Another week, another break!

Hey everyone, John and Alec back again to give everyone a break from the doomscrolling and hopefully continue to make LinkedIn a more fun, useful place for everyone! Here’s are some things we saw hidden amidst the mountain of AI-generated silliness that continues to fill all of our feeds 😅

As a quick reminder, here’s what you can expect from this weekly newsletter: 

1. MVP (Most Vulnerable Poster): There’s way too many faux experts out there acting like they’ve got it all figured out on LinkedIn, so each week we’ll spotlight a particularly impactful vulnerable post we saw that week, and what you all can learn from it. 🏆

2. Least Robotic Sounding Company: Establishing a brand voice on LinkedIn can be tough, so we’ll share an especially human-sounding brand post each week alongside how you can replicate it if you’re creating LI content for your brand 🤖

3. Oddest thing we saw this week: Let’s face it, LinkedIn can be pretty unhinged at times. Each week we’ll call out something odd that went down and focus on the takeaway in an attempt to make the insane insightful 🙂

4. Parting Thoughts: We’ll close each edition with a quick thought or anecdote to help you navigate the LinkedIn madness for the coming week!

lets go!!

MVP (Most Vulnerable Poster)

MVP (Most Vulnerable Poster) of the week goes to this post from Noah Greenberg, Founder of Stacker and someone who continues to pump out vulnerable, valuable content every single day on LinkedIn. Noah kills it daily but here’s what he did in this particular post that stood out: 

• He swam upstream: A lot of content on LinkedIn these days is centered around the benefits of remote work, automation, AI, and anything else that claims to allow us to work less and spend less time in person with one another. While there are of course many benefits to the increasingly digital nature of work in 2025, Noah took an aggressive stand in the other direction. He made it clear that he thinks becoming increasingly reliant on Zoom is dangerous and he laid out a simple, effective blueprint for anyone who wants to follow in his footsteps! Not just a hot take, but advice on how to try it for yourself.

• He put his money where his mouth is: Noah leads a team of people and he wants them to take this advice, so much so that he literally said he will offer a blank check to anyone who takes the fantastic advice he gave right here in the post! A lot of people throw out takes and opinions on LinkedIn, but Noah literally threw down his checkbook to show how much he believes in what he wrote here. That’s going from just a guy saying stuff on LinkedIn to true leadership. Bravo Noah! (If you don’t follow him on LinkedIn yet, what are you even doing?!)

Least Robotic Sounding Company

Least Robotic Sounding Company of the week goes to Parakeet: Parakeet’s entire team does a great job posting consistent, authentic (often times silly!) content from their personal accounts. Last week they showed off that quirky, fun company persona with this LinkedIn post from their company page. A few things Parakeet did here that other brands could learn from: 

• Got WEIRD with it: As we’ve discussed here in the past, LinkedIn isn’t always the most fun place to be, especially when you have to spend hours on end on there to do your job. So Parakeet gave us what a lot of people need after hours and hours combing through LinkedIn- something silly and weird! People need a little dose of that from time to time and they broke through the monotony with this one

• Pitched without pitching: If you look closely, this is absolutely a pitch of some key features of Parakeet’s product in an attempt to get folks to sign up for a free trial. But because they led with humor, it probably didn’t land to most people as a blatant sales pitch and they probably got a few signups from grateful LinkedIn users who appreciated the laugh! Anytime you can educate your customers without them falling asleep, you’ve done your job and the Parakeet team certainly nailed that here.

Oddest thing of the week

Where the heck did all the videos go? This post from Christian Di Bratto calls it out very astutely- why did everyone seemingly stop making LinkedIn videos in the last few months? 2024, especially the last part of the year, seemed to be the year of the video. Every expert was pushing connecting with your audience via short form video, and LinkedIn was even running free courses helping people navigate video content creation. And then it seems like all of the sudden we looked up and the videos were just…gone? Here are a few theories about what may have happened: 

• Follow the algo: For better or worse, we are all just doing our best to give the mythical LinkedIn algorithm what it wants, and it doesn’t seem to want video anymore! Photo and text only posts seem to be doing much better engagement numbers across the board, and they are a lot easier to create than videos (shoutout to everyone who bought a ring light last year though!)

• LinkTok blowback: The heavy push for more short form video last year had many LinkedIn users (who skew much older than TT users on average) complaining that LinkedIn was basically becoming professional TikTok and clearly, LinkedIn seems to have heard those complaints loud and clear

• Fear: Ultimately, it’s a bigger risk to put your real face and voice out there to truly stand behind your thoughts and opinions, so it’s possible some folks are just more comfortable typing their two cents and sending it off into our feeds instead of getting on the (digital) soapbox the way a lot of us were in 2024

• Whatever the reason, like most things moderation is going to be the key- post consistently and add value for your audience in a variety of different formats, and good things are likely to happen!

Parting thoughts: Be Curious: As everyone’s favorite fictional football coach showed us, those who fail to be curious can find themselves in some pretty precarious situations. Whether you’re looking for a new gig, or looking for customers, or just looking to make new friends, curiosity is a huge asset. The more you learn about the person on the other side of the table (or screen), the more opportunities you create for amazing things to happen for both of you 😀.

Have an amazing week y’all!

Alec and John