three paragraphs of flattery. People respect directness. They are suspicious of warmth they did not earn.
And it means accepting that most outreach will not get a response. Not because you did it wrong. Because people are busy and their inbox is full of messages that trained them to ignore it. Your job is to be the message that felt different enough to read. Not to convert every send.
When it is not working
The platform will frustrate you. Not occasionally. Structurally and repeatedly.
There will be weeks where a post you worked hard on gets minimal reach and a post you dashed off in ten minutes gets thousands of impressions. The algorithm is not a feedback mechanism for quality. It is a feedback mechanism for engagement patterns, which correlates loosely with quality and strongly with timing, format, early engagement velocity, and factors you cannot fully control.
Here is what to do in those weeks. Not a tactic. A reorientation.
Ask yourself which metric you are actually optimising for. If it is reach, the low-reach week is a failure by that metric. If it is the quality of the one conversation that started from that post, it may be a good week. The platform’s native metrics, impressions, reactions, comments, measure the platform’s success. They do not measure yours. Your success is the recruiter who found your profile six months after you updated it and reached out for the right role. The reader who subscribed to your newsletter three weeks after encountering your comment on someone else’s post. The collaborator who had been reading your work for a year before they sent the message that became the project.
Those things do not appear in your analytics dashboard. They are the actual compounding. They happen independent of any single post’s performance.
The specific practice for the low-reach weeks is to return to the twelve to fifteen accounts. Read them. Comment genuinely. Not to repair your reach. Because the habit of genuine engagement is the only thing that produces consistent results over time, and the weeks when you do it without a metric reward are the weeks that test whether you actually believe that.
There is one more thing worth naming about the hard weeks. The impulse, when reach drops, is to change what you are doing. Post more. Change the format. Try a different style. That impulse is the platform’s design working on you. The friction engineered to keep you producing. Most of the adjustments made in response to a bad week make things worse rather than better because they move you away from your actual angle and toward what seemed to perform last time, which is always slightly wrong.
The question to ask in a bad week is not: what should I change? It is: what was I doing when it was working that I have stopped doing? The answer is almost always the same. Writing things you actually believed rather than things you thought would land. Engaging with the twelve to fifteen accounts before you posted rather than after. Updating the profile to reflect where your thinking actually is rather than where it was six months ago.
Go back to the basics. Every time. Not because the basics are inspirational. Because they are the only things that consistently work.
The long game
The platform will frustrate you. It is designed to. The reach will feel low relative to the effort. The spam will keep coming. The algorithm will penalise you for living your life.
The people who find LinkedIn genuinely useful over time are not the ones who cracked the algorithm. They are the ones who decided to use it as a place to think in public, to be findable by the right people, and to occasionally make genuine contact with someone whose work they respect.
That is a much quieter use of the platform than most guides will tell you.
It is also the one that compounds without burning you out.
Leadership as a verb, on LinkedIn as everywhere else, is the choice to keep showing up as the same person you are when no one is watching. Not because it is strategically optimal. Because it is the only version of this that feels like it is actually worth doing.
The notification is still on my phone. “Your post is gaining traction.”
I will read the comments later. Not to see what is performing. To find the one person who said something true.
That is the whole practice.
This template is a starting point, not a fixed system. If something does not fit your situation, change it. And if you try something and it does not land the way you expected, bring it to the Q&A. That is what the room is for.
About the Author
Tino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human, one verb at a time.
Love this intelligent, honest breakdown of how LinkedIn's incentives manufacture performance at scale, and a much-needed reminder to treat "leadership" as behavioral rather than branding.
Simply outstanding piece of work Diamantino. The instructors in my community were just talking about this very topic. There’s frustration across the board. I plan on sending them this piece. Great work!