The LinkedIn Trend Machine

One agent reads X overnight, ranks every post against your offer, and has a brief waiting by morning. You pick the trend and post it on LinkedIn first.

Read this first

LinkedIn doesn't reward the most original idea. It rewards whoever keeps people on the app, and a take on something people already care about does that best.

Here's the gap: LinkedIn is slow. Most of what goes viral there was already on X a few days earlier. Whoever brings the take over first gets the reach. Everyone after gets what's left.

So I stopped trying to think of ideas from scratch. I gave the reading to an agent. Grokbot runs on its own computer, so it works while my laptop is closed. Every night it reads the accounts that set trends in my niche, scores what it finds, and writes the result into my notes.

You don't need any code. Everything below is something you say to Grokbot in plain words.

What you need

Setup

Do this once. Grokbot asks for anything it's missing.

Step 1: Build your watchlist

Pick 20 to 25 accounts on X that post early in your space. Mix three kinds: builders who ship new tools, operators who share what's working, and news accounts that break releases. Skip anyone who mostly reposts.

Save this list as my X watchlist and use it for every trend run:
@account1, @account2, @account3 ...
If an account goes quiet for two weeks, tell me so I can swap it.

Step 2: Add topic searches

Accounts catch the people you know. Searches catch the ones you don't. Give it 10 to 15 topics your buyers care about.

Also search X every run for posts from the last 24 hours on these topics:
{topic 1}, {topic 2}, {topic 3} ...
English only. Original posts only, no retweets or replies.

Step 3: Tell it about your offer

This is what turns a pile of posts into a list you'll actually use.

Here is what I sell and who buys it: {one paragraph}.
When you score posts, score how useful each one is as a LinkedIn take
for these buyers, not how popular it is.

The scout

The scout is the routine that reads X. I run it twice a day: a morning run that catches everything posted since 7 PM the night before, and an evening run that catches the day.

Create a routine called "X trends" that runs every day at 7:30 AM and 10 PM my time.
Each run:
1. Pull original posts from my watchlist since the last run.
2. Run my topic searches for the last 24 hours.
3. Drop retweets, replies and non-English posts.
4. Sort by views, then by engagement.
Save the full list with links, views and likes.

The scorer

Views tell you what's popular. They don't tell you what's worth posting for your business. The scorer reads the top 100 and gives each one a score out of 10 with a one-line reason.

I score with JEV, a small model built to make these judgment calls cheaply. Scoring 100 posts costs me under five cents a run. Any model works if you give it the rubric below.

Score the top 100 posts by views from 1 to 10:
- 9 to 10: my buyers care, and I have a real take on it
- 6 to 8: related to my offer, worth a look
- 1 to 5: popular but off-topic for my buyers
Give each one a one-line reason. Mark the rest "not scored".

The morning brief

The brief is one note per day, waiting before you open LinkedIn. Mine lands in my Obsidian vault under inbox/x-trends/ with the date as the file name.

Every morning, write the results to a note called "X trends {date}".
At the top, list the 5 highest-scoring posts with the link, views, score and reason.
Below that, the full ranked list.

A line from my brief looks like this:

@AIwithkhan: 16,093 views, 183 likes, JEV 9/10: AI video showcase; highly relevant

Post it first

The agent finds the trend. The take is still yours.

1. Open the brief and read the top five. Ignore anything under 7.
2. Pick one where you have a real opinion or a result to show.
3. Write your take: what happened, what you think, and what it means for your buyers.
4. Post it before lunch. Speed is the point.

If you want a head start on step 3, ask for drafts:

Take post #{n} from today's brief and draft two LinkedIn posts in my voice.
Use my offer description. Lead with my opinion, not a summary of the news.

Edit the draft until it sounds like you, then post. The best idea doesn't win on LinkedIn. The first one does.