🧁 How do you balance authentic, human-driven content with AI-generated support, especially when building thought leadership?

When building thought leadership to generate leads on LinkedIn, people want to see your unique perspective. Your experience. The way you explain things. The stuff you’d say over a cuppa when someone asks you how to [your expertise]. That’s the bit that builds trust. AI can’t create that because it doesn’t know what you’ve lived through.

What I tell my clients is pretty simple...

Write the idea first. Write the thing you’d say if someone were sitting right in front of you. Get the story out, the opinion, the rant (maybe not, I’m not a fan of rants), the clarity. That’s your raw material.

That’s where your authority shows 💪🏽

If you want AI to help, think of it as an organised friend. It can look at your rough idea and help you see whether your opening line connects with what you talk about on your profile. This is important as the new LinkedIn algothingymebob (360Brew) does that.

AI can catch a clunky sentence you didn’t notice, but it can equally add ‘great-sounding’ gibberish that doesn’t mean a thing, so be careful. You can ask AI to check if the angle makes sense for the audience you usually attract. Helpful little things like that.

What I’d stay away from is letting AI rewrite your stuff

LinkedIn now has that feature too. I wouldn’t pay for LinkedIn Premium to get access to that if I were you. I click on it sometimes for fun and it is worse 🤢 than any AI output I’ve ever seen!

Thought leadership needs edges. It needs the quirks, the pace, the voice that you naturally write in. That’s what pulls people in, you know, attracting fabulous leads instead of just generating leads. The more you smooth that out, the harder it gets for anyone to recognise you.

So it’s pretty straightforward really to balance authentic, human-driven content with AI-generated support. YOU lead the message; your lived experience leads the story. AI can support the packaging a little, as long as it doesn’t touch the flavour (my preferred flavour is Earl Grey, but that’s about tea, not visibilitea).

Thought leadership grows from what you’ve done, not from what a tool thinks you should say.

🧁 Happy to help you find ways to use AI to build thought leadership on LinkedIn, ask me any question and I'll see if I have an answer for you ⤵️

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