Most B2B businesses have a LinkedIn company page. Far fewer use it as anything more than a digital noticeboard. A logo, a cover image from three years ago, the odd post when someone wins an award or a new starter joins, and that’s about it.
That’s a shame, because if you sell to other businesses, LinkedIn is the one platform where your buyers are already sitting with their work hat on. They aren’t there to watch cat videos or check up on old school friends. They’re there to keep on top of their industry, and they’re far more open to hearing from a business like yours than they would be on Facebook or Instagram.
So why is it so often forgotten? Here’s how we see it, along with the features we find most businesses aren’t using.
Why LinkedIn gets overlooked
The honest answer is that LinkedIn rarely delivers the quick hit that other channels promise. A Google Ads campaign can get the phone ringing in a week. LinkedIn is slower. It works by keeping you in front of the right people, over and over, until the moment they need what you do.
For a lot of B2B businesses, that’s exactly how buying works anyway. Decisions take months, involve more than one person, and usually start long before anyone fills in a contact form. The business that has been turning up in a buyer’s feed with useful, human content is the one they think of first.
The other reason is time. LinkedIn done properly takes a bit of effort, and when you’re busy running a business, it’s the first thing to slip. That’s fair, but it’s also why the businesses that do stick at it tend to stand out.
The features most businesses don’t use
Your team’s personal profiles
This is the big one. Your company page is useful, but posts from real people almost always travel further than posts from a logo. Your directors, account managers and sales team will have far more first-degree connections between them than your page has followers.
You don’t need everyone posting every day. Even two or three people sharing a post a week, in their own words, makes a real difference. Think of the company page as the home base and your team as the people who actually start conversations.
It’s also worth a quick check that everyone has your business listed correctly as their current workplace. It sounds small, but it’s how people find their way from a personal post back to your page.
Company page invitations
Page admins get a monthly allowance of invitations they can send to their own connections, asking them to follow the company page. They don’t roll over, so if nobody uses them, they’re gone.
It’s one of the easiest ways to grow a following of people who already know you, and it takes about five minutes a month. Most businesses we speak to have never clicked the button.
LinkedIn newsletters
A LinkedIn newsletter lets you publish longer articles that subscribers are notified about, both in the app and by email. It’s a brilliant way to share genuine expertise without needing to build your own mailing list from scratch. We’ve written a full piece on the advantages of a LinkedIn newsletter if you’d like the detail.
Document and carousel posts
Upload a PDF and LinkedIn turns it into a swipeable post. It’s a great format for checklists, short guides, before and after examples or a quick summary of something you’ve learned. People tend to stop and click through them, and they’re easy to repurpose from content you already have, such as a blog post or a presentation.
LinkedIn Events
If you run webinars, open days, workshops or even a client drinks evening, setting it up as a LinkedIn Event gives people a simple way to register and lets attendees see who else is going. It also keeps the event in front of people in the run-up, rather than relying on a single post.
Showcase pages
Showcase pages sit underneath your main company page and let you give a particular service, sector or brand its own space. If you work across quite different audiences, say a manufacturing division and a consultancy arm, a showcase page stops one audience scrolling past content meant for the other.
They’re not right for everyone, and a small business with one clear offer probably doesn’t need one. But for businesses with distinct divisions, they’re underused.
Page analytics
LinkedIn tells you a surprising amount about who’s looking at your page and engaging with your posts: their industry, job function, seniority and company size. That’s gold for a B2B business. If your posts are mostly reaching other suppliers and not the people who buy from you, the analytics will show it, and you can change course.
Where LinkedIn turns into a lead generation tool
Organic posting builds familiarity. When you want leads, LinkedIn’s paid options are where it really earns its keep for B2B
Lead Gen Forms
These are forms that open inside LinkedIn and fill themselves in with the person’s profile details, such as their name, job title and company. Because nobody has to leave the app or type everything out, they tend to convert far better than sending people to a landing page. They work particularly well for things like guides, event registrations and consultation requests.
One word of warning. Make sure someone is ready to follow up quickly. A lead who downloaded your guide on Tuesday and hears nothing until the following month has probably forgotten who you are.
Thought Leader Ads
Thought Leader Ads let you put paid budget behind a post from an individual, such as your managing director, rather than the company page. Because it looks like a post from a person, not an advert, people are more inclined to read it. It’s a good way to get your best organic content in front of a wider, carefully targeted audience.
Targeting that other platforms can’t match
LinkedIn lets you target by job title, seniority, industry, company size and even specific company names. If you know the 50 businesses you’d most like to work with, you can put your message in front of the decision makers at those companies and nobody else. Clicks cost more than on most other platforms, so it’s about precision rather than volume.
Retargeting your website visitors
With the LinkedIn Insight Tag added to your website, you can show adverts on LinkedIn to people who have already visited your site. Someone who read your services page last week is a far warmer audience than a stranger, and this is often the most cost-effective place to start with LinkedIn advertising.
What good B2B content on LinkedIn looks like
Features only get you so far. What you post still matters most, and the businesses that do well tend to follow a few simple habits.
- Lead with something useful. A tip, a lesson learned, an answer to a question your clients keep asking. Sell less, help more.
- Show the people behind the business. Team photos, behind the scenes, a day on site. People engage with people, and that’s especially true on a platform full of polished corporate content.
- Have an opinion. If your industry has a common misconception, say so politely. The posts that get conversations going are rarely the safe ones.
- Be consistent. Two good posts a week, every week, beat a burst of ten followed by a month of silence.
Is LinkedIn worth it for your business?
If you sell to other businesses, it almost certainly is. It won’t replace your website, your SEO or your Google Ads, but it does a job none of them can: keeping you visible to the right decision makers between the moments they’re actively searching.
The businesses getting the most from it aren’t necessarily the biggest or the ones with the largest budgets. They’re the ones who’ve stopped treating it as an afterthought.
If you’d like a hand turning your LinkedIn into something that brings in leads rather than just sitting there, the social media marketing team here at Blue Bee would be happy to take a look and tell you honestly where we think the quick wins are.
