Polish the posts. Rough up the comments. Not the other way around.

I sat down with Angus Clark from Create a Frontier last week and walked out with a phrase I cannot unsee in any feed: most brands have the polish in the wrong place.

The post is the four-line shrug. The comment underneath gets three drafts and arrives 14 hours later, sounding like compliance wrote it. Angus thinks it should be the other way around.

If you want one specific thing to take into your week, here it is. Comment fast, comment honest, comment unedited. Save the craft for the post. Watch what happens to the people who reply.

I'm going to walk you through three more specifics from Angus, then point you to the Posting quality scorecard at the bottom, which is the thing to grade your last 30 posts against if you want to be honest with yourself about which ones earned their slot.

1: Never delete a comment. Ever.

Angus is firm on this. If a comment landed badly, you edit it and apologize. You do not delete it.

His reasoning is sharper than the rule. "Don't stop the conversation, because as soon as you do that, it tells everybody else who is on the journey with you that you are actually going to exercise that power of silence."

That is the bit most brands miss. The delete isn't private. The thread saw it. The thread will remember it. The next person who reads your feed has to decide whether you would silence them too, and they will assume yes.

This week, audit the last month of your brand's comment activity. Find anything you deleted. Edit a public follow-up instead. Make the round-trip part of the brand.

2: AI will refine you into nobody if you let it.

Angus told a story about a ChatGPT plugin that one of the bigger LinkedIn creators leaked. It optimizes your "About" section against everything the algorithm rewards. Angus tried it.

The output ticked every box. He didn't use it.

"This just isn't a story, and I'm a storyteller. So this works for somebody else; it doesn't work for me."

The output was technically correct and a brand-suicide note at the same time. The thing that makes Angus's About worth reading is the same thing that makes the algorithm say "this is not optimized."

Use AI for the admin. The reporting. The tagging. The customer replies that they don't need craft. The moment you give it the published draft, you are asking the tool that has absorbed everyone's clichés to make you sound like everyone else.

Related, this is the line that has lived in my head since the recording: "My favorite writing mechanism of 'it's not this, it's that' is now way too cliché. I immediately just started writing it slightly differently. You just have to adapt the format."

The format isn't wrong. It got worn out. Read your last five posts and ask whether the structure is yours or whether it's the structure ChatGPT defaulted to the week you wrote them.

3: Long-form on LinkedIn works when it's worth reading.

Angus has a friend in the same space who once politely asked him over coffee whether his long posts actually worked. Angus said: "Don't worry, they're working."

A week later, he wrote a long post about the capital gains tax. It blew up. He has 45 saves on his content across LinkedIn (not likes, saves). People read something they want to come back to.

His test for whether a long post earns its length is one question: "Is it worth reading? If it is, they'll stick around."

Two things follow from this. First, three quick-tips posts do not tell a story. They are selling you something, and the reader can tell. Second, saves are a better signal than likes because likes are the cheapest action on a feed; saves require a small but real decision.

What gets saved? Educational content. Hot takes. Or really good creative examples that make a reader feel seen. None of the three is skimmable. All three need to be worth coming back to.

This week, count your saves on the last 30 posts. That ratio is your worth-reading-ness, in a number.

Get the Polish Quality Scorecard

Notice the move. Every lesson above is the same lesson in different clothes.

The brand wins when the human in the brand decides where the polish goes and where it doesn't. If you want to grade your current rhythm honestly, we created the Posting Quality Scorecard, inspired by Angus. It's a Google Sheets template you can run on your last 30 posts in an afternoon. It scores each post against the saves test, the cliché test, the comment-readiness test, and the worth-reading test.

Get the Polish/Quality Scorecard

Get in on the action

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Angus → #Seen Podcast, Ep 31

If this is the kind of thing you want in your inbox every week, you can subscribe here. Thanks for being here. The bit on the farm-kid frame around the 17-minute mark is the one I think will stay with you the longest.

One last thing: what's the last comment you over-polished? Reply and tell me. I read every single one.

- Lach

Community @ Sked Social