LinkedIn personal branding for SME founders and managers: the practical guide

The owner of an industrial automation company has 1,800 connections on LinkedIn: customers, suppliers, former colleagues, a few competitors. The company page has 600 followers and posts a photo from a trade fair every three months. He never writes anything, “because I don’t have time and I don’t like showing off”. Then a long-standing customer tells him they chose another supplier for a new project: “I didn’t know you did that too”. The expertise was there. Nobody knew about it.

The short answer: for an SME founder or manager, LinkedIn personal branding isn’t about showing off; it’s about making what you know visible to people who might one day buy from you, work with you or recommend you. Your personal profile counts for more than the company page because it speaks to your network of people, and people trust people more than logos. You need a clear profile, three topics you have real experience of, two or three formats and a system that takes one or two hours a week. You can get help with writing and filming, but the ideas and opinions must be yours.

This article is about your personal profile. Making the company page work is a different matter, as is knowing when a subscription is worth paying for: for that there’s our guide to LinkedIn Premium and its plans.

Why does your personal profile count for more than the company page?

Because a company page starts from zero followers, while your profile already has a network built over years of work. And because on social media people respond more readily to a person than to a brand: they comment, reply and send private messages.

The company page is still useful. It’s the official reference point, it’s needed for job ads and advertising campaigns, and for people looking for information about the company. But on its own it struggles to start conversations. The comparison, in practice:

	Personal profile	Company page
Starting point	The network you already have: customers, suppliers, colleagues	People who chose to follow the company
Tone	A person who tells stories, makes choices, has opinions	Official communication
What works	Experiences, choices, mistakes, points of view	News, products, job ads, events
Conversations	Comments and private messages addressed to you	Comments on the page, less frequent
Advertising	A post can be sponsored with Thought Leader Ads	All LinkedIn Ads formats
Risk	Depends on one person: if they leave, the audience goes with them	Stays with the company

There’s a commercial reason too. In B2B sales several people make the decision, often outside the purchasing department. The 2025 Edelman and LinkedIn B2B thought leadership report calls them “hidden buyers”: people in finance, legal or senior management who sign off but aren’t experts in the product. According to the report, 91% of them say high-quality content written by a company makes them more receptive when the sales approach eventually comes. Your profile is one of the places where that content gets read.

The best approach is to use both together. The company page reshares the best posts by the founder and managers, and the personal profile points back to the page when talking about products, open positions or events.

How should you sort out your profile before posting?

Before writing your first post it’s worth sorting out your profile, because people who read an interesting post click on the name. If they find a ten-year-old photo and the words “CEO at Rossi Srl”, they won’t understand why they should follow you. A couple of hours, once, is enough.

Photo and cover image

Your photo should be recent, with your face clearly visible and good light. You don’t need a photo studio: a phone, a window to one side and a neutral background will do. No cropped group shots, no sunglasses.

Use the cover image, the wide panel behind your photo: the factory, the team at work, the product.

Headline: what to write under your name

The headline is the line under your name, and it appears everywhere: in comments, in search results, in connection requests. It’s the part most people read. “Managing Director” tells someone who doesn’t know you nothing.

A simple formula: what you do, for whom, with what result or speciality. For example, made up for illustration: “Founder of Rossi Automazione · Packaging lines for the food industry · I write about how SMEs choose a production line”. Put the most important information first, because in many places in the app the line gets cut off.

About: the section that explains who you are

The About section is your short story. A four-part structure works well:

1. The problem you solve and for whom, in two lines.
2. How you got here: a step in your career that explains why you know what you’re talking about.
3. What you’ll find here: what you write about, so newcomers know what to expect.
4. How to contact you: email, website, or simply “send me a message”.

Write in the first person and the way you talk. The first few lines are the only ones visible before “see more”, so they have to work on their own.

The Featured section

This is your profile’s shop window. According to LinkedIn’s guide to the Featured section, you can add posts and articles published on LinkedIn, links to external sites and uploaded files such as images, documents, presentations and videos.

For an SME founder it makes sense to include three things: the post that best explains how you work, a link to the website (better a specific page than the homepage) and a useful document, for example a guide or a case study in PDF. Update it every two or three months.

Buttons, followers and creator mode

The “creator mode” that many guides talk about no longer exists. LinkedIn removed the switch at the beginning of 2024 and made the tools it used to include available to everyone. Today the choices to make are different:

• Follow or Connect as the main button. In the settings, under Visibility and then Followers, you can make “Follow” the main action on your profile. It makes sense if you get lots of requests from strangers and want to keep connections for people you actually know. Anyone who wants to connect can still do so from the “More” menu.
• Custom button. With some Premium subscriptions you can add a button such as “Visit my website” or “Book an appointment” which, according to LinkedIn’s guide, also appears on your posts and in messages. It’s one of the few concrete reasons a founder might consider Premium Business.

What should you talk about? Find your three topics

Choose three topics and stick with them for at least six months. A few topics make your profile recognisable: your readers learn that you’re “the one who writes about predictive maintenance” or “the one who explains how to hire in an SME”. People who write about everything aren’t remembered for anything.

A good topic sits where three things meet: you know it from direct experience, it matters to the people you want to reach, and you can talk about it without giving away company secrets. A grid we use with clients:

Type of topic	What it covers	Example (made up for illustration)
The craft	How to do the work in your industry well, what you see that others don’t	“Why half the machine downtime we see stems from a choice made at the purchasing stage”
The market	What’s changing for your customers: regulations, prices, technologies, habits	“What the new packaging rules mean for food companies”
The business	How you run the company: choices, people, mistakes, numbers you can share	“We said no to a big customer. Here’s why”

The third topic is what makes a personal profile different from the company page. You don’t need to talk about your private life: business decisions, explained honestly, are enough.

To find subjects, the best source is the questions customers and colleagues ask you. Every question you hear three times in a month is a post. Keep a note on your phone and write them down as soon as you hear them. If you want a more structured way to organise topics and calendar, you’ll find it in our guide to the social media editorial plan.

Which formats should you use on LinkedIn?

Use a few formats and do them well. For people short of time, text and comments are the basis; carousels and videos come in once there’s a system that produces them without effort.

Format	When to use it	Preparation time (indicative)	What to bear in mind
Text-only post	Opinions, stories, lessons learnt	20-40 minutes	The first two lines decide whether anyone clicks “see more”
Text with a real photo	Moments at the company, trade fairs, the team, the product	20-30 minutes	Real photos, not stock images
PDF carousel (document)	Explaining a process, a checklist, a comparison	1-2 hours, or less with a design template	One idea per page, large text that’s readable on a phone
Short video	Showing the product, answering a question, letting people hear your voice	15 minutes of filming if there’s a script	Always use subtitles: many people watch without sound
Comments	Every day, on posts by the people you want to reach	10-15 minutes	One useful comment is worth more than ten “congratulations!”

PDF carousels

On LinkedIn, carousels are published as documents. According to the official guide to documents, you can upload PDF, PowerPoint or Word files of up to 100 MB and 300 pages, but once published you can’t edit the file, only the text of the post. Animations and videos inside the document appear as still images. Viewers can also download it, so no confidential data.

In practice 6-10 pages are enough: a title promising something concrete, the steps, and a final page saying who you are. A design template made once, in the company’s colours, saves you hours every time.

Short videos

LinkedIn accepts videos from a few seconds up to 15 minutes, including vertical ones, as set out in its guide to video. For a founder, video works because it lets people hear your voice and the way you think, things text doesn’t convey. 40-90 seconds on a single question is enough: “How long does commissioning really take?”, “What should you ask a supplier before signing?”.

You don’t need a film crew. A phone, a clip-on microphone and a five-line script will do. The script isn’t for reading out: it’s there so you don’t lose your thread.

Comments

This is the most underrated format. A thoughtful comment under a post by a customer, a trade association or an industry journalist is read by people who don’t follow you yet. And it brings more profile visits than you’d think. Choose 15-20 people or pages to follow closely and comment when you have something to add: an experience, a figure, a question.

A system that takes one or two hours a week

LinkedIn personal branding only lasts if it takes little time, and always the same amount. Two posts a week for a year beat one post a day for a month. Here’s a system you can keep up with 60-120 minutes a week:

When	What you do	Time
Monday	Choose the week’s two subjects from your note of questions	10 minutes
Monday or Tuesday	Write the drafts of the two posts, or dictate your ideas to whoever is helping you	30-40 minutes
Tuesday and Thursday	Publish, then stay for a quarter of an hour to reply to the first comments	2 × 15 minutes
Every day	Comment on two or three posts by people in your industry	5-10 minutes
Friday	Look at what worked and note down new questions	10 minutes

Two tips help a lot. First: write in batches. Half an hour on Monday for two drafts achieves more than ten minutes snatched every day. Second: reply to comments in the first hour after publishing. That’s when people are still on the post and conversations get going.

How can you get help and still be authentic?

Getting help is normal: managers rarely write their letters to shareholders or their speeches on their own. What matters is what you delegate. The ideas, opinions and experiences must be yours. Writing, design, filming and editing can be handed over to others.

Ghostwriting: someone who writes for you

It works like this: someone interviews you for 30-45 minutes every two weeks, records it and turns the interview into posts. You reread, correct and publish. The text is written by someone else, but every idea and every example comes from you.

The rules we follow when writing for a client:

• No invented opinions. If the client didn’t say something, we don’t write it.
• Their voice, not ours. Words, expressions, sentence length: the post has to sound as if they wrote it, because their customers know them.
• Always approved. No post goes out without them having read it.
• Comments and private messages stay theirs. The person replying to a comment must be the person who signed the post. That’s where leads come from, and nobody wants to find out they were talking to an assistant.

Artificial intelligence can help too: transcribing the interview, tidying up notes, suggesting different openings for the same post. But the final text needs rewriting in your voice. Generated posts published as they are can be spotted, and a profile that sounds like everyone else builds nothing. We discuss this in our article on staying recognisable in the age of AI.

Videos filmed in half a day

For video, the most efficient method is to concentrate filming. In a well-organised half day, with ten questions prepared in advance, you can record answers for one or two months of videos. Then someone else edits them, adds subtitles and also prepares the Instagram version if needed. It’s the same method we use for our clients’ vertical videos: script first, concentrated filming, editing designed for people watching on their phones.

A boost from advertising

When a post performs well organically, the company can sponsor it with Thought Leader Ads: the company page asks permission, the author approves, and the post runs as an ad with the person’s name and photo. It’s a way to take the founder’s voice to a specific list of companies or roles. How to set up the campaigns, with targeting and costs, is explained in our guide to LinkedIn Ads for B2B.

What should you measure to know whether it’s working?

Measure conversations, not likes. For every post LinkedIn shows content analytics: impressions, people reached inside and outside your network, interactions, saves and sends, profile activity and data on who saw the post (role, industry, company). These are estimated figures, more useful for spotting the trend than for any single value.

What to look at	Why it matters	How often
Who reads you (roles, industries, companies)	Tells you whether you’re talking to the right people	Every month
Saves and sends	A post that’s saved or sent to a colleague was useful	Every week
Comments from people in your target audience	They count for more than total numbers	Every week
Profile visits and new followers	Tell you whether the post makes people want to know more	Every month
Private messages and enquiries	This is the result the company cares about	Every month, noted down by hand
Mentions during negotiations	“I read your post about…” said by a customer	Ask your salespeople

The last row is the most important, and no analytics record it. Ask your salespeople to note in the CRM when a new contact or a customer mentions one of your posts. After six months you’ll have a concrete idea of what the time spent is worth.

An example, made up for illustration: a founder posting twice a week for six months might have posts with 800-3,000 impressions, twenty or so new connections a month with people in the industry, and four or five private conversations that turn into two negotiations over a year. They aren’t numbers to show off in a report, but for an SME selling plant worth hundreds of thousands of euros, one extra negotiation repays a year’s worth of time.

Mistakes to avoid

Posting generic motivational content. Lines about resilience, courage and Mondays could be written by anyone. Your readers want to know what you think about your market, with examples only you can give.

Only promoting yourself. If every post is about a product, an award or a trade fair, the profile becomes a second company page. Keep self-promotion to one post in five, and even then explain the why, not just the what.

Starting strong and disappearing. Twenty posts in January and nothing until June leave a profile that looks abandoned. Choose a pace you can keep up even in your busiest months.

Copying fashionable formats. Lines broken after every word, lists of ten tips, forced closing questions to get comments. They work for a while and make everyone look the same.

Delegating the replies too. Posts can be written for you, but comments and private messages must be handled by the person who signs them.

Ignoring the company. Before talking about customers, numbers or projects, agree with management and sales on what can be said. Two minutes of checking avoids problems with customers and competitors.

A checklist to get started

• A recent photo and a cover image that says what the company does.
• A headline with what you do, for whom and with what speciality.
• An About section in four parts, in the first person.
• Three Featured items: a post, a page on the website, a useful document.
• Three topics chosen and written down in a note.
• A list of 15-20 people and pages to comment on.
• Two slots a week in your diary: one for writing, one for replying.
• A field in the CRM to record when a contact mentions a post.

Want help growing your LinkedIn profile?

We work with B2B companies that want to use LinkedIn seriously: we start with an interview with the person who’ll be putting their face to it, choose the topics, write the posts and film the videos, and every month we look together at who read them and which conversations they led to. The ideas stay yours; we turn them into content consistently. You can see how we work on our social media and content page.

You can book a call with Federico or write to us via the contact form.

Frequently asked questions

Is LinkedIn personal branding useful even if my company is small?

Yes, it actually matters more. In an SME the founder and managers are often the people customers already know, and the company page has few followers. A personal profile lets you make the most of a network built over years of work.

How many times a week should you post on LinkedIn?

As often as you can keep up for months. For people running a company, two posts a week and a few comments every day are a good starting point. Consistency counts more than the number.

Is it all right to have someone else write your posts?

Yes, if the ideas, experiences and opinions are yours and you reread and approve every post. What shouldn’t be delegated is replying to comments and private messages, because the people writing expect to be talking to you.

Does creator mode still exist?

No. LinkedIn removed the creator mode switch in 2024 and made the tools available to everyone. Today you can choose in the settings whether to show “Follow” or “Connect” as the main button on your profile.

Do you need LinkedIn Premium for personal branding?

No, you can do everything with a free account. Premium Business adds some useful features, such as the custom button on your profile and more data on who visits you, but it doesn’t replace content. It’s worth considering after a few months of consistent posting.

How long does it take to see results?

The first conversations often come within the first few months, but to know whether the work is bringing in leads and negotiations you need at least six months of regular posting. That’s why it pays to measure messages received and mentions of your posts during negotiations from the very start.