LinkedIn post checklist: what to check before hitting publish

Most weak posts are not weak ideas. They are decent ideas published one draft too early, usually because the writing happened in a gap between two meetings. A short checklist fixes more of this than talent does, because it moves the quality bar off your mood and onto a process.

The checklist

• First two lines work on their own. Everything after them is hidden behind "see more," so those two lines are the whole advert for the post.
• One idea only. If you can see two, you have two posts, and splitting them usually doubles the output of a good week.
• At least one specific: a number, a name, a date, a place, a price.
• No sentence you would not say out loud to a client.
• A line break every one to three sentences. Long blocks get skipped on phones, which is where most of your readers are.
• The ending is a point or a real question, not a recap.
• You know what you will say in the comments if it works.

Why the first two lines matter more than anything else

Every reader makes one decision about your post: expand it or keep scrolling. Everything you did with paragraph four is irrelevant to that decision. This is why strong writers spend a disproportionate share of their editing time on the opening, and why the fastest improvement available to most people is deleting their first sentence and starting on the second.

Why the comment plan is on the list

Distribution on LinkedIn responds to conversation, not applause. A post with twelve real replies typically travels further than one with eighty passive likes, because replies keep it active and pull it into feeds outside your immediate network. If you publish and then disappear into a meeting for four hours, you have thrown away the part of the process you can most easily control.

Deciding your answer in advance also improves the post itself. If you cannot think of anything you would want to say underneath it, the post is probably a statement rather than a conversation, and statements are the ones that quietly underperform.

What is not worth checking

Hashtag counts, emoji rules, and character-count targets move results far less than clarity, specificity, and timing. They are popular advice because they are easy to measure and easy to obey. Spend the three minutes on the seven items above instead. Post Check runs them on every draft so the review happens even on the days you would have skipped it.