LinkedIn for Indian B2B: Post as a Person

Most Indian B2B businesses treat LinkedIn the way they treat a trade directory listing. They set up a company page, fill in the description, post the Diwali greeting, the new-office photo, the Republic Day graphic, and then wonder why nobody has ever enquired through it.

The page is not the problem exactly. The problem is that almost nobody on LinkedIn has a relationship with a company page. They have relationships with people. A procurement manager at a manufacturing firm in Faridabad does not follow "XYZ Engineering Solutions". He is connected to Rakesh, who sold him bearings four years ago and now posts things worth reading. When Rakesh posts, it shows up in the feed of the several hundred people who know him. When XYZ Engineering Solutions posts, it shows up in the feed of the eighty people who clicked follow, most of whom are employees and their cousins.

That is the whole argument of this piece. If you want conversations out of LinkedIn — actual replies, actual calls — the account doing the posting has to be a human being with a name and a face, and ideally it has to be you or your senior salesperson.

Why the page stays quiet

Think about how a feed has to work. There is far more content than anyone can read, so the platform has to choose. Whatever the exact ranking mechanics are — and LinkedIn does not publish them in detail, so anyone who tells you they know precisely is guessing — the observable behaviour is consistent: posts spread through people who react to them. Someone comments, and the post becomes visible to a slice of that person's network.

A personal profile starts that chain with an advantage. Your connections are real relationships. Ex-colleagues, clients, suppliers, people you met at a trade fair in Pragati Maidan. They are more likely to react because they know you. Each reaction opens a door into a network that overlaps with yours — same industry, same city, same kind of business.

A company page starts cold. It has followers, not connections, and follower lists on small-business pages are usually thin and passive. There is no personal reason for anyone to engage.

This is not an argument for deleting the page. Keep it. When someone hears your name and looks you up, the page is where they check that you are a real business — office address, employee count, a few recent posts so it does not look abandoned. That is a credibility function, not a distribution function. Treat it as your shop board, not your salesman.

The one useful thing a page does

Pages can run LinkedIn ads; personal profiles cannot. If you ever want to run a sponsored campaign targeting, say, HR heads in companies of 200 to 1,000 people in Bengaluru, you need the page. So the page exists for advertising and for credibility. Organic conversation comes from profiles.

What to actually write about

Here is where most people freeze. They accept the argument, open the post box, and then write something that sounds like a press release because that is the only register they know for "business writing".

The reliable source of material is not your company. It is the conversations you already have every week with customers and prospects. You answer the same eight or ten questions constantly. Those answers are your content.

Some categories that consistently produce replies:

• The question a buyer asks just before committing. "How do I know the coating won't peel in coastal humidity?" "What happens if your developer leaves mid-project?" Write the honest answer, including the part where the answer is "it depends, and here is what it depends on". People in the buying process recognise their own worry and reply.
• A decision you made and why. You chose to stop taking orders below a certain volume. You moved from three suppliers to one. You turned down a project. Explain the reasoning. Other owners are facing the same call.
• A correction of something widely believed in your trade. If your industry is full of people buying the wrong thing, say so and explain the mechanism. Be specific enough to be useful and you will get arguments in the comments — arguments are conversations.
• What a job actually costs and why. Not your price list. The structure: what drives cost up, what drives it down, where people get surprised. B2B buyers are usually being asked to justify a number internally and they have nothing to work with.
• A post-mortem on something that went wrong. Handled without drama, this outperforms almost everything. "We under-quoted a job by forty per cent because we assumed site access was clear. Here is what we now ask before quoting."

What does not produce conversations, however satisfying it is to post: festival graphics, "proud to announce" posts about certifications nobody outside your industry understands, stock photographs of handshakes, motivational quotes attributed to people who never said them, and photographs of your team cutting a cake. These get polite likes from employees and go nowhere.

Format matters more than you would like

A few mechanical things that are worth knowing. LinkedIn truncates a post after a few lines with a "see more" link, so the first two lines decide whether anyone reads the rest — put the sharpest part there, not a windup. Links in the body of a post appear to get less reach than plain text posts; whether that is deliberate suppression or just user behaviour is not publicly documented, but the common workaround is to put the link in the first comment. Write in short paragraphs, because most of your readers are on a phone.

And when someone comments, reply properly. A reply that adds something keeps the post alive and, more importantly, it is the actual start of the conversation you wanted. Many enquiries begin as a comment thread that moves to direct messages three days later.

What not to buy

This category has more junk sold in it than almost any other, partly because results are hard to check.

Do not buy connections or followers. Both exist for sale in India, cheaply. A profile with 15,000 connections who have no idea who you are is worse than one with 800 who do, because your posts now go to a feed of people with zero reason to engage, and weak early engagement is not helpful for spread.

Be very careful with automation tools that send connection requests and messages on your behalf. These are against LinkedIn's terms and accounts do get restricted. You will also be the person whose name appears on a message that opens "Hi FirstName, I came across your profile and was impressed" and lands in the inbox of someone you might actually have wanted to meet properly.

Engagement pods — groups where twenty people agree to like each other's posts within ten minutes — produce a number on screen and nothing else. The likes come from people in unrelated industries, so nothing reaches a buyer.

Be sceptical of any agency offering to run your personal profile as a ghostwriting service without ever talking to you. This is the one an agency like ours could happily sell, and it fails in a predictable way. If nobody extracts what is actually in your head — the specific job that went wrong, the reason you fired a supplier — the posts come out generic, and generic is exactly what people scroll past. If you do use help, the arrangement that works is a recorded conversation of thirty or forty minutes a month, transcribed and edited into posts you approve. You supply the thinking. Someone else supplies the time and the editing.

Do not buy bulk InMail blasts. Paying to message strangers who have never heard of you is cold calling with worse response rates and a permanent record attached to your name.

A realistic working pattern

One or two posts a week from one named person, sustained for six months, beats a burst of daily posting for three weeks followed by silence. Consistency matters because B2B buying cycles are long. The person who reads your post today may not need you for nine months, and the whole point is that you are still visible when they do.

A workable rhythm for a busy owner:

1. Keep a note on your phone. Every time you answer a question for a customer, write the question down. One line. That is it.
2. Once a week, pick one and write four hundred words answering it honestly.
3. Spend fifteen minutes commenting substantively on other people's posts in your industry. Not "Great post sir" — an actual addition or disagreement. This is how people who have never heard of you first see your name.
4. Reply to every comment on your own posts within a day.
5. When a conversation warms up, move it to a call. LinkedIn is where the conversation starts, not where it closes.

The honest caveat: none of this is fast. There is no week in which LinkedIn suddenly produces a pipeline. What it produces is a slow accumulation of people in your industry who know what you think and therefore know what you do. For businesses selling considered, high-value things to other businesses, that accumulation is worth more than almost any paid channel — but you have to be willing to be visible as yourself, not behind a logo.

Also worth being plain about: LinkedIn is not the right channel for every Indian B2B business. If you sell to small kirana-scale buyers, to local contractors, or to sectors where decision-makers simply are not on the platform, your time is better spent elsewhere. Check whether the people who sign your invoices actually have active profiles before you commit six months to this.

Where to start this week

Open your own profile, not the page. Rewrite the headline so it says what you do for whom rather than "Managing Director at XYZ Pvt Ltd". Rewrite the About section as if explaining your business to someone at a wedding. Then write one post answering the question you were asked most often last month.

Do that four times and you will know from the replies whether this channel is worth more of your time. If it is, and you would like help turning your own knowledge into a steady stream of posts — or you want the company page set up properly for advertising alongside it — have a look at what we do in social media marketing, or just tell us what you sell and who buys it and we will tell you honestly whether LinkedIn is where your effort belongs.

Questions we get asked