LinkedIn Post Writing Guide

Guidance for drafting LinkedIn posts promoting Data Controller (datacontroller.io).

Audience

Our readers are typically:

Technical managers and platform owners in regulated industries (Banking, Insurance, Pharma) running enterprise SAS® estates.
Data governance / data quality leads dealing with End User Computing (EUC) risk and audit requirements.
SAS developers and administrators who maintain data pipelines and care about automation, security and auditability.
Occasionally C-level / procurement - keep business value (OpEx, risk reduction, compliance) visible alongside technical detail.

Implications:

Assume competence - no need to explain what ETL, SAS, or a data warehouse is.
Speak to their pains: regulatory reporting deadlines, audit trails, hand-cranked ETL, EUC sprawl, OpEx, blame-games between business and IT.
Professional but direct tone. Avoid hype, buzzword stuffing, and exclamation-mark overload.

Hook - first 1-2 lines must stand alone; LinkedIn truncates the rest behind "…see more". State the pain or the claim, not the product.
Problem - short paragraphs describing the pain in the reader's context.
Belief / shift - what we believe the world should look like.
Solution - introduce Data Controller, one or two sentences on what it does (zero-code data capture, review/approve workflow, audit trail, loads into SAS / any database).
Outcome - the concrete result (eliminated ETL flows, reduced OpEx, full lineage).
CTA - single call to action, typically "book a Discovery Call - link in the comments below 👇". LinkedIn deprioritises posts with external links, so put URLs in the first comment, not the body.

Hashtags are written as #tag (e.g. #endusercomputing, #excel, #datagovernance, #sas, #masterdata). Never write hashtag#tag - that is an artefact of copy-pasting from LinkedIn's editor UI and must be stripped/normalised to #tag before posting or republishing.
3-5 hashtags, all lowercase, placed at the end on their own lines.
Use regular dashes (-), not em-dashes (—).
Short paragraphs (1-3 sentences) with blank lines between them - LinkedIn has no markdown.
No markdown syntax (no **bold**, no [links](url)) - LinkedIn renders plain text. Use CAPS sparingly for emphasis instead.
® symbol on first mention of SAS® is fine; don't repeat it every time.
Keep total length under ~1,300 characters where possible; longer posts are fine when the story warrants it, but the hook still has to earn the "see more" click.

Always attach an image - posts with images get substantially more reach. Use the same image as the feed post's previewImg where one exists.
Product screenshots work well for feature announcements; flat branded illustrations for thought-leadership posts.

Feed posts (content/feed/) and LinkedIn posts are siblings, not copies: the site version may contain markdown links and omits hashtags; the LinkedIn version uses plain text, #tag hashtags, and "link in the comments".
When converting site → LinkedIn: strip markdown, convert links to a comment-based CTA, append hashtags.
When converting LinkedIn → site: strip hashtag# artefacts and hashtags, add proper markdown links, add front matter per the add-feed-post skill.