Look at who follows your company page on LinkedIn. Most small B2B companies find the same crowd: current employees, a few former ones, some customers who clicked follow years ago, a vendor or two, and a recruiter. A few hundred people, most of whom already know exactly what you do.
Now look at who your estimator, your account manager or your founder is connected to. Former colleagues who now run purchasing at companies you would love to work with. Customers from their last two jobs. People they met at a trade show in 2019 and never spoke to again, who still see their posts.
That second group is the audience you are trying to buy with LinkedIn ads. A good part of it is already sitting in your team's connection lists, and almost nobody is talking to it.
This is what people mean by employee advocacy, and the phrase makes it sound like a corporate program with software and a launch email. For a small business it is much simpler than that: two or three people who post about their work, a little structure so it survives a busy month, and a plan for turning the posts that land into ads.
Your Company Page Is Talking to a Room That Already Knows You
A company page has two problems on LinkedIn, and neither is your fault.
The first is who follows it. People follow a company page when they work there, buy from it, or are thinking about applying. Strangers who might become customers almost never do. So even a page that posts well is mostly talking to people who are already on your side.
The second is how the feed treats it. LinkedIn is a network of people, and members come to it to hear from people. A post from a logo reads like an announcement, and people scroll past announcements. HubSpot's team, looking at what actually grows a small business on LinkedIn, put it plainly: start with the person, not the page, because a personal profile will outperform a company page on reach and engagement when you are starting out.
None of this means the page is useless. Michelle J. Raymond, who has built her whole practice around LinkedIn company pages, makes a fair point that the page is the one voice that never quits. Employees come and go; the page stays, keeps your message consistent, and is what a buyer checks when they want to know whether you are real. Keep it running. Just stop expecting it to do the job of reaching new buyers on its own.
LinkedIn Retired Its Employee Advocacy Tab. Nothing Replaced It.
If you have read older advice on this, it probably told you to use the My Company tab. Don't go looking for it.
LinkedIn used to give companies with at least ten employees on the platform a built-in place to run this: a My Company tab where staff could see colleagues' posts, and an Employee Advocacy tab where a page admin could suggest content for employees to share. LinkedIn's help center now says the My Company tab, the Employee Advocacy tab and the curator admin role were "gradually discontinued beginning in November 2024." Nothing inside LinkedIn replaced them. LinkedIn's own suggestion is to contact an outside marketing partner.
Two smaller tools survived, and both are worth using. A page admin can reshare employees' posts that mention the company, straight from the page's Feed tab. And a page admin can use Notify employees on an important company post, which sends a notification to people who list your company in their work experience. LinkedIn allows that once per day, it does not work on targeted posts, and employees can opt out, so save it for the posts that matter.
The paid employee advocacy platforms are real and some are good, but they are priced for companies with hundreds of employees. Raymond's advice for anyone who cannot justify that is the right one: go back to basics. A team chat channel, a short email, a shared spreadsheet. It is more manual. For two or three people, it is also all you need.
Three Employees Who Want to Post Is a Program. Twenty Who Were Told To Is a Wish.
The instinct is to announce this to the whole company and ask everyone to post. Don't. Most people will happily click like or reshare a company post. Far fewer will write something under their own name, and the ones who do it reluctantly will stop by the third week.
Pick two or three people, and pick them for who they are connected to and what they know, not their job title.
The founder or owner. Usually the best-connected person in the company and the one whose name buyers already associate with the business. If only one person posts, it should be this one.
The person customers actually talk to. The estimator who walks every job site. The account manager who fields the panicked calls. The lead technician who knows why things break. These people have the best material in the company, because they see the problems your buyers have every single week.
A salesperson, if you have one. Their network is full of the exact people you are trying to reach, and a post that shows they know their stuff makes the next cold call warmer.
Then ask, privately, whether they want to do it. A willing estimator who posts twice a month will do more for you than five people who were told to.
They Should Post About Their Work, Not Your Announcements
The quickest way to kill this is to hand people company news to share. "We are excited to announce our new office" from an employee's profile reads exactly like it does from the page, only now it is costing them a little credibility.
What works is the work itself. The raw material is already in their week:
- A problem they solved. An IT services technician on why a 40-person office's backups had not run in five months, and the one setting that caused it.
- A question customers keep asking. A commercial contractor's estimator on why two bids for the same tenant buildout can be $80,000 apart.
- An honest opinion. An accounting firm partner on the tax planning advice they think gets oversold to small companies.
- What a normal day actually looks like. A photo from a job site, a whiteboard from a client workshop, with two sentences about what was going on.
Notice that none of these mention what the company sells. They show someone who is good at the job, and that is the whole argument. We wrote about why being useful about the buyer's job beats talking about your product in The Best B2B Content Is About Their Job, Not Your Product., and everything in that piece applies here. The difference with employees is that you do not have to invent the material. You only have to get it out of their heads.
One practical rule: anything that names a client, shows a client's numbers or identifies a client's site needs the client's permission first. Write that down in a one-page guide along with anything else that is off limits, so nobody has to guess.
An Employee Posting Program Survives on Twenty Minutes a Week
Every program like this starts with enthusiasm and dies in the first busy month. The fix is to make it small enough that a busy month does not kill it.
Here is a rhythm that holds up for a team of two or three:
Monday, five minutes. Someone, usually whoever handles marketing or the owner, drops one prompt into the team chat. "What is a question a customer asked you last week?" "What did you fix that should not have been broken?" People reply with a sentence or two.
One shared list. Those replies go into a running document of post ideas, so nobody ever faces a blank page. The list fills up faster than anyone can post.
Draft together, post as themselves. The person with the idea talks for three minutes; whoever is helping turns it into a draft; the person edits it into their own words and posts it. It must sound like them. A post that sounds like marketing wrote it does more harm than no post.
Ten minutes of comments. Posting is half the job. Commenting on posts from customers, prospects and people in your industry is how a profile gets seen by people who do not follow it yet. A real comment with an actual point, not "great post."
A tracking sheet. One row per post: who, what, date, and anything that came of it. It takes a minute and it is how you will know what to put money behind later.
Two posts a month per person is a perfectly good target. A year of that from three people is about 70 posts written by people your buyers can actually picture, which is more useful material than most small companies produce in five years of company page updates.
The Posts That Work Become Your Best Ads
This is where the program stops being a nice-to-have and starts paying for your LinkedIn advertising.
LinkedIn lets you put ad budget behind an employee's own post through a format called Thought Leader Ads. The post runs in the feed under their name and photo, marked as promoted, aimed at exactly the companies and roles you choose. We covered why that format outperforms company page ads, and how to set it up, in Your Best LinkedIn Ad Doesn't Come From Your Company Page. What that article assumes is that someone at your company is already posting things worth promoting. This program is how you get there.
A few rules from LinkedIn's own help pages decide what can be promoted, so build the habit around them from the start:
- The post must be public and the author's profile must show their full name.
- Not every post type qualifies. Text, single image, video, and LinkedIn articles and newsletters can be sponsored. Polls, documents, multi-image posts and celebrations cannot, and neither can a repost. You promote the original.
- The employee has to approve it. You request permission in Campaign Manager and they approve or decline. To save everyone the back and forth, an employee can turn on auto-approval for your company's ad account, so every request is approved automatically.
- They should disclose who they work for. LinkedIn asks employees to show the relationship, for example by having their role at your company in their headline.
- The objective is limited. Brand awareness or engagement, plus video views for video posts. There is no button, so the link goes in the post text.
Here is how the two halves fit together. Your people post. Most posts do fine, a few do noticeably better: more comments from the right kind of person, more profile views, a direct message or two from a buyer. Those are the ones you promote, because the testing already happened for free. The people who engage with the promoted post become a retargeting audience you can follow up with, which is how a program built on two people's posts turns into a pipeline. And it fits naturally with advertising to the buyers who are not ready yet, which we argued for in At Any Given Moment, 95% of Your Buyers Aren't Ready. Advertise to Them Anyway.
A Hundred Likes From Coworkers Is Not One Buyer
Likes are a weak signal here. A post can collect fifty reactions from friends and former colleagues and reach nobody you could sell to. What you want to know is whether the right people noticed.
Watch for these, and put them in the tracking sheet:
- Profile views from people at companies you would like to work with. Each person can see who viewed their profile, and a run of views from one target company after a post is a real signal.
- Messages and connection requests from buyers. These are the clearest sign a post did its job.
- Sales conversations that mention a post. Ask new prospects how they heard of you. "I saw Marco's post about the backup thing" is the best evidence this works.
- What happens when you promote. Once a proven post is running as an ad, LinkedIn shows you which companies engaged, which we wrote about in LinkedIn Tells You Exactly Who Clicked. Almost Nobody Looks.
You will see vendors quote big return figures for programs like this. The best-known case study, from the IT company Fujitsu, reported a 360 percent return on its advocacy software. Look at how that was calculated: the clicks employees earned were priced at what LinkedIn would have charged for an ad click, and that total was compared with what the software cost. That measures how much free reach the employees generated, which is worth knowing. It does not measure customers. Hold your own program to the stricter test: did it start conversations with people who could buy from you?
When Your Best-Connected Employee Quits, Their Network Leaves Too
There is one real risk, and it is better to plan for it than discover it.
The connections belong to the person, not the company. When your best-connected estimator takes a job elsewhere, their network goes with them, and so do their posts. If you were promoting one of their posts as an ad, that ad stops too, because an author can revoke their approval at any time and LinkedIn cancels any live ads using the post.
Three habits keep that from hurting:
- Spread it across more than one person. A program that depends on one voice is one resignation away from zero.
- Keep the company page running. This is the other half of Raymond's point: the page is the constant. Reshare your people's best posts from it, so the work lives somewhere that does not leave.
- Keep your own records. The tracking sheet, the idea list and the list of companies that engaged are yours, whoever writes the next post.
None of this is a reason not to start. It is a reason to start with two people instead of one.
Your Team's Connections Already Hold the Buyers You Pay LinkedIn to Reach
Most small B2B companies spend real money on LinkedIn trying to reach people who are already sitting in their own team's connection lists. Getting two or three of those people to post about their work, twice a month, in their own words, is the cheapest reach you will ever have, and the posts that land become better ads than anything your company page could run.
If you want help setting up the posting rhythm and turning the best posts into ads that reach the right companies, that is part of what we do for B2B clients every week. And if you would rather run it yourself, start with one Monday prompt in your team chat and see what comes back.
