LinkedIn Content Strategy for Founders at Small Firms

I worked with the CEO of a small engineering firm, about twenty people. Great people, great company, and truly a forward-thinking business. He was an excellent guy who cared deeply about his company culture and supporting his team.

Among other things, The Brand Bullpen was brought in to help with content, SEO, and LinkedIn posting. He knew LinkedIn was a critical component to lead generation. In fact, their biggest client came in through the company's founder's LinkedIn post. After a few sessions of interviews and ghost-writing, it didn't click. He was focused on the specific wording, the tone, and what would resonate. At the end of the day, he made perfect the enemy of the good. The time and effort it took to get exactly what he wanted out of each post was too much, so he stopped, and his presence on LinkedIn went away.

That cost is hard to measure. It's an opportunity cost. You're not in front of your clients. You're not trying new content or new copy or new ideas. And you can't get back the visibility you missed from not posting.

Here's the biggest issue I see. Most founders at small firms don't have a LinkedIn content strategy at all. They know they need to be on LinkedIn, but they can't work out how it fits into their overall marketing and lead generation, and they don't know how to show up. While you need a strategy, you first need to show up, so the strategy has to be one a small team can actually keep up with.

A strategy starts with where you point people

Start with one decision. If you're a small firm, are you using your website to convert leads into sales conversations, or are you using LinkedIn? Where are you pointing all this traffic and presence? As a small firm, it is best to put resources and effort into one of them.

The second thing is understanding LinkedIn's job. It is very rare that someone becomes a client simply because they read your post. LinkedIn's role in your content strategy is to build trust and credibility. People build that by showing up every day, showing real results from other clients or experiences, showing case studies and showing people how they think. This world is changing. Agentic AI is going to be a large part of commerce and buying, so social media is going to be a huge part of how people find you and how trust gets built.

When you sit down and think about how you're going to show up, how you're capturing that traffic and what you want to do with it, the strategy starts to become clear.

Show up before you polish

If you're just starting, you don't need a plan. It doesn't need to look pretty and it doesn't need to be polished. You need to get on the platform and start building that posting muscle.

Throw things at the wall. See what sticks, what performs and what doesn't. Stop being afraid, and stop feeling like you're cringe. Do that for a month or two and you'll build the muscle for posting. You'll understand what makes a good post, you'll get into the repetitive nature of it and you'll build the process. Then you can start implementing a more specific strategy that will lead to better results.

A loose LinkedIn content strategy

In an ideal world, you'd have a detailed content calendar and a themes plan. That would be incredible, and the people who recommend one are right about that.

But it breaks down for small teams. A calendar with tight rules and guidelines falls apart because people are too busy to follow it. And what we've learned is that personal pages drive LinkedIn. Company content on company pages is important, but it isn't as important as personal profiles. It is a personal-driven platform. You can get content planning apps, but if you're not putting your heart into it, if you're not being authentic, people will know and it won't work.

So keep it relatively loose. Sure, promote company announcements, hirings, culture, conference attendance, and the speeches, podcasts or media appearances. Primarily, though, pick the three or five themes you're going to talk about and understand who you're talking to: your ideal customer profile, or ICP. Know what they want to hear about and what problems they encounter. That's what you talk about, consistently and repetitively. That's what gives you the best results.

What to post on LinkedIn

The best LinkedIn posts add value and teach lessons. Deeply insightful or interesting posts land, and so do technical ones. For instance, for financial firms, people are always curious about your point of view on the macro situation, rates, valuations, funding rounds, size. It may seem mundane and ordinary to you, but people want to hear your opinion. If you want to be a thought leader, you have to act like a thought leader and put your opinions out there. More importantly, you have to be willing to support them or argue for them in the public domain. Platforms have always prioritized engagement and conversations because it increases time on the platform.

That's worth doing even if your firm isn't well known. In the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 53% of B2B decision-makers said that when a company's thought leadership is strong, brand recognition matters less.

Share stories with your posts. Humans are story-driven, and if you give people an honest, authentic, human story, they'll respond to it. And then value. Everyone is trying to improve at everything they're doing, so an honest lesson or a how-to is one of the best things you can put on LinkedIn.

Three good posts a week

Founders should post on LinkedIn at least three times a week. Quantity is important, but quality is still king. I'd rather a founder or an executive post three quality posts a week than seven average ones. Posting more often gets you more impressions and more swings at the ball, if you will. But putting real time and effort into three good posts a week can create much more value.

If you're just starting, think about what your audience wants, who you're talking to and what your strengths are, and post three times a week. Once you've done that a few weeks in a row and you're in that rhythm, you can either raise the quality of those posts by putting more time, effort and resources into them, or post more if you feel you can maintain that rate.

Where to start this week

Start by understanding who you're trying to talk to. Are you trying to generate leads, amplify your personal brand or get the attention of someone important? Write down at least three personas, or ICPs. You can get as granular as age, gender, income, location, industry, title and role, which helps. LinkedIn is getting very crowded and will only get more crowded, so you need to be very narrow if you want to generate leads from those people.

If you're creating a strategy, it comes down to who you're talking to, what your ideal messages are and what your strengths are. Create content for those people, and show up.