436 A LinkedIn Posting Strategy for Professional Firms

You ever get paralyzed between. I know I should probably be posting content online so more people can find me, but I also got a business to run, man. Like, I am busy today. I want to show you what I think is the most sustainable way to consistently post online. Save you a whole pile of time. And how to focus on your core icp, not insane cloud. Posse, your ideal customer profile. I think you're going to like this. By the end of this, you're going to have almost like a machine you can set up for how to do this reliably. I'm pretty jazzed on this. Let's do it. You're not a writer. In all likelihood, all of us have the same problem. You sit down, you stare at an empty screen, and. And you just wait for the magic to come, and it never does. And I can tell you, in my case, it takes a good, like, 30 minutes for it to start flowing. And when it flows, that's great. But getting into that state, it's oftentimes impossible. Like, if I have a meeting 45 minutes from now, like, no point in even starting. My kid runs in that cold start. Like, that's the problem for most professionals who are not writers and can't just turn it on. I say that writers are the same way. Like, writing is grueling. It's just about making time and space for it. But here's the thing about writing now that we have AI is like, I'm not someone that uses AI for writing per se. Like, I don't generate things and then post those things. But the very best version version of AI writing today is writing that can be done based on a big body of context. And context, it's the word of the day, is, you know, any sort of, like, information that you want to leverage to put that thing together. So in my case, the transcript of this podcast could be context blog posts that I've done the transcript from a meeting. And in most professional services, businesses, what's the one thing that you just do, like, as part of running the business? That's always happening. You're running these meetings with clients, explaining to them why what happened is their fault and giving them advice. That's what we do. It's happening at a humongous scale. If you run a team, like, everybody is having these meetings, and we've now begun capturing these meetings, but we're kind of not sure what to do with them. Right. It's like our meeting recorder tool usually isn't integrated into the rest of our tech stack. So we've Got all these transcripts gathering dust and it's like, well, at least having them sitting there is better than nothing because I can pull them up if I need them, but I'm not otherwise doing anything like particularly powerful with them. My friends, this context, it is our, our content generation machine, this freaking leaf blower. And I'm going to give you three versions of this machine and by the end it's going to run itself. Okay? So buckle up. Version one of this machine, something you can do right now. As long as you've got an AI meeting recorder, which you absolutely should. If you don't know where to start, go use Fireflies. Fireflies AI. The reason that I like it is that it works across all virtual meeting platforms, so not just Zoom. For example, if I wanted to use Zoom AI, well, that only works on Zoom. It'll connect to your voiceover ip, like phone service, so it can even record calls. And it's got a really good mobile app, so I can record in person meetings as well. So if you're not opinionated on meeting recorders, I'd recommend you just start with Fireflies. I don't get anything for sending you there. It's just the one that I like right now. So version one of this kind of content generation machine is just going out, grabbing a meeting transcript right now, pulling it into ChatGPT. Remember, because this is a client conversation, it could have sensitive things. You need to be on the ChatGPT team plan. That's $30 a month. Team plan is the only one that comes with the data protections that are at a level where I feel totally fine putting sensitive information into. It actually comes with like a higher level of data security than most of the tools in the accounting space right now. But version one of this, chuck that transcript in and just give it the prompt. Give me like 10 sort of hot takes that I could tweet from this transcript or try to extract like a framework for how I approach advising from this Transcript. Now in ChatGPT right now, the best model for this sort of thing in the dropdown, select 03 Mini High. It's a reasoning model, which means it kind of takes a little more time thinking through it before it gives you a response. But within any meeting transcript, there's all sorts of nuggets, like tweetable nuggets. Now, if you're feeling ambitious, you may have had like, you know, three or four meetings in the last month that were maybe around a common theme. Grab those four transcripts, pull them into ChatGPT, do the same thing see across these transcripts, what are the common threads that you're seeing and the ways that I Advise? Give me 10 ideas for a blog post that I could write. And the results that you get, they're pretty darn good. And if you got some time, this is an area where you can also use deep research. So in ChatGPT, you'll see the deep research button. And I would especially use this if you're trying to get it to like create a framework from how you advise. So oftentimes we just kind of shoot from the hip when we're advising because it's something that we've done a bunch. But in our head we have these sort of mental models that we maybe haven't totally fleshed out or thought through. AI can help us with that. For more complex stuff like that, deep research is really helpful. And so that's version one is find a prompt you can use with ChatGPT that will reliably give you good little nuggets or ideas from which to get started. And once you've got that prompt, here's step number two. Share that prompt with your team. And a really, really good way to do this that I'm actually, I've gotten pretty hot on the last couple of weeks is text. Expand those. So those little things where like you type a few letter keyword and it will like expand to be a big block of text. Some people call them snippets. Like there's different names for them. One of the leading tools for this is actually called textexpander, but there's a whole bunch of these things out there. The really powerful thing for you is if you run a team and you're trying to get your team leaning into AI more, many of these textexpander tools will let you have a team account where you have shared snippets. Nerd alert. That means I can create a snippet for extracting good blog post ideas from a transcript. Like, whatever it is, once you've got to a prompt that you like, you can share that out with your team members. And then even if you make changes to that prompt down the road, those changes get pushed out to your team as well. So you're kind of putting this like AI experience on rails a little bit for your team, or at least raising everybody to the level of say, your AI champion who can build like a super helpful, more technical prompt. And then your team can just kind of like pull it off the shelf for certain use cases. Now what are the like recurring use cases of AI in your workflows. There's like a million of them. From running a set of financials through deep Research to kind of generate ideas for how I can advise my clients when I, you know, do this month end delivery. There's a version of that where you just tell that deep research, go do an analysis. But there's a better version of that where you apply your framework to that, where I actually say, here's how I advise my clients. Here's kind of this six step framework. Apply this framework to your analysis of the financial statements and then give me your findings. Now it's actually like doing your bidding. It's not just doing it the way it thinks it ought to do it, it's doing it the way that you do it. And the really cool thing is that prompt that kind of puts it on Rails and does it according to your framework. That prompt you can push out to the rest of your team as well. The tool like text Expander. As long as everybody's using this tool, you can develop that prompt yourself, share it with your team, make updates to that prompt, improve it over time. And your team is still using the same hotkeys to pull those snippets into their prompts. I Big time nerd, Big time nerd stuff, right? I told you, version three of this, it's even nerdier because while ChatGPT is really powerful and we've actually got a main YouTube channel video coming about this that I'm super excited about, while ChatGPT is super powerful, it still requires somebody going out there and having a conversation with it to make this happen. But the even better version of that is the one that's autonomous. That is I get off the meeting and a couple minutes later those tweet ideas come through automatically. Those blog post ideas come through automatically. So I don't have to make the time and remember to go out and do X, Y, Z, go to this other app. And that's where things kind of fall apart is you. You still got to remember to go out to chat TBD to do that thing. I want this instead to do like automatically happen behind the scenes. And workflow tools can enable this for us. So tools like Zapier, if you ever use Zapier, that's probably the leading one. Make N8N. Lindy is a new like AI specific one is a little more technical, but you can build out custom workflows so that for example, I could have a trigger set up on my AI meeting recorder, Fireflies. Whenever a new meeting transcript is ready it kicks off this workflow. So the trigger new transcript is ready. Next step, the next like node in that Workflow is calling ChatGPT. Calling OpenAI. The same conversations you have with ChatGPT in the app can be triggered as part of an automated workflow. And so I've got this prompt that maybe gives me really good tweet ideas, right? That prompt I build into the zapier workflow or whatever it is, so that the trigger step is transcripts ready. The second step is use this Transcript and return 10 tweet ideas. And then the third step is, you know, send it to me over Slack or something like that. And then every time I have a meeting, once the meeting's done, that stuff gets pushed through automatically. That is like embedding AI into your processes. That is the ultimate way to do it because it doesn't require anybody having to remember to go do it. Lots of use cases of this from, you know, 10 minutes before a meeting send you a digest of like, what's in the meeting agenda, recent emails my team has had with this client, maybe go out on the web and find any recent updates about this individual that I'm meeting with. And while you could go out to ChatGPT and kind of sort of get to the same thing, the way better version of that is the one that runs on its own is like developed and kind of refined by an expert and is run for everybody on your team. Like, everyone gets access to this. And I think this is like the best way to make content creation specifically easiest for you is when you're coming out of a meeting, all that stuff is front of mind, right? Like you're a little bit juiced, like you just were kind of on your roll, like giving advice. And that's, that's like a, a point in time where maybe you're more ready to write than you would otherwise be because you're kind of coming off that meeting still. And if those ideas just like come through automatically, you're never going to be short of ideas again. Because like, we can't sit down and write something from scratch. But when we sit across from a client, we could do that stuff ad nauseam. Like we, we can do that stuff in our sleep, right? And oftentimes those conversations we're having the same conversations we're having every day, so that is way easier. And we're almost creating then content from that context, sitting across from the client and riffing because like, that's something that we can do much easier than sitting down and writing something more Formal. Today's episode is sponsored in part by Team up, the folks that help you hire people directly in the Philippines to work for your accounting firm. Teamups put together a killer guide, actually a 2025 salary guide for hiring accountants in the Philippines that you can swipe for free down in the show notes. One thing they called out in this guide that I wanted to cover today, what it means to direct hire. Because a lot of offshore groups, you're actually hiring the company and they have an office and they have kind of this resource pool of people that are getting work done. Team up their approach, you hire those people directly. So Team up pays recruiters on the ground in the Philippines to find those people to come and work for you, which means they're just another member of the team. If you run a distributed team, they are no different than the folks that you got across town. Now, there's sometimes, like, disclosure rules, stuff like that that you got to navigate, but in terms of, like, building a workplace environment, they're just part of the squad. It means there's no, like, middleman that can complicate that relationship or anything like that. It means that the culture and the relationship that you have with them, it is not entangled in any other stuff that's going on, you know, in their office or, you know, the aspects of their work experience that you don't have control over. Like, it's just you hiring a person to do work. Simple as that. The salary guide. Super good. Grab that down in the show notes. And thanks to Team up for sponsoring the this episode gang. Today's episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Carbon. Every year, Carbon does a report about AI and its impact on the accounting industry. They survey a whole bunch of accounting firms. You may have heard. We actually did a whole episode of the podcast about it. It's a really, really good report. Bunch of interesting insights from real accounting firms to see how they're using it, what's working, what's not working, and kind of get the commentary on either ends of the spectrum. A lot of really interesting trends that developed just in 2025. A whole lot less fear in 25 than there was in 24. People seeing it more as an opportunity. Still a very big divide in the excitement of leadership versus staff level folks. It means we as leaders need to be doing a better job communicating and normalizing AI as a part of work so that it's not this amorphous, spooky thing that folks kind of are unsure of. Lots of exciting stuff happening there. I'll link access to that AI report down in the show Notes. Totally worth checking out. I think you like it. Now, I can tell you an unlock for me lately is actually using ChatGPT's deep research for writing. And I only use that when I want it to pull from specific context. So, for example, if I got a big long meeting transcript or five meeting transcripts, I find that deep research is very good at writing. When it has to pull from a bunch of information, it just makes much more interesting connections across all of that information. Whereas just in a chat conversation, if you don't use deep research, what's happening behind the scenes is it's just sampling the information that you give it. It's not looking at everything, it's sampling what it thinks the most relevant things are from all that information. Deep research, it's in the name. Like it's going to spend 10 minutes going through that in a more comprehensive way and making more interesting connections. And most of the time if I'm writing something like I have 10 minutes that I can give. It gets me a way better starting point then. And so as you're coming out of this meeting, it could send you a list of these ideas that could be content. And then like you could take those ideas and the transcript, you could go back to ChatGPT if you wanted and say, hey, write me a 400 word first draft of this, this thing. I'm thinking, and if you give it all that context, you'll be surprised at how good the quality of the output will be. Like from a technical standpoint, it will sound like you're advising because that's what it's pulling from. And if you've ever thought about pulling in a third party, like a marketing agency or hiring a marketer, the biggest problem with getting somebody to do this stuff for you in a way that you'll be happy with is them being able to know what you know. When you read that thing that they produced, you're like, well, this, this sucks because like, they're very obviously not a technical person and they're just speaking generically. Whereas when you try to write something even though you're technical, everybody else is like, well, that sucks because you don't know how to write. This can kind of like bridge those two things. Like you can have AI write something that is very technically sound and advising through the lens of how you would advise because it's pulling from your transcripts. Hand that off to a marketing person that can make them words sound good. That's a big time opportunity but there's something to me about this unlock of not having to go to chat GPT anymore because that is, that is friction. Like when I end a meeting, if I have to go out and download the transcript and then go to ChatGPT and do X, Y, Z, by that point I've probably cooled off a bit as opposed to just having this thing run automatically and I just get like that digest sent to me directly. You can have a, like a technical person even build on that further to where you select one of those or you respond and say run number three for me. And then that makes that kicks off another workflow that writes a 500 word blog post about that subject or something like that. That's super cool, man. That is super cool. And one of the things that, that folks get wrong when they come to AI first is they throw a really big, hard, like long, involved process at it where it's like it's, it can't do 17 steps all at once. The way that you can actually get it to do that is in more of a workflow builder where those 17 steps are chunked out kind of one by one. So I think for most professionals where they're like, when am I ever going to find time in the headspace to do writing? This to me feels like the easiest way to always have an abundance of ideas and abundance of things to talk about because these are truly things that you've said, like things that you can riff on because they just came from a meeting that you were just in. Now one other thing I want to pull in just around LinkedIn strategy. That was a question that somebody had thrown out on a comment on a past podcast. I think this is going to resonate with a lot of people. Aero CPA said I have analysis paralysis when it comes to determining, determining my social media posting strategy, primarily determining who my audience should be. I'm all for being helpful, but can't decide whether I should be helpful to potential clients and their advisors or if I should be helpful to other accountants. This is really hard. I think a lot of us have probably struggled with this because we enjoy the community of being out there and talking with other, other accountants. That's really valuable. But what if I also want to attract clients via the same channels? LinkedIn. Right now you basically can't do anything on LinkedIn through a company account. Like algorithmically actual people, individuals are boosted hugely relative to companies to where like I would not even try building a company account on LinkedIn. It's very different than say Facebook, where a lot of the stuff that you get in the algorithm and Facebook, in fact, most stuff isn't even from a person. It's from some sort of like named group or something. So this is a bit of a trade off, but it is worth considering. And Arrow even called this out in their later in their comment. What you engage with will not necessarily dictate who has served your posts. So I could post for my clients while I engage and consume with a different type of content. In fact, the content in my feed will be driven by what are the posts that I read and the posts that I engage with. Those can be a completely different class of post than the posts that you're making, which are then served up in other people's feeds right now. Sometimes LinkedIn will serve up posts that you commented on to your followers, but that's kind of a fringe scenario, I would say. Well, there isn't a perfect answer to this. My best answer is still, don't be afraid to post to a different type of audience than you want to engage with. Because the platform LinkedIn, it can handle that within reason. And doing that, even doing an imperfect version, is much, much better than doing nothing at all or being paralyzed and just kind of sitting back and watching. Right? Have you got any wisdom to share on this? If you have pulled AI in to help with ideation? I'm not interested in like auto posting stuff with AI. I think that's ultimately pretty lame. But when it comes to overcoming writer's block and having an abundance of ideas, man, that seems pretty cool. But if you've got any experience with that, got anything to share, drop that stuff down in the comments. Any other questions? This whole episode came from a couple of questions and kind of got my wheels turning on on how to make time for the content. When you are a busy firm owner, that's very, very hard. So don't be afraid to join in the discussion, in the comments, or if you want to find some other people, experiment with the same thing. Check out Realize the community I run that has about 500 accounting firm owners in there. Very progressive folks. A lot of folks listen to the podcast. The whole goal of that platform is to help you make some new connections and build your network. That's it for today. Hope I see you on LinkedIn. I'll see you in the next one.