What Should a Consultant Post on LinkedIn? A Practical Content Strategy
You know you should probably post on LinkedIn more often. But what exactly are you supposed to post?
For consultants, the problem usually isn't a complete lack of ideas. You probably spend much of your working week discussing problems with clients, answering questions and forming opinions about what works in your field.
But sitting down to write a LinkedIn post can make all of that material mysteriously disappear. So instead of starting with individual post ideas, it helps to decide what your content needs to do for the business.
Start with what you want to be known for
Before creating a content calendar, ask what someone should understand about you after following your content for a few months. This becomes particularly important when you offer several services.
You don't need every post to promote an offer. But taken together, your content should create a recognisable picture of your expertise and the problems you're qualified to solve.
If your business covers several areas and you're struggling to connect them, start with our guide to positioning multiple consulting services on LinkedIn.
Once the positioning makes sense, choosing subjects becomes considerably easier.
Build your content around the work you want more of
One of the simplest ways to choose LinkedIn topics is to work backwards from the business.
What kinds of problems do you want people to hire you to solve?
If you want more positioning projects, for example, your content might examine common positioning problems, decisions clients struggle with or situations where an apparently sensible approach doesn't work particularly well.
A financial consultant will have a completely different set of subjects. So will an HR consultant.
The important part is the connection between what you discuss publicly and what you eventually want someone to pay you for. If your posts repeatedly demonstrate expertise in an area you don't particularly want to sell, you may build visibility without building the right kind of demand.
Use questions clients already ask you
Your existing conversations are one of the best sources of LinkedIn material.
Think about the questions that come up repeatedly on calls.
- What do clients misunderstand before working with you?
- What decisions take longer than they should?
- What do you regularly find yourself explaining?
Each of those can become a useful piece of content because it starts with a real question rather than an invented content prompt.
You can also pay attention to the language clients use. The way an expert describes a problem isn't always the way a potential client describes it. Writing around the client's version of the problem often makes the content much easier to recognise as relevant.
Share the thinking behind your recommendations
Advice becomes more useful when people understand why you give it.
Suppose you tell clients not to launch five services simultaneously.
You could write a post containing that recommendation and leave it there. Or you could explain what you've seen happen when businesses present too many offers at once, when having several offers does make sense and what you would look at before deciding.
The second approach gives someone a better sense of how you think. For consultants, that's valuable because prospective clients aren't only evaluating whether you know a collection of tips. They're also deciding whether they trust your judgement enough to involve you in their business.
Talk about the problems surrounding your service
Your content doesn't have to describe the service itself every week. Often, the more interesting material sits around it.
A consultant who helps businesses with operations could discuss what happens before a company realises it has an operations problem.
A brand consultant could examine why a business outgrows positioning that worked perfectly well two years ago.
A leadership consultant might discuss situations that make management problems visible.
These subjects give you a wider content territory without pulling you away from what you sell.
Use your own work as source material
You don't need dramatic case studies to talk about your work. Sometimes a small observation from a project is enough.
Perhaps a client question changed the way you explain part of your process. Maybe you noticed the same problem across several projects. Perhaps you tried an approach that worked differently than expected.
Those experiences can become posts without revealing confidential client information. They also tend to sound more specific than generic educational content because they come from something you've genuinely encountered.
Decide what belongs on your personal profile
If you're running a founder-led business, you may also be wondering whether this content belongs on your own profile or your Company's Page.
In many cases, expertise-led content makes sense on the founder or consultant's personal profile because the individual's experience is part of what the client is buying.
The Company Page can play a different role.
We cover that decision in more detail in Personal LinkedIn Profile vs Company Page for Small Businesses: Which Should You Focus On?
You don't need to duplicate every post across both.
You don't need endless content pillars
Content pillars can be useful, but they can also become another planning exercise that delays the writing.
A consultant doesn't necessarily need seven carefully named categories. You need enough structure to stop yourself wondering what to post every time you open LinkedIn.
For example, your strategy might include:
- problems your clients regularly encounter
- your perspective on decisions within your field
- lessons or observations drawn from your work
- occasional content about your services and how you work
That's already enough territory for a substantial amount of content. The categories can evolve as you learn what people respond to and which subjects lead to useful conversations.
How often you publish is a separate decision. If you’re trying to find a realistic rhythm, see our guide to how often consultants should post on LinkedIn.
Your content should make the next step easier
A potential client may read your posts for weeks or months without contacting you. During that time, they're gradually building a picture of what you know, how you approach problems and whether your work might be relevant to them.
Your profile needs to support that process.
If a post catches someone's attention and they click your name, they shouldn't have to reconstruct your business from a collection of unrelated job titles and vague descriptions. The content and profile should make sense together.
That's why content strategy works much better once your positioning is reasonably clear.
If your content is already bringing people to your profile but those visits aren't turning into conversations, we've covered some of the possible reasons in why your LinkedIn profile gets views but not client enquiries.
You probably have more material than you think
You don't need to manufacture a new opinion every morning to maintain a useful LinkedIn presence. Look at the work you're already doing:
Client conversations, recurring questions, decisions you've made and things you've changed your mind about can all provide material.
Then put some structure around it. The goal is to create a body of content that helps the right person understand what you know and why they might want your help.
Want a clearer strategy behind what you post?
Pink Fruit Agency develops LinkedIn content strategies for consultants, founders and small businesses that want their content connected to the business behind it.
We'll identify the subjects worth talking about, develop your content direction and build a bank of angles you can use when it's time to write.