This morning I spoke to a potential client who had just published a great article on a recent, urgent market development in their space. And they'd posted it as a LinkedIn article, under the company byline.

Showing your own ideas, insights into market conditions and proposing solutions is a huge driver of trust. You show you know what you're talking about; that you're keeping up with your environment, and you can gently mention this amazing solution to the very problem you're discussing. That you built.

On the call, I said this should have gone out under the founder's own byline – and they agreed. But it's not always a cut-and-dry choice. It depends on the company lifecycle and where the role – and voice – of a founder matters most.

Tl;dr

  • —Your founder is your easiest marketing channel early on. Post your most in-depth, interesting content on their own LinkedIn profile.
  • —As you grow, use your founder to direct people to your own, on-site content, adding credibility to named internal authors.
  • —As an ongoing task, your founder should aim to become a leading voice in your industry: topical posts, comments and replies where it matters, the odd deep dive when it's worth it.

The early-stage megaphone

When you start out, most businesses lean hard into direct sales channels, with marketing being some combination of word of mouth, events and CEO charisma. Pipeline velocity hasn't been established. You're just happy to get leads at all – you build strong relationships with them because each one really matters.

When it comes to LinkedIn, it's easier to build a brand for a person than a business. Businesses are abstract; people may not know whether to trust you with their custom. But people get to know other people pretty fast. There's no internal compliance review for getting to know another person.

That's why a CEO makes such a good megaphone. They don't need to sell your product, explain all the functionality, or handle objections. They just need to have ideas and be interesting. And they can have an audience.

With a simple target of getting a few leads in via strong relationships, your founder can essentially be your early-stage marketing programme. Putting ideas out there, making connections and directing people through a simple sales funnel. It's free, it makes customers feel special and it starts building your brand, albeit indirectly.

Why companies don't do it

I've worked with loads of startups over the years and founders are a startlingly heterogeneous bunch. Some – especially those coming from a sales background – feel very at home in the spotlight. Others, often but with several notable exceptions from Product, just want to build something amazing and let others take the credit.

For either, posting on LinkedIn may be far from their list of priorities. Writing an article and putting it out there is one thing – responding to comments and following up messages is an open-ended time sink.

A common scenario in my career has been sitting down with a CEO – who knows infinitely more about their domain than me – and trying to get their ideas into a format that can be delivered smoothly, for an article, whitepaper intro or an event speech. It's not because they lack the intelligence to communicate; quite the contrary. More common is that they have so many ideas and are thinking so far ahead that they outstrip their audience. My role in this scenario is to play the constructive idiot – asking questions until I've extracted the full story in a way that can be told cohesively and succinctly.

The end result is that the best ideas in the business get put out under the company byline on LinkedIn, in order to keep the CEO insulated from the commitment of managing any success – precisely at a time when building the founder brand could do the most good.

How to build business and founder brands for mutual benefit

At some point, the business needs to be bigger than the founder. Your product is working, your customer base is growing and your pipeline is coming into focus. The founder may well still be the figurehead, but if you're gaining momentum then they're probably focused on raising a Series B to keep the train moving. You need your business to do the heavy lifting.

So does that mean it's time to stop using the LinkedIn channel? Honestly, probably not – or definitely not exclusively. By the time you're standardising your growth pattern, your website should be the primary domain for your content.

  • It builds domain authority in your area
  • It grows your SEO and GEO footprint
  • It puts readers next to higher-intent content opportunities
  • It gives the opportunity for scalable lead capture

Your best ideas at this point should go to making your whole business look good – not just your founder. That said, please stop posting on your blog under 'Company Name'. You've got smart people in your business who know things – show them off. Even if you have a ghostwriter producing your content, make sure the credit is going towards building tangible trust links with people. Just as with early-stage founder content, people connect with people. Trust in your business can be augmented by the sum of the trust-equity built up between your customers and your specific experts.

Your founder at this point should still be posting on LinkedIn – you've built up that goodwill, so why not use it – but they should also be lending some of that shine to your website. They should be talking up every bit of content you publish on your site, co-signing your internal experts and making the case to their hard-won audience.

The long game

Over time, your business will likely become more specialised. So will your CEO – less firefighting, more big-picture thinking and fundraising. But they should keep posting. Not as much, inevitably, but they need to stay in the conversation.

Because just like in the beginning, they're the megaphone pointing people to your business. In the growth stage there's a give and take in credibility building, but in the long term, they're your company's reflection. They're the public avatar of your value – even your valuation – and they have a chance to show the best parts of what you do, through what they do.

That means staying in the conversation, commenting where it matters, and perhaps the odd deep-dive article when your company hits a funding round, makes a strategic pivot or signs a major partnership that shakes up the status quo.

This is where having a dedicated CEO ghostwriter can come in handy – especially if you've been working with them long-term to craft your CEO's specific LinkedIn presence. It's a way to stay visible without chewing up their time, and maximise the combined power of their brand-within-your-brand.