649 - The CEO Who Was Posting To Be Seen, Not To Be Strategic

The CEO Who Was Posting To Be Seen, Not To Be Strategic

A CEO once asked me how often she should post on LinkedIn. I asked a different question. What is the through line? If someone read ten of your posts in a row, what would they walk away knowing about you?

She told me the truth. She was forwarding posts, sharing things, trying to get more attention. The content itself was good. She was clearly capable of writing something people wanted to read. But none of it was connected to anything larger. It wasn't aligned with where the business needed to go. It existed to be seen, and that was the whole purpose it served.

This is not unusual. Inside most organizations, the people responsible for visibility are also the people responsible for outcomes, and those two responsibilities pull in different directions without anyone noticing. Visibility rewards frequency. Outcomes reward direction. A post can perform well and still contribute nothing to where the business is trying to go, and very few people stop to check which one they are optimizing for.

I have watched this pattern repeat across organizations of very different sizes and industries. Likes arrive within minutes. A comment appears in the inbox the same afternoon. A through line, on the other hand, takes months to build, and longer still for an audience to actually feel it. Because one of these is visible immediately and the other is not, the visible one tends to win, even when it has little to do with what the business actually needs from its leadership presence.

The deeper consequence is quieter than it looks. When a CEO posts without a through line, the audience absorbs fragments rather than a coherent position. They see a person who is active, engaged, occasionally insightful, but they cannot describe what that person actually stands for. Over time, this becomes an invisible cost. The CEO has reached this position without recognition. People know the name without knowing the perspective behind it.

In the conversation I had, something shifted once the gap became visible to her. She did not need a new posting schedule or a content calendar with more entries. She needed to see that attention and direction were two separate things, and that she had been optimizing for the wrong one without realizing it. Once that became clear, she developed a concrete strategy. An ecosystem of content took shape around a single idea, rather than scattered posts competing for momentary notice. She is hammering it now, and it is working, not because she posts more, but because what she posts now belongs to something larger than itself.

A lot of CEOs are sitting in this exact spot, whether they recognize it or not. They track likes and impressions because those numbers are easy to see and easy to report. They rarely ask what the through line of their strategy is, or whether the content they produce is helping the business move anywhere at all. The two questions feel similar. They are not.

If someone read ten of your posts in a row right now, would they know what you stand for. Or would they simply know that you post?

Highlights:

00:00 A Funny CEO Call

00:19 Random Posting Problem

00:51 Value Driven LinkedIn

01:04 Building a Content Strategy

01:14 Likes vs Business Results

Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links