The formula for LinkedIn personal branding posts for busy founders

A founder once sent me their last twenty LinkedIn posts and asked why nothing was landing, and I scrolled through the lot of them slowly, half expecting to find some obvious howler buried in there somewhere.

Fifteen were "we've just onboarded a new client!" or "check out our services," three were vague industry news reposted with no real opinion attached, and two were a photo of the office plant (lovely plant, admittedly, but it wasn't bringing in any leads).

There was no pattern to any of it, no real structure underneath, just whatever felt easiest to throw up that week when they remembered LinkedIn existed.

So here's the fix I gave them, and the one I'm giving you now: stop winging it, and start working to a ratio instead.

The formula: 50/25/20/5

Every LinkedIn post you write should fall into one of four buckets, and each bucket gets a rough, deliberate share of your overall content, rather than whatever you happen to feel like posting that day:

• What you think – 50%

• Work passions – 25%

• What you do – 20%

• Life passions – 5%

  
  

Add it up and that's your entire content plan, more or less, with no more agonising over "what do I even post today," because you just pick your bucket and go from there. But each of those buckets deserves a proper explanation rather than a single line, so let's walk through them one at a time.

What you think (50%)

This is your opinion on trends, news, or debates happening in your industry, and I do mean opinion, not a repost with "interesting!" bolted on top as an afterthought.

Something changed in your sector? Say what you actually think about it, properly, rather than just flagging that it happened. A common practice in your industry winds you up? Say that too, in as much detail as you like. This is the bucket that does the most work for you overall, and it should also be the easiest one to fill, because you already have opinions rattling around, you just haven't been bothering to post them.

A good test here: if a competitor in your industry could have written the exact same post, word for word, it isn't opinion enough yet. Keep sharpening it until it sounds like you, and only you, could have written it.

Work passions (25%)

This is the belief sitting underneath why you do your job in the first place, not a sales pitch quietly wearing a trench coat and hoping nobody notices.

Think about the bit of your day-to-day work that genuinely lights you up, the thing you'd happily talk about at a dinner party even if nobody was paying you a penny for the privilege. For a HR consultant, that might be why people management matters so much more than free snacks in the office kitchen. For an accountant, it might be the quiet satisfaction of untangling someone's finances so they can finally sleep at night without dreading their inbox.

This bucket, more than any other, is what makes you feel like a person doing a job they actually care about, rather than a business account with a pulse and a posting schedule.

What you do (20%)

This is your actual offer: services, availability, your newsletter, case studies, all the genuinely promotional stuff you've probably been leading with until now.

It's still an important bucket, since it's how people actually find out you're open for business in the first place, but it's a fifth of your content rather than the headline act, and it works best when it feels like the natural conclusion to everything else you've already posted, rather than the thing you open with every single time.

Life passions (5%)

This is something you care about entirely outside of work, a hobby, an interest, a mild and slightly embarrassing obsession, and it only needs to show up roughly once in every twenty posts.

It doesn't need to be profound, and it definitely doesn't need a lesson attached to it. It just needs to be real, because this is the bucket that quietly turns "I follow this person for their industry takes" into "I feel like I actually know this person," which, as it turns out, is very good for business indeed.

Why the ratio is lopsided on purpose

Look back at that list for a second. "What you do," the actual thing you're trying to sell, only gets 20% of the pie, which means half your content should be opinion rather than offer, and that tends to make people twitchy the first time they see it written down.

I know what you're thinking, because everyone thinks it: surely I should be talking about my services more than that, given that's what actually pays the bills at the end of the month.

But people don't engage with endless posts about your services, no matter how well written they are. They engage with people, and here's roughly how that plays out in practice.

Someone sees a hot take you posted on an industry topic, and they like it without thinking too hard about it. They come back a few days later and see more of your thinking on something else entirely. Then they spot a post where you go a layer deeper, teaching rather than just reacting to the news, and that's usually the point they hit follow. Somewhere in there, you post about something you genuinely care about outside of work, and it turns out they care about it too, and now you're not just a service provider to them anymore, you're someone they'd genuinely like to work with.

So by the time you do finally mention your offer, they're not seeing a cold pitch land in their feed, they're seeing an offer from someone they already trust, which changes everything about how it's received.

That's the whole point of the 50/25/20/5 split, really. The 80% that isn't "what you do" is quietly doing the heavy lifting of building trust in the background, so that the 20% that is lands on warm ground instead of cold.

A worked example, so it's not just theory

Say you're a HR consultant. Across a batch of twelve posts, that ratio might realistically look something like this:

• Six posts giving your take on things like flexible working, redundancy law changes, or why "unlimited holiday" is usually a trap dressed up as a perk (what you think)

• Three posts on why you got into people management in the first place, or a lesson from a client situation you obviously can't name but definitely learned something from (work passions)

• Two posts on your actual services, your diary, your newsletter sign-up, the practical stuff (what you do)

• One post on something totally unrelated to any of it, your hyperfixation on true crime podcasts, your Sunday long run, whatever it is that genuinely makes you, you (life passions)

  
  

None of that requires a design template, a content calendar app, or three hours of your precious Sunday evening. It just requires knowing which bucket you're filling before you even open the LinkedIn app.

How often should you actually post?

Here's the bit that trips most people up: the ratio doesn't tell you how often to post, because that part is entirely, genuinely up to you.

I'm not going to tell you to post daily, or three times a week, or any specific number that makes you want to close the laptop and go put the kettle on instead. Post as often as you're actually comfortable doing, consistently, and not a single post more than that.

What matters far more is that you apply the 50/25/20/5 split to whatever batch of content you're working through, however long it realistically takes you to get through it.

So, roughly speaking:

• If you're comfortable posting once a week, that batch of twelve posts becomes your next twelve weeks of content, which works out to roughly one "what you think" every fortnight, one "work passions" post a month, and so on, spread gently across the whole quarter.

• If you're happy posting two or three times a week, that same batch of twelve posts covers you for four to six weeks instead, so you'll cycle through the ratio a good deal faster, but the underlying split stays exactly the same either way.

Same formula, same ratio, just stretched out or condensed depending on how much you're realistically going to post without burning out halfway through. Nobody's handing out prizes for posting daily, after all. They're handing out leads to whoever shows up consistently, in roughly the right proportions, for as long as they can actually keep it up.

The bit this formula doesn't cover

Here's what the ratio will never do for you, no matter how perfectly you follow it: it won't make you sound like you.

The 50/25/20/5 split tells you what to post and how often to post it, but it says nothing at all about the actual words that end up on the page, and that's the part people care about most, whether they'd admit it or not. Two founders can follow the exact same ratio, post for post, and still get completely different results, because one of them sounds like a real person typing away on a Tuesday afternoon, and the other sounds like they've quietly outsourced their entire personality to a template.

People don't follow ratios. They follow people. So once you've got your buckets sorted and your posting rhythm settled, the next job is making sure whatever actually lands in them sounds like you, and not a slightly stiffer, more "professional" version of you that only shows up on LinkedIn.

That, funnily enough, is exactly what I'm covering next: how to actually get your voice onto the page, properly, so your posts sound like you sat down and wrote them, rather than a content calendar filling in the gaps for you. So watch this space.