Most founders know they should be on LinkedIn. It’s where customers, partners and investors spend time, and to not be present is a major oversight. What most are lacking – or feel they are lacking – is the time to actually do it.
Startup founders are among the most time-pressured people in business, juggling endless day-to-day demands while steering the company’s overall direction. Posting something insightful or thought-provoking tends to find itself at the end of a very long list.
So a question comes up time and again: can a founder outsource their social media, and LinkedIn in particular? Surely social media is personal, and needs to be authentic to really land?
Outsource vs. authentic
There’s a perception that a founder outsourcing their LinkedIn is inherently inauthentic. In honesty, this is a false binary – it assumes the two are opposites, and they aren’t.
No founder writes every email unaided, builds every deck personally, drafts their own keynote from scratch, or writes the company’s press releases and nobody calls that inauthentic.
It’s much more a question of how to divide the labour. A founder can hand over drafting, scheduling, formatting, research and repurposing. What they cannot delegate is the opinion, the insight, the big-picture ideas, the stories, the customer anecdotes. That has to come from the founder.
Capturing insight and voice
At the start of any engagement with a social media agency or freelancer, it’s worth holding an initial content session to capture the founder’s topline thinking and get a proper handle on their tone of voice.
Use that time to create content at the outset, populate the calendar and get the first round of posts approved.
There also need to be mechanisms to capture the founder’s thoughts as they happen. A five-minute voice note after a client meeting, an immediate reaction to industry news, a WhatsApp after a moment of inspiration on the commute can all be turned by the agency into something publishable. The thought and the opinion are entirely the founder’s; it’s only the finessing and posting that aren’t.
This is also where I’d sound a note of caution on AI.
Generic AI coy flattens a distinctive founder’s voice, and an informed network can smell it a mile off. Use it to transcribe the voice note or tidy a draft, but the moment AI starts supplying the opinion rather than polishing the founder’s, is the moment when your LinkedIn strategy has gone wrong.
Never disconnect
That doesn’t mean a founder can fire off an opinion and consider the job done. There’s nothing wrong with getting help, but it’s a serious failure if someone asks a founder about a post and they have no idea what it was about. It’s an equally bad look if the voice is at odds with how they actually speak, or if the post reads as overly corporate and devoid of opinion.
Followers can detect a post with zero input from the supposed author. So a founder must cast an eye over everything published in their name. The one tension to manage is speed: if you want to react to breaking news, the founder has to be reachable quickly, because a post that’s lost its moment waiting for approval isn’t worth as much.
There’s more to LinkedIn than posting
Here’s the part founders most often underestimate. As any good social media consultant will tell you, posting is half the job at best. The real value lies in the relationships formed in the replies, the DMs and the comment threads – that’s where customers, partners and investors actually clock that there’s a real person there.
It’s also the half you mostly can’t outsource. An agency can monitor, triage and flag the exchanges worth your time, even tee up a reply for sign-off. But a founder who has even their replies ghost-written has missed the point entirely, because the connections and value are made in those threads, in the founder’s own words.
So…should they?
It’s straightforward enough for a founder to outsource their LinkedIn. But should they? Yes, provided they treat it as the investment it is. A consistent presence beats a neglected profile every time, but a profile that’s busy yet lifeless can be worse than silence.
The rule is simple: outsource the production, never the personality or the opinion. Get that division of labour right, and nobody will stop to wonder whether the founder wrote it themselves. They’ll just see a business leader with something worth saying.
About the author
With 20 years + PR experience, Paul Allen is MD of Rise PR, the tech pr agency that specialises in helping startups and scaleups tell their story.
Most founders know they should be on LinkedIn. It’s where customers, partners and investors spend time, and to not be present is a major oversight. What most are lacking – or feel they are lacking – is the time to actually do it.
Startup founders are among the most time-pressured people in business, juggling endless day-to-day demands while steering the company’s overall direction. Posting something insightful or thought-provoking tends to find itself at the end of a very long list.
So a question comes up time and again: can a founder outsource their social media, and LinkedIn in particular? Surely social media is personal, and needs to be authentic to really land?
