Why Is It So Hard to Think of What to Post on LinkedIn?

We have all been there. It is 8:45 AM on a Tuesday. You open up LinkedIn to do some “prospecting” (scrolling), and you see it.

It is a post from one of those people.

You know the ones. The “LinkedIn Naturals.” The people who seem to wake up, roll out of bed, and sneeze out a piece of viral content that garners 15,000 views and a comment section that looks like a fan club meet-and-greet.

They post bangers day after day. They are witty. They are insightful. They seem to have an infinite well of anecdotes that perfectly illustrate complex B2B sales methodologies.

And you sit there, looking at your own blinking cursor, waiting for an idea to descend that isn’t completely lame.

You probably assume these social heroes have got some innate “posting gene.” You might think they are just naturally more charismatic, smarter, or more interesting than the rest of us.

I have met enough “LinkedInfluencers” to tell you… that’s a big nope. Not only are they not even that interesting, they are certainly not geniuses.

They rely on systems. Frameworks. Rinse and repeat.

They are not relying on luck… they are engineering the outcome. And just doing boring stuff over, and over, and over.

Success on LinkedIn, and in business, is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration (to misquote Edison). Personality helps… but process wins. It is boring, but it is true.

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The Assembly Line of Soul

Before Berry Gordy founded Motown Records, he worked at the Lincoln-Mercury automobile plant. He spent his days watching bare metal frames move down a conveyor belt, slowly transforming into gleaming, high-performance machines. It was a system designed to produce consistent quality at scale.

When he started his record label, he did not view music as some mystical art form that couldn’t be tamed. He viewed it through the lens of the factory floor.

Gordy set up “Hitsville U.S.A.” not as a chaotic artist commune, but as an assembly line (to make money!)

He had a team of songwriters (Holland-Dozier-Holland) who were effectively the R&D department. He had a house band (The Funk Brothers) who were the manufacturing engine, laying down tracks with machine-like precision. He had a Quality Control department (literally called exactly that) where they would listen to potential releases and vote on whether they would be a hit or a miss. If a song didn’t pass QC, it didn’t ship.

The result? Motown didn’t just have one lucky hit. They had 79 top-ten records on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 1969. Absolute machines!

They dominated because they built a system that manufactured excellence.

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The “Artiste” Fallacy in B2B Marketing

Most people are obsessed with finding “Rockstars.” They want to hire that one VP of Sales who is already a LinkedIn celebrity, hoping their magic dust will settle on the rest of the company.

Or, worse, they treat their internal subject matter experts like delicate artistes. They nudge them gently: “Hey, it would be great if you could post something about the new product launch… if you feel like it. No pressure.”

They are terrified of stifling authenticity. They worry that if they impose a structure, the content will feel robotic.

So what happens?

Nothing happens. Literally nothing. Tumbleweed.

The team stays silent because they are busy, or they don’t know what to write, or they are afraid of looking stupid. The “Rockstar” you hired posts great content, but it is all about their personal brand, not your company’s growth. The marketing team churns out a few graphics that get zero engagement because… well… you know why.

You are left with a ghost town profile and a sales team that is invisible to the market. It’s The Great Disconnect in action.

Lame.

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The Rise of the Slop Generators

Then came the panic button: Generative AI.

“Write me 10 LinkedIn posts about cloud computing.”

You have seen it. We have all seen it. Posts that start with “In today’s fast-paced digital landscape…” Posts that use the word “delve” three times in one paragraph. Posts that use emojis in a way no human being ever would.

This is the anti-Motown. It is an assembly line, sure, but it is an assembly line producing garbage.

Authenticity is the product. The system is just the delivery mechanism.

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Engineering Authenticity (It is not an Oxymoron)

So, if waiting for inspiration fails, and churning out AI slop fails, what is the answer?

You need to take the Berry Gordy approach. You need a system that supports your talent, extracts their unique voice, and puts it into a format that performs.

This is where things get interesting, and where the “boring” stuff becomes profitable.

The best of the best have a workflow. They don’t leave it to chance.

For a company, you need to scale this. You cannot expect every engineer, salesperson, and executive to build their own personal content factory. That is not their job.

Their job is to be experts. Your job, as the leader, is to fund the factory.

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Pillar 1: True Personalisation (AuthorDNA)

The biggest lie in social media software is that “templates” work.

If you give the same template to your CEO and your freshest SDR, one of them is going to sound ridiculous. Your CEO shouldn’t sound like a hype-man, and your SDR shouldn’t sound like a visionary philosopher.

This is why generic advocacy tools fail. They provide “canned” content.

At Drumbeat, we developed something called AuthorDNA. It is not about generating text from scratch; it is about analysing the existing voice of the person. How do they structure sentences? Do they use humour? Are they formal or casual?

We use AI not to invent the message, but to translate the core idea into the specific dialect of the speaker.

It ensures that when your Head of Product posts, it sounds like them, not like a PR release. It maintains the human connection which is the only currency that matters on social platforms.

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Pillar 2: Streamlined Collaboration (The QC Dept)

Remember the Quality Control department at Motown? You need that.

But it cannot be a bottleneck.

I have seen companies where a single LinkedIn post has to go through four layers of approval via email, Slack, and a shared Google Doc. By the time it is approved, the topic is irrelevant and the author has lost the will to live.

You need a workflow that is frictionless. A driven marketing leader knows that if you make it hard for your team to participate, they won’t.

We built Drumbeat to make approval a literal one-click process. Marketing sets the strategy, the legal team (if needed) sets the guardrails, and the exec just has to say “Yes.”

No chasing people down in the hallway. A steady stream of approved, high-quality content moving down the line.

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Pillar 3: Content Variety (No One Likes a One-Note Song)

Imagine if The Temptations only released the same song, over and over again.

Yet, brands do this constantly. “Buy our product.” “Here is a webinar.” “Buy our product again.”

The “Naturals” mix it up. They use what we call the content mix:

1. ThunderClaps: Big, synchronized moments where everyone talks about a major launch or event.
2. Evergreen: The timeless wisdom that establishes authority.
3. Contextual: Riffs on current news or industry trends.

You need to equip your team with all three. You need to give them the flexibility to be thought leaders one day and promoters the next. If you force them to be shills, they will tune out. If you let them only post pictures of their lunch, you won’t generate leads.

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Pillar 4: Measurable Impact (The Charts)

Berry Gordy didn’t guess if a song was a hit. He looked at the sales charts.

For B2B leaders, the “vanity metrics” of likes and comments are nice, but they don’t pay the bills.

You need to track the real impact. Are these posts driving impressions from the right accounts? Is the engagement translating into reach within your target demographic? We’ve studied what actually drives engagement, and it’s not what most people think.

When you engineer the outcome, you can predict the result. You stop hoping for a viral lottery ticket and start seeing a predictable uplift in brand awareness and pipeline velocity.

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The “Boring” Path to Glory

Building a system is harder than writing one good post.

It requires discipline. It requires setting up the infrastructure. It requires getting buy-in from people who would rather be doing anything else than “social selling.”

It is the digital equivalent of digging a foundation. It is dirty, sweaty work.

But look at the alternative.

You can continue to watch the “LinkedIn Naturals” with envy, wondering why they have all the luck. You can continue to let your company’s greatest go-to-market asset (the collective networks of your employees) sit gathering dust. You can continue to throw money at paid ads that people ignore.

Or, you can start building the factory.

You can recognise that creativity flourishes best when it has a structure to support it. You can accept that consistency beats intensity every single time.

The most successful people in the world are not the ones who wait for the lightning bolt. They are the ones who show up, every day, with a shovel. They also know when to break out the heavy machinery.

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Stop Waiting for Permission to Be Boring

There is a strange paradox in marketing. We are obsessed with the “new.” New channels, new buzzwords, new hacks.

We treat the basics, process, consistency, data hygiene, as if they are beneath us. We want the sexy campaign that wins a Cannes Lion, not the automated workflow that generates 15% more leads month-over-month.

This is vanity… and perhaps insanity as well.

You do not have the luxury of vanity. You have targets to hit.

Your team is sitting there, right now, with thousands of connections. Those connections are your potential buyers. They trust people. They do not trust corporate logos.

Every day that goes by where your team is silent is a day you are leaving money on the table. But you cannot nag them into relevance. You cannot “inspire” them into consistency.

You have to give them the tools.

You have to remove the friction. You have to do the heavy lifting of writing, editing, and strategy so that all they have to do is be themselves.

That is what Drumbeat does. We are not selling a magic wand. We are selling the assembly line.

We unlock the full power of your team’s voice… at scale, with authenticity, and without hassle.

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The Bottom Line

When you look at those influencers who seem to have it all figured out, remember Berry Gordy.

You can’t see the assembly line, so you assume it is creative magic. You assume they are special.

They aren’t. But they did the work.

So stop waiting for the “posting gene” to manifest in your engineering team. Stop waiting for your sales VP to suddenly become Shakespeare. Stop waiting for Moliere to visit your marketing department.

Give your team the system.

Because in six months, when you are dominating your niche and your competitors are wondering how you became an “overnight success,” you can just smile.

You can tell them it was a bit of Motown magic.