LinkedIn Strategy for Founders: Personal vs Business Profile (And What Actually Works)

If LinkedIn has ever felt like a “should” instead of a strategic tool, this conversation will shift how you approach it entirely.

This isn’t a how-to tutorial—it’s a decision-making framework.

In this episode, Ruthie breaks down the real role LinkedIn should play in your marketing ecosystem and how to decide where to focus your time: your personal profile or your business page. You’ll learn what the current data actually says about reach and engagement, why personal profiles are outperforming company pages, and how to use both platforms intentionally without doubling your workload.

More importantly, this episode challenges the bigger issue most founders are facing: creating content without a clear job description for their platforms.

If you’re a founder navigating limited time, shifting algorithms, and the pressure to “show up everywhere,” this episode will help you simplify your strategy and focus on what actually moves the needle.

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:01.24)

Welcome back to another episode of the Consistency Corner. I'm Ruthie, founder and marketing strategist of the Consistency Corner, where our goal is to help you lighten the mental load of marketing so that your growth doesn't require more hustle, more noise, or more energy. If you're a founder and you have ever thought, I should probably be doing more on LinkedIn, this episode is for you, because today we're gonna talk about LinkedIn. But more than that, we're gonna talk about how

how to decide what role a platform plays in your business before you spend another minute creating content for it or beating yourself up for not creating content for it. Listen, this is not a LinkedIn how-to. This is a decision-making conversation because the worst thing you can do is show up on a platform without knowing what you're asking it to do for your business. So let's get into it.

LinkedIn has kind of a weird energy for a lot of founders. It feels corporate, it feels like homework, it feels performative. It feels like something you should be doing, but you're not really sure if it's working or why or how. And there's this question that comes with it. Do I lean into my personal profile or my business page? Do I need to post on both? Do I need to be here at all? How much time am I supposed to spend here? The real issue is not

LinkedIn in and of itself. It's that most founders haven't given social media a clear job. So if we don't know what social media's job is, trying to figure out what that individual platform's job is, is even harder. And we've been talking about this for a few weeks now, giving your content and your channels a job description. LinkedIn is no different. So today I'm going to help you break down what each account type is built for.

what the data says about how they perform and how to decide which one makes sense for your brand right now. Let's start with the personal profile because this is where the conversation gets interesting. LinkedIn's algorithm heavily favors personal profiles over company pages right now. And this isn't just anecdotal. The data is pretty clear. Personal profiles are generating five to eight times more engagement than company pages.

Ruthie Sterrett (02:16.92)

Company page posts are reaching just one and a half to 5 % of their followers. So even if your company page has a thousand followers, your posts at best are gonna reach 50 people. Meanwhile, personal profiles actually make up about 65 % of the content that shows up in people's feeds. The balance is company profiles and also sponsored content ads.

The organic reach on company pages has dropped somewhere between 60 and 66 % since 2024 alone. So these are active changes that the platform is intentionally making. They're telling us something. People follow people. And LinkedIn is built for personal connection, personal perspective, personal voice. If your brand is founder led, if your audience is connecting with you as the face of the business,

The personal profile is where the relationship really lives. And your personal profile is best for thought leadership and connection, DM relationships, and real conversation. For mom founders specifically, your personal profile lets you show up as a whole person, not just a brand. Those are the types of conversations that resonate with an audience because they want to see you as a whole person, not just...

a billboard for your business. The person scrolling and seeing your content is not just a buyer of your services or your business's products. She's also a mom. She could be a friend. She could be an advocate. She's a founder or employee, a fellow human who wants to connect with people she trusts. Now, here's something I want you to think about if you're considering leaning into your personal profile on LinkedIn.

The content, the type of content matters. If every single post on your personal profile ties back to your company, you're not being a thought leader. You're being a corporate mouthpiece with a headshot. And both the audience and the algorithm can tell. The content that really earns the follow and the engagement on your personal profile is the more personal stuff. And I don't mean you have to like spill your life story here or trauma dump.

Ruthie Sterrett (04:39.682)

But share your unique perspective on industry trends, conference takeaways, insights from articles you read, things you're learning as a founder, leadership reflections, career milestones, even celebrating the people that you appreciate. That's the type of content that earns the click, the ones that drive people to learn more about your business because you started the conversation like a human, not like a commercial.

The brand adjacent stuff people will see, but client insights that are shared through your own lens is a much better way of having a conversation on LinkedIn versus a glowing testimonial or a five star review or even a case study. Behind the scenes of how you think about your niche or your industry and your take on something happening in the market is what makes you human.

And in the age of AI-driven content, your humanness matters more than ever. A good rule of thumb is roughly 50-50. Half of your content is personal and professional. It's about you as a human and a leader. And the other half can be more brand adjacent, about your work, your expertise, your point of view in the industry, and even business and product updates. But the personal content earns the follow.

It earns the connection. It earns the conversation. The brand content then can earn a click. So they have to be paired together. Now, let's talk a little bit about the business page because I don't want you to hear everything I just said and think your business page doesn't matter. It does, but it has a different job. Organic reach on a business page is lower. We know that. That's just the reality. But the business page carries the institutional voice.

It's where your product content, your case studies, your service descriptions, and your conversion-oriented content live. It's where your prospects are gonna go to evaluate when they're further down the funnel. Think about it this way. Someone discovers you through your personal profile, through a post you made or a comment you left, a conversation you were having in the comments, and they're intrigued. So what do they do? They...

Ruthie Sterrett (06:58.158)

click on your profile, they click on your company, they want to learn more about what you do and what your business does. So your business page does need to be there. It needs to be active. It needs to clearly communicate what you do and who you do it for, the company you do it for. Even if the company is just you. That's a legitimacy play and it's a validation step. The business page is also better for retargeting and ads.

team visibility, hiring as you grow, and brand credibility at a larger scale. If your brand is growing beyond you, if you have a team, if you're building something bigger than your personal presence, the business page becomes more and more important over time. So you might be asking yourself, like, OK, but who has time to create content for both the business page and the personal page? Like, it all just feels like so much.

And you know, my answer for everything in marketing is like, well, it depends. So what does it depend on? Because I know that your time and energy is not unlimited. I know that you have to make decisions about where to prioritize your time, your energy, and your content. If you're a founder-led brand and you're trying to decide where to start and lean in, your personal profile should get the most energy. The business page can support from the background.

Now, if the answer is like, yes, the business is me and it's led, but there's more than just me, we probably want to put a little bit more content onto the business profile. Like maybe it gets two posts a month where your personal profile is getting two posts a week. We want to keep it active so that it looks like you're in business, but you don't have to hang out there, right?

Now, let's say that your business is you and a team. That's even more reason for the business profile to be posting because you and team members can share posts from the business page onto your personal profiles, which will amplify the reach of the business posts. And speaking of team members sharing content,

Ruthie Sterrett (09:23.36)

and who is representing the brand and how they were representing the brand. That's a whole number of their conversation that we could have like an entirely separate episode on in terms of how your team represents your brand on social media and how to guide, how to influence that. And honestly, for some founders who are building a company brand and they don't see it as a founder led brand, it may be important to identify internal ambassadors who can't.

be the face of the brand that shares that content on their personal profile, that builds their personal brand along with promoting the company brand on LinkedIn. But like I said, involving your team in social media is a whole other conversation. We'll do an episode on that soon. The other thing you want to think about is understanding if LinkedIn is a discovery channel for your audience or a nurture channel. So again, what is LinkedIn's job?

If people, if you want people to find you on LinkedIn for the first time and that's what you want to be a top of funnel tool, that changes what you post and how you show up and how often. If you will want LinkedIn to serve more of a nurture role and people are finding you from elsewhere and they're just checking you out on LinkedIn as like a validation step, then that's a different strategy. You need different.

types of content and probably you can live with a lower volume of content. But you have to ask yourself, do I have the capacity to maintain two distinct voices? And so if I'm putting content on the personal profile and the business profile, do I have the capacity to do both and do both well? Do I understand the job of both profiles? And if I know that I don't have the capacity to do both, let's pick one and let's do it really well.

and manage your expectations about what the other one is going to do for you based upon what you now know about personal profile versus business profile. So here's another part that I think a lot of people skip, and it's a really important piece of the LinkedIn equation, so I wanna make sure that we spend some time on this. Posting is only half the equation on LinkedIn. For every piece of organic you put on your personal profile,

Ruthie Sterrett (11:48.31)

you should be spending 10 to 15 minutes engaging with other people's content. And I don't mean just hitting the like button or typing congratulations. I mean having thoughtful comments, real conversation in the comments, responding to people who comment on your posts, asking questions, sharing perspectives on other people's content. And here's why this matters so much. When you comment on someone else's post, your name,

your headline and your profile photo show up in front of their entire engaged audience. You're not just talking to that person, you're having a public conversation and you're being seen by more people who are reading that post and then scroll through the comments. And the data really backs this up. Comments are weighted about eight times more than likes by the LinkedIn algorithm. Engaging before and after you

post can improve your reach by up to 20%. And the profiles with active engagement strategies are three times, get three times more profile views than profiles that only post their own content. We like to call that post and ghost around here and we don't promote that. I like to think of it this way. Your posts are seeds. Your comments on other people's posts are water. Both are required.

But watering someone else's garden is often what will then bring them to your garden. And here's a detail a lot of people miss. You I said that your profile photo, your name, and your headline shows up in those comments. Your headline matters more than you think, not just on your profile page, but in the context of engagement. When you comment on someone's post, people see your headline right there next to your name.

and they're deciding in a split second whether or not to click through to your profile or keep scrolling. When someone comments on their posts or on your posts, their engagement can now show up in their followers feeds and those people are now seeing your headline too. Like for example, if I post something on my friend's, let's call her Jessica, my friend Jessica's post and I say like, I really appreciate you sharing your perspective here. What do you think about blah, blah?

Ruthie Sterrett (14:09.602)

the people who follow Jessica are gonna see my comment and see who I am and what I do. If somebody comments on my post, the people who follow them are now gonna see my post. it creates more of a community conversation, which is one of the reasons, to be honest, that followers don't matter nearly as much on LinkedIn as they once did. But that headline, again,

It needs to make someone want to click to find out more about who you are. Owner, CEO, that's not interesting. We need something to create curiosity. We need something that shows what makes you different, what makes you unique. know, mine, actually, now that I'm recording this, I actually don't know what mine says right now, but what it should say is marketing strategist for mom founders. Right when I'm done recording, I'm gonna go change.

so that by the time you're listening, it will say that. Because I don't remember what it says anymore. It's been a minute since I've audited my own LinkedIn profile. But the headline is a small detail that really does make a big difference. And LinkedIn is also measuring something called a depth score. So in terms of your content, it's not just about how many likes or comments your posts get, but it's also how long people spend reading your content.

They call it dwell time. And also whether they save it, whether they share it privately, or whether the comments are substantive, substantive? I don't know how to say that word. Or substantial, let's just say substantial. Or just surface level reactions. The platform is rewarding depth and real conversation. Which means that 10 to 15 minutes of thoughtful engagement isn't just a nice to have. It's how the platform works now. Now.

I'm not saying you should be like AI and create walls of text just for a wall of text. Like we're not being verbose just to be verbose. But a little bit longer form content goes a long way on this platform. So you can be a little bit more detailed. You can share a little bit more depth in the story. You can add a little bit more nuance and precision to that caption to go deeper because the more people read,

Ruthie Sterrett (16:32.096)

the more the platform is going to reward you for that dwell time. So like I said, today was not supposed to be an all encompassing LinkedIn tutorial. I wanted you to know some high level information about the profile, the platform, how the different profiles work and what's kind of being weighted today in order for it to do its job in your business. But platform decisions are not just about where you should be.

They are about what job you need that platform to do. And once you know the job, you can decide how much of your time and energy it deserves from both you pouring into it or you outsourcing and having somebody else manage that platform because you believe that the job it can do is so important in your overall marketing strategy and in your customer's journey. If LinkedIn is a platform that you want to invest in, start with your personal pro.

show up as a human, not just as a brand, and split your content between personal and brand adjacent. And spend as much time as you can engaging with other people's content. And honestly, spend more time engaging than you do creating content. That's part of that like create more than you consume. Well here, I don't want you to just consume, I want you to connect. So connect more than you create, how about that? And if you're sitting here thinking,

Okay, but how do I figure out which platform deserves my time in the first place? Because there's LinkedIn and Instagram and TikTok and threads and should I be on Pinterest and my God, should I start a blog or a podcast? And does anybody even care? Does any of this even matter? Well, that is what we're talking about in our quarterly marketing strategy log coming up on April 16th. It's a 90 minute working session. It's not just a webinar.

but we are going to walk through the success equation, which is a formula that I use to figure out the right balance of intensity and consistency for your content on different platforms. We're going to calculate your actual content capacity, map out your customer journey, and then choose what channels based on all of that make the most sense for your brand. Not based on what somebody on the internet told you to do.

Ruthie Sterrett (18:54.166)

not based on what AI says is a good idea or is a best practice, but based on your real life and your business. If you're listening to this after April 16th, the replay is available. Go to the consistencycorner.com slash lab for registration or to get the replay and the link is in the show notes. Thank you so much for being here, friend. I'm Cher and you on, I hope you know that and I'll see you next time.