A Social Success: What UK Businesses Can Learn From Companies Thriving on LinkedIn

Writer Alyssa Jaffer dives into the commercial opportunity LinkedIn offers brands in 2025. Read on for insights and tips from experts at LinkedIn, IBM, and ClickUp.
If you’re looking for an easy and effective way to connect with your customers, investors, and new prospects, LinkedIn is the platform for opportunity in 2025. British chief executives like GymShark’s Ben Francis, Barclays’ VS Venkatakrishnan, and Diageo’s Debra Crew are jumping on the trend of posting LinkedIn videos of themselves to feel more relatable and accessible, build their personal brands, and most importantly, draw more attention to their businesses from new target audiences.
Companies like IBM and ClickUp are making a splash on LinkedIn, using the social media platform to generate and nurture leads, build awareness of their brand’s products, solutions, and employer value proposition, as well as cultivate a community through engaging posts.
We spoke with social media experts to learn their LinkedIn lessons and find out how they’re thriving on the platform — and how you can too.

Building your brand presence on LinkedIn
In today’s market, the buying journey has become longer, broader, and increasingly complex, with more touchpoints and influences impacting a prospect’s purchasing decisions than ever before. And most of that influence and exposure happens online. With more than 1 billion users across 230 countries, LinkedIn is the number one platform➚ for B2B lead generation. Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions and have twice the buying power of the average web user.
“LinkedIn is no longer just a platform for job updates and work anniversaries – it has evolved significantly, with rising engagement rates and increased time spent on the platform,” said Jonathon Palmer, LinkedIn’s head of content solutions for EMEA and Latin America. “Content sharing has grown by 41% over the past year alone,” he said.
The first and most basic step to unlock business value from LinkedIn is to set up your company page and post quality content regularly.
Approximately 69 million companies and organisations have a LinkedIn page and users interacted with LinkedIn pages more than 2 billion times per month in 2024. Plus, compared to company pages that post monthly, pages that post weekly have 5.6x more followers and their following grows 7x faster.
“Your company page is where people learn who you are, what you stand for and why they should consider doing business with you,” said Palmer. “Business leaders and their teams should also invest time in crafting professional profiles to strengthen their personal brands.”
How IBM uses LinkedIn to connect with audiences and meet business goals
IBM has grown its LinkedIn audience to an impressive 18 million followers, through a diversified content strategy built on authentic content and audience connection.
“Our content is a mix of culture, product and education with a focus on delivering helpful, interesting information to our audiences and always asking ourselves: ‘What’s in it for them?’” said Kirsten Echeverry, director of social media and influence at IBM.
“We love the newsfeed, as it’s a great way for us to connect with our key audiences as well as current and prospective employees. We also use paid products to help us reach audiences in new ways including targeted InMails, LinkedIn Live sessions, Live Streaming key events and the newsletter feature,” Echeverry explained.
“We publish a bi-weekly newsletter called AI in Action to educate our audiences and employees on new AI concepts and products. It’s not solely focused on IBM but is more inclusive to help educate our followers on the ever-evolving AI space,” she said.
Consistent and quality content is key to IBM’s LinkedIn strategy. And delivering this content to the right audiences is the secret to its success.
Echeverry said: “It takes time to cultivate a true community on LinkedIn so patience is key. LinkedIn is the only social media platform built around business with the demographic data of where people work, went to school, industry they work in, etc. The targeting is very different from other social platforms so for a B2B company, it can be a really powerful tool.”
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ClickUp’s customer community-building strategy on LinkedIn
ClickUp has grown its LinkedIn page into an impactful business-driving channel through data-backed strategy, thought leadership, and viral content to a community of 160,000 followers, with an above-average engagement rate of 7-9%.
“LinkedIn is ClickUp’s most influential platform for B2B marketing,” said Chris Cunningham, head of social marketing at ClickUp. “Our LinkedIn strategy focuses on building relationships with professionals, sharing high-value content and showcasing our brand story authentically by combining humor, storytelling and product-driven narratives to engage audiences and build trust across platforms,” he said.
Being early to test and experiment with different content types and intentional audience targeting has been a winning strategy for ClickUp, across paid and organic LinkedIn pathways.
“Engagement metrics such as impressions and interactions have grown exponentially because of our tailored approach to audience needs. Video is crushing it for us. We post mainly videos and are moving up to posting two per day. LinkedIn has become a large driver for our SMB/enterprise customers via LinkedIn Lives and thought leadership ads – we’re testing out the new boost feature soon,” Cunningham said.
And most importantly, two-way content is key to building community. “True community on LinkedIn comes from creating conversations, not just campaigns. Listen to your audience, engage meaningfully and collaborate with thought leaders,” advised Cunningham.
The do’s and don’ts of LinkedIn for business growth
Palmer, Echeverry, and Cunningham shared their pointers and pitfalls for business leaders who want to drive growth on LinkedIn.
Do:
- Tell stories and make episodic content: Share stories about your team, customers and or company vision. Create content that people can come back for and look forward to more episodes.
- Invest in high-quality creative content: Attention spans are short and content is crowded, so to captivate your customers, create quality content with visuals, video, and audio — it can quadruple your profit.
- Always be authentic. Stay true to your brand’s values and don’t jump on social trends to try and go viral. People can see through inauthentic content on social media and are quick to call brands out for it. Some trends that don’t make sense for your brand to participate in and that’s okay — don’t force it.
Don’t:
- Overengineer your posting strategy. It’s not about having x number of posts a day or week, it’s about sharing meaningful content that drives engagement. The more engagement your content gets, the more people will see it. Knowing that the algorithm prioritises engaging content is key in getting the most out of social media.
- Neglect testing and optimisation. Crafting the right content strategy on LinkedIn takes time, and while there are general best practices, no single approach works for every brand. Experiment with different strategies, measure your campaigns, and refine your results.
- Focus only on your brand. Avoid turning every post into a sales pitch and build relationships first. Share industry insights and collaborative content for broader appeal and comment on other page posts to start conversations and get more visibility for your page.
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