If you’re a B2B, there’s no question that LinkedIn can help you promote your business. That is after all where your ideal clients hang out – and in the right frame of mind! But how do you know whether you should be using a personal profile or a business page?

The short answer is that it is a personal choice, as both options have their advantages and disadvantages – but you’re not here for the short answer!

What’s the difference

Your business page is, quite obviously, designed to promote your business. It’s obvious who your employees are, what’s been going on in your business and whether or not you are looking for new staff.

Your personal profile is designed to promote your experience and your professional journey, it’s kind of an up-to-date and active CV to show your potential employer. Now, if you run a small business and a nice polished CV is the least of your concerns, turning your personal profile into a tool to promote your business might be the best next step.

Networking

The main advantage of a personal profile is that it is much easier to network. People will connect with your personal account if they can relate to you in any way -and that might just be that you live in the same country, you work in a similar industry, or you met that one time three years ago.

Like with any Social Media platform you need to be interacting with your ideal client’s posts, answering their questions when you can and getting them to recognise your name in their notification bar. When you use a personal profile, this is relatively easy for you to do – although it can take a lot of time!

With a business page, this is much harder. Your page can follow three hashtags and can only interact with posts that have included one of your chosen hashtags. You can also invite up to 100 people per month to follow your business page – this does mean you need to do some networking on your personal profile first.

Analytics

Every Social Media Strategy needs to take into account how well previous posts have performed. On a business page, you can get see analytics about your visitors, your followers, your updates, your competitors and your employees’ recommendations. On a personal profile, you can only see how many people have seen your post and how many have interacted with it.

The perfect balance

Ideally, you should be using both and using one to boost the other.

Use a personal profile to share the behind the scenes, to interact with people and to grow your audience. The goal of these posts would be to direct people to your business page.

Use a business page to teach people about your industry and inform people of business updates. The goal of these posts would be to direct people to your website.

Of course, using both is a lot of work – make sure you’re on the right track with a Social Media Audit! I can focus on both your personal profile and business page for £50 if you get in touch with me before the first of April (the usual price would be £65).