LinkedIn Management
On LinkedIn, your people outperform your company page
This is the one platform where individual profiles consistently reach further than the brand account. That makes employee and executive participation the strategy rather than an optional extra, and it puts the real work inside your approval process rather than inside a scheduling tool.
Who does the work
Three kinds of account, doing three different jobs
Most LinkedIn programmes put ninety per cent of the effort into the account with the least reach. Splitting the jobs properly is usually the change that makes everything else start working.
The executives
One or two senior people with a position on something their industry argues about. This is where reach comes from, because a named person with a face and an opinion is what the platform circulates. It requires their actual views, not a communications department’s summary of them, and about half an hour of their time a fortnight.
The employees who talk to customers
Salespeople, consultants and engineers who already answer the same questions every week. They have the specifics buyers want and usually post nothing, because nobody has told them what is acceptable to say. Prompts and clear boundaries work here; scripted posts that everyone shares on the same day do not, and are transparent to any reader.
The company page
Supporting infrastructure. It is where someone lands after reading a post and wants to know whether you are real, so it needs to be current, clear about what you do, and consistent with what your people are saying. It is not the channel, and treating it as one is how programmes end up busy and invisible.
The structural difference
What a personal profile can do that a company page cannot
| Dimension | Personal profile | Company page |
|---|---|---|
| Who tends to follow it | Peers, buyers, and people who found one post interesting | Employees, candidates, suppliers and competitors |
| How posts travel | Through comments and reshares from individuals, which keeps circulating for days | Mostly to existing followers, with little onward movement |
| What it can credibly say | A first-person opinion, a disagreement, an admission that something went wrong | Announcements, hiring, events and positions the whole business will stand behind |
| Who has to approve it | The person whose name is on it, ideally within a pre-agreed boundary | Usually marketing, then legal, then whoever else is copied in |
| Where it is genuinely needed | Building familiarity with buyers who are not in market yet | The credibility check someone does after seeing a post, and recruitment |
| Main failure mode | Nothing posted for two months because the person got busy | Steady publishing that reaches nobody who could buy anything |
Where programmes die
Three bottlenecks that stop LinkedIn programmes
- Approval has no deadline and no owner.
- A post about something happening this week goes into a review queue behind a supplier contract. By the time it comes back the moment has passed, so it is published anyway and lands flat. Fixing this is administrative rather than creative: agree which topics are pre-cleared, name one reviewer, and give the queue a same-day service level for posts inside the agreed boundary.
- Everything is written in corporate voice.
- Readers came to the platform to read individuals and can spot a committee draft immediately. The hedges are the tell — the qualifier added by the third reviewer, the softened claim, the sentence that commits to nothing. A post that could have been signed by anyone in the sector gets scrolled past, regardless of whose photograph is beside it.
- Nobody comments on anyone else’s posts.
- A large share of the reach available to an individual comes from thoughtful comments on other people’s posts, where the audience already exists. Most programmes ignore this entirely because it cannot be scheduled in advance and does not appear on a content calendar, which makes it the most underused thing on the platform.
How we run it
A fortnight that fits around a busy person
The whole design assumes the executive has almost no time and that a slow approval route will kill the programme. Everything below is built to keep both of those from becoming excuses.
Agree the boundary once
Which subjects are pre-cleared, which need a review, and which are never discussed publicly — clients, live deals, anything under contract. Agreeing this once with legal removes most of the recurring delay, because the majority of posts then fall inside the pre-cleared set.
You get: A written posting boundary signed off by legal
Record, do not commission
A twenty-minute call every fortnight where we ask about things going on in their world: an argument they had, a pattern across recent projects, something they think their industry has wrong. Nobody is asked to write anything. This produces three or four genuinely first-person posts.
You get: Recorded session and a fortnight of drafts
Draft, then remove the hedges
Written in their voice from their words, then edited to take out the qualifiers that make a position sound like a position on nothing. If the draft cannot be disagreed with, it will not be read.
You get: Drafts with a stated point of view
Approve on a phone in five minutes
Posts arrive somewhere the executive already looks, edited to be readable in one pass, with a clear yes or change request. Anything requiring a document, a meeting or a chase becomes the reason the programme stops.
You get: A same-day approval route
Comment where the audience already is
Each week includes a short list of posts by people your buyers follow, with a suggested angle. Comments are written by the person, not by us, because a comment in someone else’s thread is a conversation and reads as one or does not work at all.
You get: A weekly commenting list with suggested angles
Report on accounts, not on followers
Which target companies viewed profiles, who commented and whether they could buy, and whether sales conversations reference anything published. Follower count is reported because people ask for it, not because it decides anything.
You get: Monthly account-level visibility report
Questions
What B2B teams ask about LinkedIn
Why does the company page get so little reach?
Because people follow people. A company page has no face, rarely says anything a person would argue with, and is followed largely by employees, candidates and competitors rather than by buyers.
That does not make the page useless. It is where someone checks you after seeing a post from one of your people, so it needs to be current and credible. It just should not be the thing you spend most of your effort on.
Our executives have no time. How does this work?
We take the material out of conversation rather than asking anyone to write. A recorded twenty-minute call every fortnight typically produces three to four posts, and the executive’s remaining job is a five-minute review on their phone.
What does not work is sending someone a blank document and a deadline. Every executive posting programme that collapses collapses at that step.
Legal has to approve everything. Is that fatal?
No, but it has to be designed for. We agree in advance which subjects are pre-cleared, which need review, and which are off limits entirely, then draft inside those boundaries so most posts never need a second opinion.
The problem is rarely legal itself. It is a queue with no service level and no named owner, where a post about a conference sits behind a contract for six days and misses the conference.
Do you post as our executives, or do they?
They publish it, from their own account, having read and approved it. We draft from their words and their positions, and they can change anything.
We do not have access arrangements where an agency posts unreviewed under someone’s name. If a person would not defend a sentence in a meeting, it should not go out under their photograph.
Will you use automation to send connection requests?
No. Bulk connection and messaging tools breach LinkedIn’s user agreement and put the account you depend on at risk of restriction, which is a poor trade for volume.
Connection growth comes from posting things worth reading and from commenting usefully on other people’s posts. It is slower and it does not get the profile removed.
How do we know any of this is working?
Not through follower counts. We look at whether people from your target accounts are viewing profiles, whether posts are being commented on by buyers rather than by peers, and whether sales conversations start with someone mentioning something they read.
That last signal is the most valuable and the least automatic, so we ask for it explicitly: a question on the enquiry form and a standing item in the sales meeting.
Find out which of your people should be posting
It is usually not the ones already doing it. On a strategy call we look at who in your business has something buyers would want to read, and what your approval process would have to change for them to publish it.
Related
Where to go next
- the arguments an executive publishesThe material that makes a personal profile worth following.
- paying for reach on the same platformOrganic profiles and bought impressions do different jobs.
- targeting named accounts deliberatelyLinkedIn visibility is most useful when the account list is defined.
- working out whether LinkedIn is even the right platformWorth settling before committing executive time.
- turning visibility into pipeline
- how this works for B2B software
Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal