LinkedIn or newsletter: where should a small B2B team start?

Rent the reach, own the relationship.

What does each one do?

LinkedIn is where people who do not know you can find you. A post travels through your connections and their reactions to people two and three steps away, and into the feeds of followers who never connected. That is reach you cannot get from an email list of forty. The newsletter is where people who already said yes keep hearing from you, on your schedule, in their inbox, with their reply one click away. One finds, the other keeps.

The two fail in opposite ways. A team that only posts builds an audience it cannot contact: LinkedIn decides who sees each post, and the follower list does not leave the platform. A team that only sends emails to a list of forty has a channel with nobody new arriving. So the question in the title has a sequencing answer, not an either-or answer.

Who owns the audience?

This is the deciding difference, and it is a matter of record rather than opinion.

The short name for the right-hand column is an owned audience. The LinkedIn newsletter sits in the left column, which surprises people: it has subscribers and sends email, but LinkedIn holds the list.

What does each one cost in time?

Less than people fear, if the two share material. A post is one idea in 700 to 1,500 characters; four a week is about an hour of drafting and an hour of replying to comments across the week. A newsletter issue every other week is one to two hours, and half of that is already written if the week's posts are the raw material. The reverse works too: an issue cut into four posts fills the following week. The method is in how to repurpose LinkedIn posts into a newsletter.

The hidden cost is on the LinkedIn side: a post with no comments reached nobody, so the hour of replying is not optional. The hidden cost on the email side is the list itself, which has to be built one signup at a time before the newsletter has anyone to go to. That is the four-week lag in the direct answer.

Which one produces conversations?

Both can, and the newsletter does it more reliably once the list exists. A post produces comments, which are public, short and often from people who will never buy. An email produces replies, which are private, longer and from people who already opted in. The benchmark pages disagree about what a good email open rate is (Mailchimp reports 35.63% across its users, Campaign Monitor 21.5% across all campaigns), and opens are soft anyway because Apple Mail loads the tracking image in the background; clicks and replies are the numbers to watch on both channels.

The campaign we ran with Chameleon Collective to fill a CTO dinner used both at once: three LinkedIn posts a week on the dinner's topic from the partner's account, and direct invitations that landed in that context. The second outreach wave replied at 6% against 1% for the first, after the target list changed; the posts did not change. Posts set the context; the direct message, like the email, started the conversation. The numbers are on the case study.

How do they feed each other?

Three handoffs, each one line long. Every how-to post ends with where the full version lives: the newsletter, link in the first comment. Every newsletter issue ends with one line asking the reader to forward it to a colleague, which is how a private channel grows. And a LinkedIn newsletter, if you run one, carries a line at the top and the bottom pointing to the email version and what it adds, because LinkedIn invites your followers to subscribe and then notifies them for every edition, which is reach, while the email list is the asset. The five routes from a follower to a subscriber are in how to turn LinkedIn followers into email subscribers.

What should a three-hour week look like?

This is the split we recommend for a founder or a one-person marketing team, after the first four weeks of LinkedIn-only.

When is one of them enough?

LinkedIn alone

For the first four weeks of a new account, or when the company has nothing to send yet: no offer, no event, no content beyond the posts. Posting alone also fits a founder whose buyers are all on LinkedIn and who closes in the DMs. The risk is the one above: the audience is rented, and a change in how LinkedIn distributes posts changes the business.

Newsletter alone

When the list already exists and is the right size, for example a few hundred customers and prospects who signed up at events or through sales, and the founder will not post. A newsletter can run for years on referrals and forwards. It grows slowly that way, and the people joining are mostly like the people already on it, which is fine if that is who you sell to.

For everyone else, start on LinkedIn, start the newsletter in week five, and move the hours toward the newsletter as the list grows. The cadence to begin with is in how often a B2B company should send a newsletter; the posting side is in why founders' LinkedIn posts beat company page posts. Both channels together are what we run under Engage.

Need help with this? See how Sawa handles newsletters and LinkedIn content, or book an intro call.