For organic reach, a personal profile usually beats a company page on LinkedIn, and the company page still has jobs that only it can do.
The "usually" matters. Most of the numbers you will see quoted for this comparison, such as "five to ten times more reach", come from agencies or software firms with something to sell, and few say how they were measured. This guide looks at what the evidence does show, where it is weak, and how to split your time.
It is part of our wider guide to social media marketing in the UK.
What the evidence says about personal profiles and company pages
The clearest published comparison we found is from Refine Labs, a US B2B marketing agency. It tracked three employee profiles and the company's own LinkedIn page for ten months and published the third-quarter 2025 figures, adjusted per 1,000 followers.
The company page, which has about 43,000 followers, earned 67 engagements per 1,000 followers. The three employee profiles earned 867, 262 and 230.
xychart-beta
title "Engagements per 1,000 followers, Q3 2025 (Refine Labs, one company page and three employee profiles)"
x-axis ["Company page", "Profile 1", "Profile 2", "Profile 3"]
y-axis "Engagements per 1,000 followers" 0 --> 900
bar [67, 867, 262, 230]
Even the weakest personal profile earned about three and a half times the engagement of the page. The strongest earned nearly 13 times as much.
Why you should be careful with those numbers
Four accounts is a very small sample. One profile drives most of the gap, and Refine Labs says the pattern holds without it but does not show those figures. The firm also sells marketing and advocacy services, and the post ends with a sales pitch.
The pattern is plausible, since people engage with people more than with logos. But it is one firm's data, not a measure of what will happen to yours. A firm with a well-known brand and a weak personal following could see the opposite.
Whito, a UK agency, says a founder's post "will typically reach five to ten times more people than the same post from a company page". It cites no source or sample. We would treat that as an opinion from an experienced practitioner.
For a wider benchmark, Socialinsider's 2026 study of 1.3 million posts from 16,645 business pages found an average of 9,759 impressions per post and a 5.20% engagement rate. That is what company pages in general achieve, so you can compare your own page against it.
What a company page is for
A company page does four things a personal profile cannot. It holds your official description, logo and website link. People check it to confirm you are a real business before they reply. You post jobs from it. And most LinkedIn advertising runs from it.
That last point matters if you plan to spend money. LinkedIn also offers thought leader ads, which promote an individual's post. Check the current options in Campaign Manager before you decide. Our paid media service sets these up for B2B firms.
A page also survives staff leaving. Posts that live only on one person's profile go with them, along with the followers who came for that person. Keep copies of your best material on the page and on your website.
What a founder profile is for
A founder's profile is where reach and trust come from. People read posts from named individuals with a face, a history and a point of view. They reply to them, and they often reply as themselves.
That is where conversations start. A reply, a connection request or a direct message from a founder's posting is a warm lead in a way that a follower of a page rarely is.
Edelman and LinkedIn's 2024 report adds a useful nuance. Of the decision-makers they surveyed, 62% said high-quality thought leadership comes from a prominent or high-quality expert, not necessarily the CEO. Ragan's summary of the report has the detail. So the face of your content does not have to be the founder. It has to be someone who knows the subject.
Who should be the face of a small firm's LinkedIn
Pick the person who talks to customers most, and who is willing to post and reply every week. In a small law firm that is often a partner who handles clients directly. In a consultancy it is usually the person who runs the discovery calls.
Two people posting well is better than one posting daily. It also reduces the key-person risk, which is the problem of having all your reach tied to a single account.
Do not hand the profile to a ghost writer who never speaks to customers. We explain why in why most agency social content is invisible.
What happens if the founder will not post
Plenty of founders will not post, and forcing it produces stiff, rare posts that do more harm than good. There are three workable alternatives.
The first is to interview them. A 20-minute call every fortnight, recorded with their agreement and turned into posts in their own words, gives a ghost writer real material. We cover the method in content repurposing done properly.
The second is to find someone else in the firm who talks to customers and enjoys explaining things. The Edelman finding above says expertise matters more than rank.
The third is to accept that the company page will carry the load and set lower expectations. Socialinsider's benchmark figures give you a yardstick: if your page averages well below 5% engagement over a few months, the content is the problem, not the format.
How to make company page posts work harder
Company pages do better with specific, useful material than with announcements. A document post that walks through a process earns more than a photo of a team lunch. Socialinsider's 2026 benchmark found native documents averaged 7.00% engagement against 5.20% for pages overall, which is why we cover how to make a LinkedIn document post in 20 minutes.
Tag the people who feature in a post, but only when they will reply. A post where the named person comments within the hour looks alive. One that sits unanswered looks abandoned.
Ask staff to reshare the page's best post with a sentence of their own. A reshare with a comment from a named person reaches that person's network, which is the part the page cannot reach alone.
A realistic week for a small firm
Take a ten-person professional services firm with one partner willing to post. A workable week is four posts from the partner's profile, one post from the company page, and ten minutes a day on comments.
The partner's four posts come from real customer questions, a number, a mistake and an opinion. The company page post is the week's best piece of reference material: a guide, a checklist or a case study with the client's permission.
On Friday, the partner reads who commented, who viewed their profile and who sent a message. Anyone in the target market gets a short, human reply. That list is the pipeline, and it is far smaller and more valuable than the follower count.
For accountants and consultancies, where the sales cycle is long, that list matters more than any single post's reach.
How to split your effort
Most small B2B firms should put about 80% of their LinkedIn time into one or two personal profiles and the rest into keeping the company page accurate and active. Our own recommendation is a rough split, not a measured one, so adjust it as you see results.
flowchart TD
A[Do you sell to other businesses?] -->|Yes| B[Does one named person talk to customers?]
A -->|No| F[Start with local or consumer channels]
B -->|Yes| C[Put that person's profile first]
B -->|No| D[Pick someone who will, or write as the company]
C --> E[Keep the company page accurate and post there weekly]
D --> E
On the page, post what is useful to a visitor who checks you out after a conversation: your latest case study, a hiring announcement, a link to a guide. Do not expect the page to carry the reach.
What to do with the company page
Make it complete, current and linked. Add a clear one-line description, your logo, your website and your location. Then ask your team to list the company as their employer and to share the odd post.
LinkedIn's own recruiting guidance suggests asking staff to link to the page from their profile and email signatures, and to add a follow button on your website. If your page has few followers, what to do with a company page that has 300 followers goes through the steps.
How to measure where the leads come from
Ask every new enquiry how they found you, and record the answer in your CRM. Ask a second question too: whether they have followed you or connected with you on LinkedIn, and when.
A lead who saw the founder's posts for two months before getting in touch will often say they "just came across you". The second question catches that. For the full method, see our 90-day LinkedIn plan, and for the replies that start the conversations, the daily comment routine.
Next steps
If you want help working out who in your firm should be posting, what they should say and how to tie it to enquiries, get in touch. We will give you a straight view on whether LinkedIn is worth the effort for your business.
