Take this as a warning

I was not going to send this. I had decided to leave it alone because there is very little to be gained from picking apart what someone else has posted.

Then I saw how many people had shared it and how many were treating it as a plan rather than an opinion. So here we are.

Gary Vaynerchuk posted on LinkedIn this week telling people that most of them should be publishing far more often, potentially eight to 15 times a day. His reasoning was that the feed never shows every follower everything you publish, so nobody experiences it as spam. Everyone sees a fraction, the people who genuinely like your work see more and the algorithm sorts out the rest.

He has built a remarkable business, is a true entrepreneur, and I have learned plenty from watching him work. About LinkedIn, though, the advice is just wrong, and I want to explain why before anyone feels anxious and rebuilds their content calendar around it.

Nobody writes eight to 15 considered posts a day. What actually happens is that something gets automated and readers notice. You end up publishing more while saying less and the people you most want to reach are the quickest to spot it.

There is also the question of what happens after you press publish: The value on LinkedIn sits in the conversation underneath the post. That is where people work out whether they want to talk to you. Produce at that volume and you have no time left to reply to anyone properly, so you have traded the part that generates business for the part that only generates activity.

Your posts compete with each other, too. Publish again a few hours later and you shorten the life of the one before it. You are splitting your reach rather than adding to it. My advice would be to repost your post 7-8 hours later to resurface it in the feed instead.

For senior professionals, particularly in regulated sectors, there is a reputational cost on top of all that. Your profile is often the first thing a prospective client, a regulator, or a future hire looks at. Fifteen posts a day tells them something about your judgement that you probably did not intend.

So what is actually working? Two or three well-made posts a week, published consistently, with real time spent replying in your own comments and commenting thoughtfully on other people's. There is a reason that I schedule my posts when I am around for the following hour to respond to comments on them!

Analyse what works for you - I find Saturday morning posts have consistently gained the highest reach over the last 365 days, and all the posts which have “I” in the first line (are written in the first person) have gained 10k plus impressions.

That is the whole strategy. It is not exciting but it is what generates conversations that turn into work.

The wider point matters more than the specific advice. Being brilliant in one arena does not make someone right about another. Gary knows business. It seems that he does not know how LinkedIn behaves.

Here is what bothers me most about it: Gary will be fine either way. He has a media team, a production operation, and an audience large enough to absorb any strategy he chooses to test. The person who takes this advice at face value and spends the next month posting fifteen times a day is the one who finds out it does not work. By then they will have spent a month of their own credibility finding out, in front of exactly the people they were trying to impress.

That is the real cost of advice given confidently by someone who is not going to be around when it fails. Read the source, check the date and back your own judgement.

Warmest wishes as always,

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