Every small business says it’ll post on LinkedIn every week. Most manage three weeks. Then a client deadline arrives, and the company page goes quiet until the next burst of guilt.
We fixed that by making the boring part automatic and keeping the human part human.
What stays manual
I write the posts myself. On purpose.
I could have a model write them, and plenty of people do. You can usually tell. The whole point of posting is sounding like an actual person who knows what they’re doing, so the writing stays with me. The automation handles everything that isn’t writing.
How it works
The engine is n8n, an open-source automation tool I run on my own server. Think of it as a set of dominoes you line up once: when one thing happens, the next thing happens, without anyone pushing.
- I finish a post and drop it into a Google Drive folder.
- n8n is watching that folder. The moment a new post appears, it picks it up.
- It sends me an approval message on Telegram with the post inside.
- I approve it, and it goes out on schedule.
That’s it. Writing a post takes as long as it takes. Publishing it takes one tap.
Why the approval step matters
Anything that publishes in your name without a final check is a disaster waiting for a quiet Friday. The Telegram approval costs me three seconds and means nothing goes out that I haven’t seen in its final form.
Personally I’d rather have that approval on WhatsApp, since that’s where I actually live. WhatsApp is much stricter about automated messages than Telegram, so that’s still on my to-figure-out list.
The part that doesn’t work yet
Posting to a LinkedIn company page needs access to LinkedIn’s Community Management API (Application Programming Interface, the official door for apps to talk to LinkedIn). You have to apply for it.
I applied. It wasn’t approved. From what I can see, LinkedIn has tightened who gets access, and small companies are finding it harder than it used to be. I haven’t given up. I’ll keep trying, and I’ll keep updating the application until someone at LinkedIn gets tired of seeing it.
What it’s actually worth
The time saved per post is small. That’s not the point. The point is consistency. The hardest part of posting every week isn’t the posting, it’s remembering to, finding the file, formatting it and doing it again next week when you’re busy. Take all of that away and the only job left is the one that needs a human.
Which, conveniently, is the only part I wanted to do anyway.