While I appreciate the fact that people recognize the importance of personal branding, you cannot make a personal brand with generic, pardon my French, sh*t. What most founders do when they try to build a voice is reverse-engineer creators they admire, produce content that looks technically correct, and then wonder why it lands with the emotional resonance of a terms-and-conditions page.

I need to call out my own hypocrisy upfront, I have been down the path of using LLMs to create same-sounding content, and I am now on the complete opposite side of that fence. The fear underneath it is not of being wrong. It is of being weird. Of sounding like themselves on a ‘professional’ platform. So they resort to ‘professionalism’ instead.

On the other end of the spectrum you do not want to go down the path being totally unhinged. Exhibit B.

One of my clients is a senior consultant for a very large ERP software. His initial LinkedIn content was very ‘ChatGPT-coded.’ Everything was generated from an LLM and didn't really have a personality, which is understandable, because his focus was being an expert in his domain, not a content creator.

A few meetings in, I realized he had a very strong POV about things in his domain and spoke passionately about specific topics with immense authority. None of his posts displayed that.

So how did we build my client’s voice?

First, we have an intro meeting where I listen to understand their target audience, and their professional goals.

Then, I walk them through what works on LinkedIn today (the hooks, the content types, the engagement patterns etc.) The goal here is to observe their reaction. Their discomfort. Then we define his positioning and content pillars together.

The intro-call also achieves one big thing. I keenly observe how they speak, the passion they have for certain topics, what irritates them, what excites them and what motivates them. Apart from this, I am most attuned to how they structure sentences, how they exclaim and how they express surprise or frustration. That syntax becomes their voice.

With this client in particular, we started with six experiments, playing around with topics and his perspective. We also analyzed what worked in his specific domain. I discovered that the ERP world he operates in is dramatically different from the marketing world I was used to. ‘Marketing’ LinkedIn is heavily focused on scroll-stopping, humor-induced content. ERP LinkedIn runs on ultra-long posts packed with information that could fill books. We had to work inside that world while finding the angle that was distinctively his.

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I would like to believe that every human being has a quirk or an oddity that makes them interesting to an audience. My role as a LinkedIn content strategist is understanding that oddity.

Voices on LinkedIn that only aim to cause outrage really capitalize on this ‘odd’ behaviour part. However, it is hard to maintain constant outrage with your content. People eventually grow weary of this approach. Content that is meant to merely shock starts declining in value once the shock wears off. And then what? Real oddness is not calculated. It is what is already there, before the editing starts.

On the other hand, being ‘odd’ is not always an option for everyone.

A recent conversation with a VP at a large telco brought this to my attention. His seniority made it difficult for him to be ultra-honest (or ultra-odd) in his content, so we refined and trimmed the rough edges for his content. We added political correctness, all this while trying to maintain a bit of edge.

This incident reminded me: what works for an ERP consultant will not work for a marketer, and definitely will not work for a VP at a telco.

My voice today is shaped by the way I speak and express things. It is sardonic, honest and self-deprecating. I did experiment with a more formal, 'proper' and dare I say 'smart-sounding' voice. But it was hard to sound authentic and real. I would like to believe that my voice today is a bit weirder than it was before. Not as weird as a LinkedIn Lunatic but weird enough to be distinct.

If you ask me if I am happy with my voice right now, my answer would be ‘I don’t know’. For example, the article I am most proud of writing is titled LinkedIn is Cringe. It is raw, real, and authentic. It talks about what works on the platform and why it has become a necessary evil, for B2B, for executives, for anyone trying to position themselves in a job market that treats LinkedIn as a credential. It holds all the contradictions: people love to hate LinkedIn but they still need to be on it.

That post felt like my voice. But I am still not entirely sure what made it land, or whether I can replicate it (or whether trying to replicate it would immediately kill the thing that made it work.)

Maybe voice is not something you build. Maybe it is something you catch, occasionally, when you stop trying to sound like the version of yourself you think LinkedIn wants.

Grow-th Architect is where I (Shreya Vaidya) think out loud about brand-building, positioning, and surviving on LinkedIn. If this resonated, subscribe, or share it with someone who needs to hear it.