Your LinkedIn Content Strategy Isn't the Problem. Your Plumbing Is.

Go look at the LinkedIn page of almost any company between ten and two hundred people. There's a decent chance the last post is from four months ago. It's a reshare of a press mention, or a "we're hiring" graphic, or a photo from an offsite with a caption that starts with "Incredible energy at our team retreat." Then nothing.

The reflex when a page looks like this is to go find a better LinkedIn content strategy. A new posting cadence, a fresh content calendar, a set of pillars and themes. But the page didn't go dead because the strategy was wrong. It went dead because of how the company organized the work of posting. The strategy was never the bottleneck. The plumbing was.

This is worth understanding whether or not you ever do anything about your own page, because the failure is structural, and structural problems are the kind you can actually diagnose.

The bottleneck is almost always one person

Here is the usual shape of it. A company decides it should be more active on LinkedIn. That responsibility lands on someone, usually a marketer, sometimes a founder, occasionally a contractor. That one person becomes the throat through which all content must pass. They write it, or they chase other people to write it, or they rewrite the rough thing someone sent them at 11pm. They also have a full-time job that is not this.

So the page moves at the speed of that single person's spare capacity. When they're busy, which is always, the page goes quiet. When they leave, it goes silent for good. You can see this in the posting history of basically any company that tried and gave up: a burst of five posts in one week, then a cliff. That cliff is the week the responsible person got pulled onto something else.

The instinct is to fix this by finding a more disciplined person, or by building a content calendar, or by booking a recurring content sync that everyone dreads and half the team skips. None of that addresses the actual problem, which is that you've routed an organization-sized amount of expertise through a one-person pipe.

The approval tax

The second thing that kills pages is approval. Most companies, reasonably, don't want anything published under the company name without a check. So a post gets drafted, then it waits for review. The reviewer is busy. The post sits. By the time it's approved, the news it referenced is stale, or the moment has passed, or the person who wrote it has lost interest in the whole thing.

The deeper cost isn't the delay on any single post. It's what the delay teaches people. After a contributor watches two or three of their posts die in a review queue, they stop writing. Why would they keep spending effort on something that disappears into someone's inbox? The approval process, designed to protect quality, ends up protecting silence. The page gets very good at not publishing anything bad by virtue of not publishing anything.

Active companies haven't removed approval. They've made it cheap. The review happens in minutes, not days, often because the reviewer is looking at something that already sounds right rather than rewriting it from scratch. Low-friction approval keeps contributors contributing, because their effort actually turns into published work they can point to.

Polish is not the thing

There's a belief that company content has to be polished to be safe to publish, and that polish is what takes the time. This gets the priorities backwards. The pages that work are not the most polished ones. They're the most consistent ones.

A slightly rough post from a real engineer about a problem they actually solved last week beats a beautifully art-directed carousel that took three weeks and a designer. The rough post is specific, it's timely, and it sounds like a person. The carousel is competent and forgettable. Audiences on LinkedIn have gotten very good at scrolling past competence. They stop for specificity.

This matters because polish is exactly the thing that requires the one-person bottleneck and the heavy approval process. If you decide that nothing ships without being perfect, you've guaranteed that almost nothing ships. Lowering the polish bar isn't lowering the quality bar. Specificity and honesty are quality. You're just declining to spend your scarce time sanding things smooth that were better slightly rough.

What the living pages actually do

The companies whose pages stay alive year after year have, whether they'd describe it this way or not, solved three things. None of the three is a clever LinkedIn content strategy. All three are about plumbing.

They get content from many people instead of one. The expertise in a company is distributed across everyone who does the work, so the content engine is too. The engineer writes about the engineering problem. The salesperson writes about the objection they keep hearing. The founder writes about the bet they're making. No single person is the throat anymore, so no single person's busy week takes the page down.

They keep the voices distinct. This is the part people get wrong when they try to centralize. When one person ghostwrites everything, it all sounds the same, and "the same" on LinkedIn means generic, and generic means ignored. The living pages let the engineer sound like an engineer and the founder sound like a founder. The variety is a feature. It's what makes the page feel like a company full of actual humans rather than a brand account.

They make contributing nearly frictionless. The reason most people across an org don't post isn't that they have nothing to say. It's that the gap between "I have a thought" and "it's published and on-brand" is enormous, and they have a real job. Close that gap and the contributions appear. People have opinions about their work. They just won't fight a process to share them.

The actual lesson

If your page is dead, the problem is probably not your LinkedIn content strategy, and it's probably not that you need to hire someone who cares more. The problem is that you built a system where content has to squeeze through one person and survive a slow review to come out the other side looking polished. That system produces silence by design, and no amount of strategy on top of it will change the result.

The fix is to widen the pipe. Get content from across the org, keep each voice its own, and make the whole thing low-friction enough that a busy person's good thought can become a published post without a week of overhead. That's the difference between a page that goes quiet every time someone gets busy and one that stays alive because it never depended on any single person staying un-busy in the first place.

This is the problem Poplar was built to solve, which is why we think about it this way. But the diagnosis holds regardless of what you do about it. Go look at the active pages in your space and the dead ones. The difference is almost never talent or strategy. It's almost always plumbing.