How to (actually) write engaging LinkedIn posts with ChatGPT

One of the things people get super excited about with ChatGPT is it’s ability to write content for you. If you are calling it ‘content’ in the first place, chances are you’re doing it because it pays the bills, not because of any inherent love of writing. So you automate it with ChatGPT, and never have to worry about posting to social again. Unfortunately it writes this sort of garbage:

This isn’t even how people write on LinkedIn, so I can only presume it learned this is what we want from all of the social media guides written by misguided gurus blog admonishing you for not using enough emojis and hashtags.

Even some of the most popular social posting prompts get awful responses, like this prompt on the Google Chrome plugin AIPRM that has been used over 78,000 times.

ChatGPT can do anything

The truth is that ChatGPT is actually great at writing LinkedIn posts, it’s capable of almost anything! You get back the average of the internet, because without detailed instructions, the average is a good guess. Average is the default, but it’s not the only mode.

The thing has been trained on the sum total of human knowledge (everything that’s online anyway) – all of our greatest writers – and it’s just giving you this trash because you haven’t told it what you want. You get from average to awesome through prompt engineering.

If you tell it to write in a specific style, it’s capable of doing that:

If you have some interesting insight to share, it can craft it into a post:

Give it a good example to work with, and you’ll get better results:

If you know of a useful framework, you can get ChatGPT to use it:

You can even get it to stop using emoji and hashtags:

I’m going to build on a few of these concepts, and create a prompt to promote my first book “Marketing Memetics”, using the principles from my second book “Prompt Engineering for Generative AI” (will be out in 2024, through O’Reilly) The goal is to create LinkedIn content that I think would genuinely not ashamed to post on my own LinkedIn. If I do a good job, you’ll see these posts on your feed when you follow me.

Humans still have a job to do

The key insight for anyone worried about the impending AI apocalypse, is that us humans still have a job. You can create content with ChatGPT alone that’s passable, but not good. The best content comes when the human (i.e. you), provides the secret sauce, as I covered when publishing my AI blog writing system.

If you can do any or all of the following things listed here, you are ready to create great content in partnership with ChatGPT.

• Nominate a specific writing style or persona (i.e. Hemingway)
• Convey interesting experiences, opinions, or insights (i.e. Hero’s journey)
• Provide examples of the task (i.e. previous LinkedIn posts)
• Define a framework to follow (i.e. Hofstader’s bait, hook, threat model)
• Instructions on format (i.e. no emojis or hashtags)

Remember there’s a difference between delegation and abdication. Just like with any coworker, you can’t just outsource a task without taking responsibility for proving detailed guidance on what success looks like. Once you get this working for your brand, you’ll be creating better content than you could alone, and in less time.

The final prompt

After 3-4 hours of messing around with various approaches, this is the prompt I settled on. Having tested it 20+ times in various scenarios, I’m pretty confident it works robustly. Feel free to steal it and use it yourself, or modify it for your own brand.

Write a social media post for {social_network}, in the style of {famous_writer}, using the Bait-Hook-Reward-Payload framework:

- **Payload:** An interesting insight, unique experience, or contrarian opinion that you have, that would be commercially valuable to you for your audience to know.
- **Bait**: Grab the attention of the person browsing social media. This could be a contrarian statement, appeal to identity, celebrity name, or anything else that stops them scrolling.
- **Hook**: Keep their attention now you have it. Show this post is relevant to them, by alerting them to an issue, using familiar words, or providing social proof to keep them reading.
- **Reward**: Compensate them for their attention to elicit reciprocation. Is there any useful information, a surprising statistic, or an interesting anecdote to reveal? Or a threat to make?

Instructions:
You will be provided with a Payload. First decide on the Bait, Hook, and Reward, before writing a social post for {social_network} that sounds authentically human and extremely detailed. 
To maximize engagement, the content should be surprising, interesting, or practically useful, or induce high-arousal emotions such as anxiety, anger, awe, or surprise. 
Follow best practices for posting engaging content on {social_network}, but do not use emoji or hashtags.

{examples}

### {social_network} Post:
- **Payload**: {payload}

This is an example of the full post filled out to promote my book on LinkedIn, with the following examples (manually written) from here added:

Write a social media post for LinkedIn, in the style of Malcom Gladwell, using the Bait-Hook-Reward-Payload framework:

- **Payload:** An interesting insight, unique experience, or contrarian opinion that you have, that would be commercially valuable to you for your audience to know.
- **Bait**: Grab the attention of the person browsing social media. This could be a contrarian statement, appeal to identity, celebrity name, or anything else that stops them scrolling.
- **Hook**: Keep their attention now you have it. Show this post is relevant to them, by alerting them to an issue, using familiar words, or providing social proof to keep them reading.
- **Reward**: Compensate them for their attention to elicit reciprocation. Is there any useful information, a surprising statistic, or an interesting anecdote to reveal? Or a threat to make?

Instructions:
You will be provided with a Payload. First decide on the Bait, Hook, and Reward, before writing a social post for LinkedIn that sounds authentically human and extremely detailed. 
To maximize engagement, the content should be surprising, interesting, or practically useful, or induce high-arousal emotions such as anxiety, anger, awe, or surprise. 
Follow best practices for posting engaging content on LinkedIn, but do not use emoji or hashtags.

### LinkedIn Post:
- **Payload**: Most people don’t know that some species of whale are going extinct, so we’re running the London marathon to aid the "Save the Whales" foundation.
- **Bait**: People who care about whales or animals will pay attention when whales are mentioned.
- **Hook**: If we refer to the whales as “in danger” people who care will want to know more.
- **Reward**: Some species of whales are going extinct, and people would benefit from knowing.
- **Post**: The whales are in danger of extinction. Many people aren't aware, which is why it's so important to bring awareness to this cause. Together with a few colleagues, we'll be running the London marathon next week in aid of the "Save the Whales" foundation, and any support would be appreciated.

### Facebook Post:
- **Payload**: Our hotel specializes in hiring smart people who need a temporary job to fund their interests.
- **Bait**: Use the trope that smart people are so focused they fail to look after themselves.
- **Hook**: Particle Physics is a subject that is universally associated with smart people.
- **Reward**: Fantasizing about being somewhere remote where you can earn money while focusing on your work.
- **Post**: Meet Jon. He has been working the night shift at our hotel for over a month already, and he says the best part is the peace and quiet. Particle physics, which is the topic of Jon’s Masters Thesis, requires concentration. That’s fine by us. So long as our guests can count on Jon, he can count all the particles he wants (or whatever it is that particle physicists do).

### Instagram Post:
- **Payload**: I believe there is no such thing as a bad experience traveling. Every disaster has a silver lining. For example when it rained in Kauai 2 years ago I ended up meeting my bestie @moniqueontour.
- **Bait**: Mentioning a ‘wasted trip’ will get the attention of people who like to travel, and for whom wasting a trip would be upsetting.
- **Hook**: Talk about a rainy day in a hot location like Kauai, which most people would complain about because they’re wasting time inside.
- **Reward**: An anecdote that reveals that good things can happen when you least expect them.
- **Post**: *There’s no such thing as a wasted trip! On this rainy day in Kauai 2 years ago I met my bestie @moniqueontour and we’ve been on 4 amazing adventures together since.*

### Twitter Post:
- **Payload**: You don’t have to do networking if you don’t like it: I built a blog for my agency business that drove 60% of our leads.
- **Bait**: Most self-help advice focuses on fixing weaknesses, but instead let’s focus on how to reframe weaknesses into strengths.
- **Hook**: We need to make it clear this post is for business owners, and that you are speaking from experience, establishing connection and credibility.
- **Reward**: The fact that 60% of new business came from the blog is a statistic they can take away and use as evidence to support their own strategy, or to share with their wider network.
- **Post**: Don’t try to mold yourself into the person you think your business needs you to be, build your business around who you actually are. When I started my agency business, I hated networking. I’m introverted by nature  so I wrote blog posts instead – eventually 60% of my agency’s new business came from our blog.

### LinkedIn Post:
- **Payload**: Most Hollywood movies including Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix, use the same story template: The Hero's Journey.

Here’s how this prompt works, step-by-step:

• The task should be mentioned first, as that’s where the most attention is paid in the prompt.
• I summon the name of Malcolm Gladwell, the celebrity who most matches the style of interesting anecdotal storytelling I’m trying to emulate.
• I’m using a framework I adapted from Hofstader’s Bait-Hook-Threat model, so I need to define it as I can’t expect ChatGPT to know who I am.
• It helps to set apart the instructions clearly so it can follow what’s needed.
• I used the data from this Jonah Berger study on New York Times headlines to specify in the prompt which factors and emotions in content are correlated with virality.
• No emojis or hashtags!
• I provided a diverse set of examples, clearly delineated from each other, all in the same format so ChatGPT learns how we like things. These were manually written to bootstrap this prompt template, but as you get it working in production you’ll just want a way of catching the best performing posts and feeding them back in here as examples.
• I structured the prompt to end on a completion, starting off with the Payload which we can modify each time we want a new post. This gives us the flexibility to reuse the prompt, while also making it less likely ChatGPT will deviate from the format.

Here are the results:

For good measure, here’s me testing it on another payload based on an insight from my book:

And another insight that’s less likely to be in ChatGPT’s training data:

Where to go from here

The great thing about templating your work as ChatGPT prompts, is that there are endless ways to improve, and infinite prompt tests you could run. Trying different celebrities other than Gladwell, or different frameworks other than my version of Hofstader’s framework could yield radically different results. This prompt could also easily be adapted for use on other social networks like Twitter / X. Hopefully you picked up a few tips you can use in building your own prompts as well. Let me know if you find anything interesting in your testing! If you want to learn more about prompt engineering before my book is out, check out our top-ranked Udemy course.

Bait-Hook-Reward-Payload

This model is explained in detail in the book, and is more widely applicable than just social media. You can use this framework to ensure your content (memes) get remembered and shared, so that you earn the chance to promote your business. I actually developed this framework while working running a media buying agency, so if you’re doing a lot of creative testing on Facebook and Google this will be particularly useful to you. It also applies to landing page copy, and other more obscure marketing touchpoints (I apply it to a hotel’s page on a travel site in the book).