The 4-1-1 rule and the 3-2-1 rule.

The 4-1-1 rule comes from Twitter's early years. Tippingpoint Labs states it as: tweet four pieces of relevant original content from others and retweet one relevant tweet for every one self-promoting tweet. A Contently piece from February 2012 credits it to Andrew Davis of Tippingpoint Labs and Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute, and it spread from there into every social media curriculum.

The idea behind it was sound for its time and platform: on a feed built around resharing, an account that only talked about itself was ignored, and curation was the cheapest way to be useful. Nothing about the rule is LinkedIn-specific. It was later applied to LinkedIn because it was already famous.

The 3-2-1 model does come from LinkedIn, and it is advice for company Pages. LinkedIn's guide for small business Pages says: every week, aim to publish three pieces of industry-related content, two pieces of "proud" content that makes your employees and community feel good, and just one piece of product or service content.

You will also find a 3-2-1 that describes the shape of a single post (a hook of at most three sentences, two insights, one takeaway) and a 3-2-1 that splits a week into industry posts, personal insights and one personal story. Those are individual writers' frameworks with no shared origin. Useful or not, they are somebody's opinion, and this page treats them as that.

Both rules were written for accounts that are not people. A brand page needs a ratio because it has no natural voice, so the rule supplies one. A founder posting under their own name has the opposite problem: the reader came for the founder's view, and four reshares a week deliver none of it. A reshare says nothing in your words. If you want to stand beside someone else's post, a comment with a view in it does more for you than a reshare, because the comment is yours.

So keep the instinct behind the rules and drop the arithmetic. The instinct is that most of what you post should be useful to a reader who will never buy from you, and only a little of it should sell.

• Post three to five times a week. Three is the floor at which a profile starts to feel alive; LinkedIn's own limit is 3,000 characters a post, and most good posts use a third of that.
• Make most posts from what happened: a decision, a result, a lesson, a number from the work. That is your industry content, and it is content nobody else can post.
• Once a week, take a position on something moving in your niche. That is the post that travels.
• Sell plainly about one post in ten. Say what you do and who it is for, and stop.

Sonar's default weekly mix is 60 percent awareness, 30 percent nurture and 10 percent convert, shown as a receipt on each day's suggested post and adjustable in Settings under Pillars. It is advisory. It steers the drafts and never blocks one. How it works shows where the drafts come from.