LinkedIn profile or company page: which one should you grow?

If you're a small business or you're the business, grow the profile. Your face, your name. It isn't close.

Why the profile wins

People follow people. They'll read a post from a person they've come to know and skip the same words coming from a logo, because a logo has never said anything surprising or admitted a mistake.

A company page also has to sound like a company, which means it ends up sounding like every other company. Your profile can sound like you, and sounding like you is the only real advantage you've got.

What a company page is actually for

It's a shopfront, not a stage. People check it after they've decided you might be interesting, to see that you're real and that the business exists. So it needs to look alive and current, and that's about it.

Put your offer on it, keep the banner and the description sharp, and post there occasionally so it doesn't look abandoned. Don't build your week around it.

The one case for both

If you've got a team and several people post, then the page becomes worth something, because it's the place all of that collects. Even then, the individual people will still out-perform it, and the smart move is to have the team post from their own profiles and let the page gather it up.

The mistake that costs the most

Splitting your effort down the middle. Two half-fed accounts grow slower than one well-fed one, and you'll feel twice as behind. Pick the profile, feed it properly, and treat the page as maintenance.

How to make the profile earn its keep

Your headline should say what you do for whom, in the words they'd use. Your banner should say the same thing in a picture. Your featured section should point at one thing you want people to take, not five.

Then post. The profile is the shop window and the posts are why anyone walks past it in the first place.