How Do You Keep a Team Supplied with LinkedIn Topics Without Ghostwriting?

You keep a team supplied with LinkedIn topics by asking for them, and by leaving every sentence to the person who posts. Send the same five questions about the week to everyone on a fixed day. Pass on industry news with a question attached, and share documents with one more question: what was your part in this?

We build Authira. It is an employee advocacy platform for teams of 3 to 30, and the last section before the FAQ shows where it takes over part of the routine. Everything before that section works with the chat tool and the shared drive your team already uses. Ghostwriting here means something narrow: the person running the program slowly becoming the author of other people's posts.

Why does the person running the program end up writing the posts?

A program lead, the person who runs employee advocacy alongside a main job, often becomes the team's ghostwriter through a run of small favours. A colleague wants a topic, and you suggest a project you know well. Your suggestion arrives with your reason for picking it, so the draft follows your angle before the person has found their own.

A quick look before a post goes out tends to grow: you smooth a paragraph, and on another post you rewrite the opening because it was the weakest part. By then the opening lines of the program's posts are yours.

In individual conversations I had over recent months, program leads named the search for topics as the hard part, and one of them put it ahead of getting the words down.

The psychology of one person staring at the empty box has its own article on blank page anxiety. Topics are one of several tasks a program lead repeats, and the other recurring jobs of running a program have their own page.

How a weekly check-in collects topics

A weekly check-in collects topics by sending the whole team the same written questions about their week on a fixed day. The model is the sprint retrospective. In its section on that meeting, the Scrum Guide says the team discusses “what went well during the Sprint, what problems it encountered, and how those problems were (or were not) solved”. That wording comes from the 2020 edition by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, which is published under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Using those questions to find LinkedIn topics is my own adaptation, and the guide says nothing about posting. The retrospective's shape carries over: the same few questions about the last stretch of work can turn up material that nobody in the team would have offered as a topic.

Five questions, worded the same every week

Keep the wording fixed, so people learn what each question is after. These five check-in questions look at the week from different sides:

1. What went well this week, and why did it work?
2. What did not go to plan, and what happened next?
3. What did you learn this week, and from whom?
4. What are you in the middle of right now, and what is the tricky part?
5. Which customer or colleague said something this week that stuck with you?

Answering should take five to ten minutes. Nobody has to answer all five, and one honest line on one question already counts as a good week.

One message to the whole group, on a fixed day

Post the questions on the same day each week in the channel the team already reads. Make it written and asynchronous by default, so people can answer when they have a quiet moment. If you already hold one-to-ones with some of them, the questions can live there as well.

Let people answer in the thread or send their answers to you directly. Some will share a setback in front of colleagues and some will not, and both are fine. Write the message the way you would ask a colleague over coffee.

Taking part is voluntary, so leave a skipped week alone and do not follow up one by one.

Your reply: one line that points at a post

After the check-in, reply to each answer where it came in, with a short line that names the part of their own answer that could carry a post. A reply might be: “The customer who changed their mind after the site visit could carry a post. Who would you want to read it?”

Then stop. The angle and the first sentence stay with the person who answered, and so does the decision to post.

A check-in message to copy

Paste this into Slack or Teams and adjust the tone to your team.

This week's LinkedIn check-in

Five questions about your week. Answer one of them or all five, here in the thread or in a direct message to me. Five to ten minutes is plenty.

1. What went well this week, and why did it work?
2. What did not go to plan, and what happened next?
3. What did you learn this week, and from whom?
4. What are you in the middle of right now, and what is the tricky part?
5. Which customer or colleague said something this week that stuck with you?

If one of your answers could carry a post, I will point out which part. Whether you write it, and how, is up to you.

How to use industry news without making every post sound the same

An industry topic only becomes a post together with the person's own view on it, for example where their own work contradicts the common take.

A quick search, or asking ChatGPT what people in your field are discussing this month, gives you a list of industry topics within seconds. That list helps you see what is in the air. It becomes a problem when the topic is the whole post. Several people summarising the same report produce posts a reader could swap for one another, and none of them says anything the report did not.

So pass news on with one question attached, for example: who here sees this differently, and why?

Whoever has an answer to that has the core of a post. How such a post is built is covered under industry takes in our list of LinkedIn post ideas.

How to share source material so each person finds their own part

Much of the best material already exists inside the company, such as a campaign deck or a project report. A file like this carries facts and leaves the angle to whoever picks it up.

Send the file with one question: what was your part in this? The same report holds as many posts as it had contributors, because each of them worked on a different piece of it.

Two rules help here. Say in the same message which figures and names may be shared outside the company. Before a customer's result appears under anyone's name, get the customer's agreement. The confidentiality clause in a LinkedIn social media policy template covers which customer names and figures stay internal.

What you hand over, and what stays with each person

A program lead who supplies topics without ghostwriting owns the occasion and the material, and each person owns everything they publish.

When you notice yourself doing the work under “What stays with each person”, hand it back with a question only that person can answer.

Where Authira does part of the asking

A weekly check-in works without any software, but it needs you every week, posting the questions and reading the answers. Inside Authira, the questions sit in the product, where each person answers them for themselves, and the finished text still stays with them.

An interview each person answers on their own

The idea generator in Authira has an interview mode. Authira asks each person the kind of questions you would ask in a weekly check-in, whenever they open it, and only they see the answers.

The questions are fixed, shuffled into a new order for each run and shown one at a time. A person can skip as many as they like and answer up to three, each with at least 20 characters. Two of them, word for word:

• “Which tool, method or small trick saved you the most time or nerves in the past few days?”
• “Did you have a conversation this week that left you with a new insight?”

I built the interview because a post needs something that happened, and expertise tags only name a field. From the answers, Authira usually builds three post ideas and is instructed to use only the details the person gave. Any of them can then become three drafts in that person's own voice, which they edit and post themselves.

The interview answers are not saved to the team account. They stay in that person's browser tab until the tab closes or they sign out, and they go to the AI model only to build the ideas. If the person saves a draft from one of the ideas, the idea is saved with it. Nobody else in your company, admins included, can open the answers or the ideas and drafts built from them.

I kept the answers out of the database on purpose. Their value lies in the ideas built from them, and I think a question about a week that went wrong gets a more honest answer when nobody reads along.

Classic ideas, and documents from the lead

The classic mode needs no answers at all: it gives ideas from each person's own field, built on their expertise tags and profile, without repeating what they posted recently.

As the lead, your lever is still the material. Send the deck or report through your usual channel, and each person uploads it under “From a document” in their own Content Creator. Authira reads a PDF of up to 30 pages once and does not keep the file. The dialog then asks a required question, “What did you have to do with this?”, so the post rests on that person's part. Whatever they carry into a draft is saved with that draft, visible only to them.

Where the brand rules apply, and where the product stops

The brand rules you set once as an admin go into every draft. Ideas draw on the elevator pitch to know what your company does, and they are told to avoid your blacklisted words. If a blacklisted word still appears in a draft, the editor marks it, and whether to keep it is the author's call. The guardrails page shows how blacklisted words get flagged.

You cannot assign topics to people, there is no approval step before anything goes live, and each person publishes on LinkedIn by pasting the post in themselves. The price is € 299 per month for up to 5 people and € 49 per month for each person beyond that, and you can cancel anytime. The content assistant page shows how the three drafts differ from one another.

Keeping a team supplied with topics: FAQ