u/SnooBooks9107

Quick context: I'm the founder of WaveGen, a tool that turns newsletters and blog posts into LinkedIn carousels. One of our users sent me 90 days of his LinkedIn analytics last week, and the breakdown across post types was interesting enough that I wanted to share.

1. Real-life photos performed best

Photos with family, clients, real-world moments. Highest engagement, highest impressions by a clear margin.

Not surprising in hindsight. LinkedIn heavily rewards signals that feel socially authentic.

2. AI-generated "status" images performed second best

Things like fake conference keynote photos, fake award ceremony shots.

These got strong engagement at first because they trigger curiosity. But two things happened:

• Impressions stayed relatively capped by the platform
• Engagement declined over time as people started recognizing the AI pattern

AI images can manufacture novelty, but novelty decays once audiences detect it.

3. Educational carousels had the most stable distribution

His WaveGen carousels consistently pulled solid impressions — better than most of the other content formats he tested. Engagement was more moderate, but the floor was higher and steadier. Obvious bias since I make the tool, but the "carousels = stable distribution" pattern shows up across most creator analytics I've seen, so I think it generalizes.

Takeaway from his data:

• Real photos build trust
• AI fantasy images create temporary attention
• Educational carousels create scalable distribution

Best strategy probably isn't picking one - it's combining them intentionally. People follow people, but they stay for useful ideas.

One thing that’s been surprisingly effective for me lately:

Using Reddit threads as the starting point for content.

Not just for “idea generation,” but for actual wording and positioning.

My workflow is basically:

• find high-engagement threads in subreddits my audience hangs out
• look for repeated frustrations/questions with high engagement (upvotes or comments even better)
• paste the thread into my tool (WaveGen)
• It extracts the interesting meta-topics
• and turns them into LinkedIn posts, carousels, quote cards, etc.

Sometimes I’ll combine several threads around the same topic and ask it to synthesize the opinions across them.

What surprised me is:
people explain their problems WAY more honestly in Reddit comments than in surveys or customer interviews sometimes.

The resulting content tends to perform better because:

• the topics already proved socially engaging
• the wording sounds natural
• the pain points are specific instead of generic marketing language

It feels less like “coming up with content” and more like organizing conversations that are already happening.

Curious if anyone else does this deliberately.

I see this idea everywhere lately, especially with every Claude and skill tutorials on X/Instagram:
“Just use AI to write captions + connect to a scheduling API → social media solved.”

When I tried it out, it's never as easy as they said:

• the generic Claude Serif look which is easily recognized miles away
• the generic voice regurgitating cliche
• any passable results would require a lot of babysitting
• ...and no one shows their token cost

From my conversations with most SMBs, the real friction is:

• turning messy real-world assets & insights into content
• making it feel on-brand
• having something they’re actually comfortable publishing

So they try the tool → generate a few posts → given up.

I've been working on WaveGen to trying to create posts people actually want to post.

Curious if others have run into this?

If you are posting consistently with AI tools, what actually made it work?