I read 4,500 posts from LinkedIn’s Top Voices. Here’s what makes a message land.
What 93 of LinkedIn’s newest Top Voices taught me about getting people to stop, care, and actually pay attention.
Look, I nerd out over words.
How they land. Why some make you stop. Why some actually move you to do something, while others just fall flat.
I’m also incredibly curious. Once something gets in my head, I have a hard time leaving it alone until I understand what’s going on.
So when LinkedIn dropped its Top Voices list, I did what I tend to do: went way too deep.
I pulled up to 50 recent posts from all 93 people on the US and Canada list. About 4,500 posts in all, plus the stats on every reaction, comment and repost.
And somewhere in there, I realized this wasn’t really just about LinkedIn.
LinkedIn post. Email. DM. Different channel, same person on the other side.
You still have to get people to stop. Care. Feel like what you’re saying has something to do with them.
That’s when I started thinking about email.
The posts that broke through were personal. Specific. They sounded like people actually talk. And most of them weren’t trying very hard to sell you something.
Then I looked at my inbox.
A lot of marketing email does the exact opposite.
One limit up front: I didn't test any of this on email. The LinkedIn numbers are measured. The email translations are my read.
01Context beats your take
The biggest posts weren't insights. They were moments: something that just happened to a real person, that the reader could feel.
Marvin Chow marking 16 years at Google hit 59×. Jalen Brunson winning a championship with the Knicks hit 45×. Megan Klein writing about her late sister hit 37×. Karen S. Carter becoming CEO of Dow hit 29×. Posts about a career move beat their author's usual 63% of the time.
Anyone can have a take. The context is yours, and nobody else can write it.
In email: start with what's happening to them, not what you want to say about your product.
02Write it like you'd say it
Posts that said "I," "my" or "me" six or more times landed at 1.3×. Posts that never did landed at 0.9×. A first-person story next to a photo did best of anything I looked at, at 1.4×.
Length surprised me. I assumed shorter would win. Posts of 200 to 299 words performed best, and posts under 50 words landed at 0.8×.
In email: send from a person, and sound like one.
03Borrowed words lose
You know the move: someone else's post, "So true!" on top, share. Quote posts landed at 0.45×. Only 16% beat their author's usual, and quote posts were the weakest format in all four of LinkedIn's categories.
In email: a merge tag doesn't make a message personal. People can tell when something wasn't really written for them.
04Volume isn't the lever
The median Top Voice posts 2.3 times a week, and posting more wasn't what set the best apart. The executives who post once a week or less got the most engagement per follower. Greg Case, Hari Gopalkrishnan and Tarang Amin earn 25 to 47 engagements for every 1,000 followers. Most daily posters sit well down the chart.
That doesn't prove posting less causes better results. It does show that volume wasn't what separated the best performers in this group.
In email: another send to the whole list isn't a strategy.
05AI alone is average. The human stuff stands out.
AI shows up in 35% of posts and in 82 of the 93 feeds. On average, those posts landed right at the norm.
What people responded to was the human part around it. Varun Anand sharing Clay's new AI writing policy hit 26×. Amy Webb on AI slop and anxious executives hit 4.6× and 5.3×. Posts calling out AI slop, or saying no AI wrote them, landed at 1.2×.
In email: generic reads as generic, however it was written.
06Every pitch costs you
Sponsored posts landed at 0.7×. Podcast plugs at 0.8×. "Join me for our webinar" at 0.9×.
The clearest case: Emma Chieppor's "courses are officially live" post landed at 0.1×. Her origin story, posted the same launch week, landed at 9.6×. Same person, same audience, same product. One sold. The other told a story.
In email: lead with something useful to them, and earn the ask.
Somewhere in the middle, this stopped being about LinkedIn
Here are all six side by side, with the email version of each.
What this means for your next send
Take one email going out this week and ask:
- Does it open with their situation or yours?
- Would you actually say it out loud?
- Is it written for the reader, or just merged at them?
- Is this email worth sending, or are you sending because the calendar says it's time?
- Is there enough real context that it couldn't have been written for anyone?
- Does it earn the ask before it makes one?
That's the work I do at Singulate: helping teams send emails that read like someone wrote them for one person, even when they go to thousands (or millions!).
Send me one.
An email you're proud of, or one that isn't working. I'll tell you honestly how it reads and what I'd change.
Or see what we do at Singulate.
After 4,500 posts, the pattern was pretty simple: context, a real person, and something worth saying.
I think email works the same way.
Keep going
The course is taught by Sarah Ohlson. She's worth a follow too.
Want me to run the same analysis on the global class? Tell me and I'll do it.
Meet all 93 Top Voices
A quick read on how each of them posts, plus the post that did best. Names link to their profiles. Go follow a few.