LinkedIn executive presence audit

Judge whether an executive's LinkedIn activity builds authority with the audience that matters, rather than reach among peers.

Inputs to load

• The profile headline, about section and featured items.
• The last 20 to 30 posts with their reactions, comments and saves.
• The business goal behind the presence: pipeline, hiring, partnerships or category positioning.
• The target audience, described by role and company type.

Run five tests

1. Positioning clarity. A stranger must be able to say in one sentence what this person is known for after reading the headline and the last five posts.
2. Hook strength. Read only the first two lines of each post. Weak hooks warm up, announce or thank. Strong hooks state a claim, a result or a tension.
3. Theme concentration. Count distinct themes. More than three means the audience cannot learn what to expect.
4. Proof density. Split posts into own data and own experience versus borrowed ideas and generic advice. Authority comes from the first group.
5. Audience quality. Sample who comments and who saves. Estimate the share of engagement coming from the target audience versus peers, recruiters and engagement groups.

Check the conversion path

Follow one reader from a post to the profile to a next step. If the profile does not tell a buyer, candidate or partner what to do next, the content cannot convert, however well it performs.

Verdict

• Authority building: clear positioning, concentrated themes, high proof density, engagement from the target audience.
• Visible but generic: reach is healthy, proof density is low, engagement comes mostly from peers.
• Active but unfocused: strong individual posts across too many themes.
• Invisible: unclear positioning, inconsistent cadence, weak hooks.

Each verdict ends with the single change that moves the profile up one level.

What good looks like

• The expert's tell: the ratio of own proof to borrowed ideas, and the quality of the first line. Both predict authority better than impressions.
• The common mistake: optimizing for reach among peers while the buyers never see or trust the content. Generic motivation, long warm ups and announcement posts are the usual symptoms.
• A good output gives one clear verdict, three prioritized changes with expected effect, and a proposed theme set of no more than three.
• Engagement is read by who, not how many. A smaller audience of the right buyers beats a large audience of peers.

Hard rules

• NEVER invent metrics or infer private analytics that were not provided.
• NEVER post, comment or message from the executive's account. Output is a recommendation reviewed by a human.
• ALWAYS express performance as percentages and ratios, not raw counts, unless absolute numbers are requested.
• ALWAYS flag when the sample is too small to support a verdict.