LinkedIn for Small Business: Marketing Best Practices

For small businesses, LinkedIn is a channel for founder-led brand building, relationship development, recruiting, and PR. And with more than 1.3 billion members across 200 countries and regions, it gives entrepreneurs access to the world’s largest professional network. 

Scout Brisson, strategic adviser to the beverage brand De Soi and its former CEO, found that publishing thought leadership posts on LinkedIn led to press, podcast appearances, and visibility with retail buyers. It also helped with hiring. “I was surprised by how immediately it was really impactful for the whole business,” Scout says on Shopify Masters. 

But the professional platform is underused. Fewer than half of small and medium-sized businesses say LinkedIn is part of their social media marketing mix, according to HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report. This article covers how entrepreneurs use LinkedIn for small business marketing and best practices for building a network that grows your business.

How do small businesses use LinkedIn?

Small business owners can use both a LinkedIn business page and the personal profiles of founders, leaders, and employees. A business page gives your company an official presence on the platform, while personal profiles let the people behind the business build relationships and engage directly with their target audience of professionals and other businesses. 

Creating a LinkedIn business page is free, and you can customize it with your company name, industry, size, company website URL, and images that showcase your product or team. You can use these pages to market your business in several ways. A LinkedIn marketing strategy might include:

• Sharing company updates, industry news, and social proof

• Building relationships and reaching out to potential clients

• Recruiting and employer branding

• Growing your community through engagement with a network of connections

Many entrepreneurs use LinkedIn to build their audience organically without spending money on LinkedIn ads. Arjun Sofat, cofounder of nutrition brand Free Soul, found LinkedIn to be a powerful marketing tool while bootstrapping the company without a budget for digital ads. On an episode of Shopify Masters, he says that LinkedIn and a few tight-knit WhatsApp groups helped to generate early organic traffic and build the brand’s email subscriber list.

Best practices for effective LinkedIn marketing

• Post as a person, not just a company
• Use keywords, hashtags, and @ tags strategically
• Repurpose owned content
• Seek out mentorship and industry support
• Use LinkedIn to find talent
• Use your connections to make introductions
• Converse more than you broadcast

An effective LinkedIn strategy means more than just maintaining your business page. Founders and leaders can use their personal LinkedIn profiles to build their credibility and establish relationships while growing their brands at the same time:

Post as a person, not just a company 

Personal profiles and company pages do different jobs. Posting as a person is one way to build credibility for your brand; it gives readers someone specific to relate to, which is harder to do from a faceless brand account. 

A 2026 study in SAGE Open analyzed LinkedIn posts and found that different kinds of posts get different responses. Personal and observational posts drew more comments and reactions than posts sharing business results or expertise, which got reposted more often. 

The same logic extends to your team. Give employees material worth sharing—a launch, a company milestone, a piece of research, or photos from an event—and ask them directly to post from their personal profiles. 

Use keywords, hashtags, and @ tags strategically

Content strategy on LinkedIn also involves helping the right people find what you post. Relevant keywords in the body of the post itself, @ tags (which link to another profile or company LinkedIn page), and hashtags (clickable keywords) all help categorize your content and surface it in search.

As of 2024, LinkedIn no longer pushes hashtagged posts into a topic feed. However, they still work as a search and categorization signal. To find which hashtags to use, look at the ones your peers are using in their posts. You can search for a hashtag in the LinkedIn search bar and see whether posts using that hashtag are getting engagement.

A 2025 study in Business and Professional Communication Quarterly measured the factors that influence member engagement. Posts using hashtags drew more reactions, and so did posts that mentioned other people or companies. Tagging had the biggest effect, and it also substantially increased comments from the audience the posts reached.

Repurpose owned content 

You don’t have to create unique marketing content for every platform. If you run a Shopify storefront, you can save time creating content by sharing blog posts, products, and collections directly to LinkedIn from your Shopify admin. LinkedIn is one of the supported platforms alongside Facebook, X, Reddit, and Pinterest. 

Often, content needs to be adapted for a LinkedIn audience. You might pull the single most interesting or surprising fact from an in-depth blog post or piece of thought leadership, share behind-the-scenes details from a product launch, or frame customer stories as a lesson learned for other business owners. 

Some content transfers well without adaptation, however. Share photos from events or milestones, data or research your business has produced, and press mentions.

Seek out mentorship and industry support

Leah Marcus and Yasaman Bakhtiar, cofounders of the pickle company Good Girl Snacks, advise early-stage entrepreneurs to use LinkedIn to build more connections with experienced mentors.

“One thing we always tell people is to cold outreach people in the industry through LinkedIn,” Leah says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “That’s exactly what we did before we even decided to launch the business. And we were connected to a bunch of people in the industry who told us that we should take the leap ... which is what gave us the confidence to do it.”

Leah recommends looking through mutual connections for a warm introduction. Yasaman adds that, when messaging people, get straight to the point in the first sentence and do enough research to find a real commonality—whether that’s a shared alma mater, interest, or work experience. 

Use LinkedIn to find talent

LinkedIn isn’t just a place to connect with clients and customers. It’s also one of the most popular tools for recruiting and hiring. About 8,200 job applications are submitted on LinkedIn every minute, and its tools allow you to filter by skill, previous experience, or location to narrow the results. When you connect with potential employees, you’re not only looking for new people to join your team; you’re also connecting with new people and expanding the reach of your business. 

When you search for candidates, filter by skills and not just job titles. Titles vary between companies, while the underlying skills you’re looking for stay more consistent. It’s also worth looking at what someone posts about, which can tell you about their current focus and provide insight into their recent work.

In addition to posting roles from your company page, you can recruit by publishing posts from your personal profile—for example, explaining what you’re looking for, what the team is like, and what types of projects this person will be involved in.

Use your connections to make introductions

Jen Yu, cofounder of skincare brand Jaxon Lane, says on Shopify Masters that she builds the brand’s retail presence through her personal profile. “What I would normally do is I would look up a retailer that I want to partner with, and I'll go on LinkedIn and see if we have any mutual connections,” she says. “That’s how we ended up in a couple of our retailers—finding somebody that was willing to give us the intro to that retailer.”

After identifying a potential partner, retailer, or buyer, search for a mutual connection and ask for an introduction. Jen weighs this against the alternative: “Cold emailing people is always an option, but it’s harder. You spend a lot more time to get fewer hits.”

Converse more than you broadcast

A 2025 study in the Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship interviewed small business entrepreneurs about how they use LinkedIn. Most started with the intention of promoting and selling, but over time, their focus shifted toward exchanging knowledge and building relationships. The researchers describe these networks as fostering reciprocal behavior: People kept contributing because they got something back from it.

To get the benefits of engagement, spend minimal time broadcasting and instead answer questions other people pose, comment on others’ posts, and participate in industry conversations. Although follower growth is an obvious metric to pursue on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram, LinkedIn works best when those in your network—big or small—regularly tap one another for work and expertise.