| name | apply-value-first-posting |
| description | Use when deciding what to post on a personal social feed reaching distant contacts, senior figures, or a broad network — post rarely, and only content that gives the viewer genuine value (a specific insight, a distilled takeaway from a book or talk) rather than personal-life updates or generic greetings, because frequent low-value posts read as noise to anyone not already close to you, while distant contacts register credibility only from content that is useful to them. |
| source | Austin Kleon, "Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered", Workman Publishing (2014); Gary Vaynerchuk, "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World", HarperBusiness (2013); Dorie Clark, "Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It", Portfolio (2015); Steve Woods, "Digital Body Language: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Reading Online Signals" (2009) — engagement as an interest signal in social-selling methodology; Content Marketing Institute, "B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends" (annual) — long-form and newsletter content consumption patterns among senior decision-makers versus short-form consumer platforms |
| tags | ["personal-branding","content-strategy","networking","social-media","visibility","career-strategy"] |
| related | ["apply-non-transactional-giving","apply-reverse-mentoring-strategy","design-social-media-strategy"] |
Apply Value-First Posting
Post rarely on a personal feed reaching distant contacts, and make every post something that gives the viewer real value — a specific insight, a distilled takeaway, a novel observation — rather than a personal-life update or generic greeting, because low-value, frequent posts read as noise to anyone who isn't already close to you, while distant or senior contacts register your credibility only from content that is actually useful to them.
Why This Is Best Practice
Why best: A message that functions perfectly well to maintain a close relationship (a holiday greeting, a personal-life update) carries essentially zero information for a distant contact, because a genuinely close relationship doesn't require it — the people who actually know you well don't need a scheduled greeting to stay connected, and the people who don't know you well can't extract any signal about your competence or judgment from it. Distant contacts and senior figures, who receive far more incoming content than they can attend to, filter almost entirely on whether a piece of content is useful to them specifically — not on whether it demonstrates ongoing personal familiarity. This reframes a personal feed from a relationship-maintenance channel (which it is poorly suited for, at the frequency generic greetings require) into a low-frequency, high-signal credibility-broadcasting channel — a fundamentally different use requiring a different posting discipline.
Austin Kleon, "Show Your Work!" (2014): Kleon's central argument is that sharing your process, your discoveries, and your genuine points of view publicly — rather than only finished, polished self-promotion or unrelated personal content — is what makes someone findable and interesting to people who don't already know them, because it gives an outside observer something concrete and specific to evaluate and respond to. The book explicitly frames this as a deliberate practice of curation: sharing selectively and specifically, not broadcasting everything that happens in one's day.
Gary Vaynerchuk, "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook" (2013): Vaynerchuk's framework — give value repeatedly ("jabs") before ever making an ask ("right hook") — established a widely adopted content-sequencing principle in content marketing: an audience's tolerance for eventually being asked for something is a direct function of how much genuine value they've received first, and value has to be judged from the audience's perspective (does this help or inform them), not the poster's perspective (is this true or notable to me).
Dorie Clark, "Stand Out" (2015): Clark's research and case studies on professional reputation-building document that individuals who build a following and professional credibility through public content consistently do so by sharing a distilled, original point of view on their area of expertise — a specific take on a book, an analysis of an industry development, an original observation — rather than generic updates, and that this content is deliberately infrequent and curated rather than a continuous stream of unfiltered activity.
