How it is ordered. Each agency gets a "best for" label and agencies are grouped by that need. By the way, this is our list, and we've put ourselves first.
Criteria. What the engagement actually covers (ghostwriting, executive team, employee advocacy, company page or full presence), what gets measured, whether pricing is published, and verifiable credentials such as named clients and published results.
Sources. Each agency's own website (services, pricing and case study pages), its LinkedIn company page and public client reviews. Where an agency does not publish something, the table says "not published"; that means we could not find it, not that it does not exist.
Kiin is a LinkedIn-led B2B paid media agency. Its entry uses the same format and has a tradeoff like everyone else. Nobody paid to be included.
Last checked: 3 November 2026. Spot something out of date? Email [email protected] and we will fix it.
The shortlist by need
- A presence programme where the organic and the paid are one plan: Hey Sid, Kiin, Shake Content, Understory
- Founder and executive ghostwriting: Concurate, CSuite Content, Jennavi, Linkedist, Windmill Growth
- Company page, executive and employee social across the business: Giraffe Social Media, Sculpt, Vulse
- Thought leader ads set up at a fixed price: DowSocial
"LinkedIn management" covers five scopes, priced very differently: single executive ghostwriting, an executive team programme across several leaders, an employee advocacy programme, company page management, and full presence with paid distribution of the posts that earn it. Ask early what happens with comments: some agencies write posts only, some draft replies for approval, some comment as the executive under delegated access, and some comment on other people's posts on your behalf. The Kiin Labs Thought Leader Ads Benchmarks 2026 found that which person posts explains most of the difference in engagement, so choosing the authors matters as much as the writing.
Comparison table
Facts only, no scores. Each row comes from the agency's own site or public profile.
| Agency | HQ / markets | Channels | Published pricing or minimum | Typical client | Standout proof |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kiin | London; UK, Europe, US | LinkedIn, Google, Meta, Reddit | $2,500 to $5,500/mo; about $5,000/mo ad spend | Sales-led B2B SaaS | Storysnap $3M+ influenced pipeline; Lumi AI CPL $455 to $176 |
| Concurate | India; serves US | SaaS content marketing; founder LinkedIn ghostwriting | Not published | B2B SaaS founders | Under two hours a month of client review |
| CSuite Content | US | Executive ghostwriting: articles, speeches, LinkedIn | Not published | CEOs and senior leaders | Not published |
| DowSocial | UK | LinkedIn; thought leader ads | £995 training; £1,299 set-up; £2,750 Kickstart | UK B2B, any size | Trained Google, Meta, Vodafone teams |
| Giraffe Social Media | Portsmouth, UK | Social management, employee advocacy, paid social, influencer | Social retainers from about £2,000/mo + VAT | UK and global brands | Hemsley Fraser 590,000+ organic video views |
| Hey Sid | Stockholm | LinkedIn ads, outreach, content platform | Not published | Mid-sized Nordic B2B | Risk Ident 2.5x shorter sales cycle |
| Jennavi | Not published | Founder ghostwriting and positioning | $100 audit to $1,000/mo full management | Startup founders and CEOs | 873% impressions case |
| Linkedist | Europe | LinkedIn personal branding, content, ads | Not published | Founders and executives | Detra Solar, CloudVisor, WhiteBridge.ai |
| Sculpt | Iowa City, IA | Organic and paid B2B social, influencer, video | Not published | Mid-market and enterprise B2B | KnowBe4, Monotype, Loom |
| Shake Content | London (Southwark) | LinkedIn content, video, webinars, podcasts, paid | Not published | UK founders and CEOs | $700K+ pipeline case |
| Understory | US | LinkedIn content, paid media, GTM engineering | Flat retainer, not published; six-month minimum | Seed to IPO B2B | Clients include Clay, Zapier, Expensify |
| Vulse | UK | Employee advocacy software | Platform pricing on its site | Teams that write in-house | LinkedIn platform since 2019 |
| Windmill Growth | US | Founder ghostwriting, commenting, profile work | Not published | Seed to Series B founders | Platter $479K revenue traced to LinkedIn |
The agencies, by what they are best for
Best for a presence programme where the organic and the paid are one plan
Companies treating LinkedIn as a primary channel, who want the posts, the distribution and the follow-up decided together.
Kiin
Best for a LinkedIn presence where the organic and the paid are the same programme
Kiin picks the two or three people worth backing rather than writing for everyone who volunteers, builds content pillars with them through founder content, then puts paid distribution behind the posts that earn it and feeds the engagement to outbound. Reporting is on landing page clicks and influenced pipeline by account in your CRM.
Named results: Storysnap, $3M+ influenced pipeline and $1.28M closed won; Lumi AI, blended CPL from $455 to $176. All results: case studies. Service page: how Kiin runs LinkedIn Ads.
Tradeoff: we are not a content studio. If you need five posts a week for six executives, the ghostwriting group does volume better and cheaper.
Hey Sid
Best for person-level LinkedIn targeting for mid-sized Nordic B2B
Hey Sid targets named people on the buying committee rather than accounts in aggregate. Published cases: Risk Ident (2.5x shorter sales cycle), Mercuri (85% lower ad spend) and REAC (+40% visibility).
Tradeoff: Founded 2024 with a platform model; ask what is software, what is people, and who owns the ad account.
Shake Content
Best for a London full-service LinkedIn programme: content, video, webinars, podcasts and ads
Shake runs the whole LinkedIn programme rather than the posts. Published cases: 1.1M+ impressions and a 380% engagement lift; $700K+ pipeline; $2M+ funds raised; a 30% platform sign-up lift.
Tradeoff: Full-service means full-service pricing; a founder who wants ten posts a month will be paying for the rest.
Understory
Best for paid media, GTM engineering and LinkedIn content run by one team
The "allbound" model puts a paid strategist, a GTM engineer and a content writer on one dataset and one target list, so the ads warm the accounts the outbound then works.
Tradeoff: Six-month minimum for most engagements (four for smaller companies) and no published fee; it suits clients who want outbound and media as well as content.
Best for founder and executive ghostwriting
A founder or a few executives who want their own LinkedIn written and run for them, measured on audience and inbound.
Concurate
Best for SaaS founder ghostwriting from a content marketing team, with little of your time
Ghostwriting as one line of a SaaS content marketing agency, which suits a founder who also wants the blog and AI-search content written by people who know the product.
Tradeoff: A content marketing agency first; the LinkedIn work is not the whole company.
CSuite Content
Best for executive ghostwriting beyond LinkedIn: articles, speeches and newsletters
For the executive whose content need is bigger than LinkedIn: a bylined article for a trade publication, a keynote, an all-hands memo. LinkedIn posts are a by-product rather than the product.
Tradeoff: Not a LinkedIn specialist; no distribution, engagement or paid.
Jennavi
Best for founder ghostwriting on published tiers from $100 to $1,000
Positioning-led (the profile before the posts), with a framework and tools you can try before paying. The fit is a founder testing whether ghostwriting is worth it before committing more elsewhere.
Tradeoff: A young, solo-led shop; capacity and voice range are the questions to ask.
Linkedist
Best for personal branding and executive content in Europe
Profile and personal-brand programmes for founders and executives, content creation, workshops and audits, with ads alongside. Published results are follower and impression growth (Detra Solar, CloudVisor, WhiteBridge.ai) rather than pipeline.
Tradeoff: Measured on followers and impressions; if you need pipeline attribution, pair it with an ads-led agency.
Windmill Growth
Best for done-for-you founder LinkedIn brands with named revenue outcomes
Published cases lead with revenue rather than impressions: Ben Sharf (Platter) $479K of revenue traced to LinkedIn plus a $250K angel round via inbound; David Johnston (DoorSpot) 1.6M impressions in twelve months; Aaron Spivak (Founders Club) 31K followers. The commenting on your ICP's posts is done for you.
Tradeoff: Organic only; no paid amplification, so the audience is whoever the algorithm shows it to.
Best for company page, executive and employee social across the business
Larger B2B teams that want the company page, leaders and staff posting as one programme, or the software to run it themselves.
Giraffe Social Media
Best for a UK B2B social programme across more than just LinkedIn
Named clients include OneFamily, Brother, Hemsley Fraser, SAP Taulia, L&C Mortgages, Sebamed and SE Controls, and the published result is 590,000+ organic video views on a Hemsley Fraser campaign. The positioning is turning your people and culture into content.
Tradeoff: A multi-channel social agency, so if LinkedIn is most of your B2B market you pay for breadth you will not use, and the published proof is reach rather than pipeline.
Sculpt
Best for organic and paid B2B social run together
Josh Krakauer's agency has done "100% B2B social" since 2012: company page content, community management, executive and employee programmes, B2B influencer campaigns and paid social, with video in-house. Named clients: KnowBe4, Monotype, Remote, Loom, Blend and Netscout.
Tradeoff: Breadth: paid LinkedIn is one of five paid platforms, so expect social-team depth rather than Campaign Manager depth.
Vulse
Best for employee advocacy software with tone-of-voice matching, for teams that write in-house
The software alternative to an agency: executives and employees writing and scheduling in their own voice with analytics and a leaderboard. It suits a company that has the ideas in-house and lacks the operating system.
Tradeoff: No writer; someone still has to think and type, or pair it with an agency.
Best for thought leader ads set up at a fixed price
Companies that want executive posts promoted as ads, built properly once and then run in-house.
DowSocial
Best for getting thought leader ads live at a fixed price, or training your team to run them
DowSocial publishes fixed prices for getting thought leader ads live and offers to teach your team instead of running the account.
Tradeoff: A small specialist: the managed retainer is on request, no client results are published, and it promotes posts rather than writing them.
Why the company page loses to the profile
Every LinkedIn presence decision starts here, and it is the one thing in this space that has been measured properly. Running the same objective, in the same account, in the same window, a post from a person outperforms a post from the company page:
| Paired comparison, same accounts | Cost per landing page click | Landing page CTR | Engagement rate | Accounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal profile vs company page, engagement objective | -22% | +38% | +58% | 106 |
| Personal profile vs company page, brand awareness objective | -47% | +123% | — | 32 |
| Personal profile vs company page, all objectives | -3%, not significant | — | +162% | 205 |
| Personal profile vs company page on a traffic objective | +59% | 0%, not significant | — | 119 |
- Like for like on the engagement objective, a person’s post delivers landing page clicks 22% cheaper and a 38% better click through rate than the same company posting the same way. On brand awareness the gap widens to 47% cheaper and more than double the click rate.
- Across all objectives the engagement rate advantage is 162% and it wins in 87% of accounts, with cost per engagement 51% lower and dwell time 38% higher. This is the most consistent finding in the dataset.
- The exception matters: against a company page running a straight traffic objective, personal posts cost 59% more per click. If all you want is cheap clicks to a page, the company page on a traffic campaign is still the cheaper instrument. Personal profiles win on attention, trust and mid-funnel work, not on raw traffic price.
Source: Kiin Labs, LinkedIn Thought Leader Ads Benchmarks 2026 — 464 advertiser accounts, 2,563 campaigns and $8.4M of thought leader ad spend in the twelve months to 7 September 2026; the author spread is measured on 47 authors. Medians across advertiser accounts, never pooled totals. LinkedIn Audience Network excluded. Paired comparisons are within the same account in the same window.
Who posts beats what they write
This is the finding that should change how you buy this service, and it is uncomfortable for an industry that sells writing.
| What we tested | Result |
|---|---|
| Top decile of authors, engagement rate | 10.55% |
| Bottom decile of authors, engagement rate | 1.22% |
| Spread between them | 8.6 times |
| Share of engagement variance explained by which author posted | 67% across accounts, 20% within one company |
| Author consistency, first half of the year to second half | r = +0.82 |
| Short first line, same author with and without | +5%, not significant |
| Second person “you”, same author with and without | 0%, not significant |
| Post length | no relationship (top decile 1,167 characters, bottom 1,122) |
| Posting volume | flat: more posts does not raise the rate |
Read those two halves together. Which person posts explains 67% of the variance in engagement across accounts, and it is predictable: an author’s first-half performance correlates with their second half at r = +0.82. Meanwhile every craft feature the ghostwriting industry sells, the short hook, the second-person opener, the optimal length, stops being significant the moment you hold the author constant and ask whether the same person does better with it than without.
That does not mean writing is worthless. It means the order of operations is backwards almost everywhere. Pick the right three people first, and only then argue about hooks. An agency that will tell you which of your executives is worth the budget, and which is not, is doing the high-value part of this job. An agency that will write for whoever you nominate is selling you the 20% and calling it the whole thing.
What a presence programme actually covers
“LinkedIn management” means five different scopes depending on who is selling it, and the price ranges accordingly. Establish which one you are buying in the first call.
| Scope | What it includes | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Single executive ghostwriting | One person, two to five posts a week, interview-led, profile rewrite | A founder who is the brand |
| Executive team programme | Three to six leaders, content pillars per person, editorial calendar, comment support | Companies with several credible voices |
| Employee advocacy programme | Wider staff sharing, enablement, a tool, adoption reporting | Headcount above roughly 100 |
| Company page management | Page posting, community management, page analytics | Almost nobody as a standalone, see above |
| Full presence | All of the above, plus paid distribution of the posts that earn it | Companies treating LinkedIn as the primary channel |
The commenting question is worth asking explicitly because it is where agencies differ most quietly. Some write posts only. Some draft comment replies for approval. Some comment as the executive under delegated access. Some run outbound engagement, commenting on other people’s posts on your behalf, which is a materially different risk profile and should be a conscious decision rather than something you discover in month three.
What to measure on a presence programme
A presence programme produces a different measurement problem from a campaign, because the unit that matters is the person rather than the ad. Four things to track, in this order.
- Audience growth per author, monthly. This is the compounding asset and the only number on this list that is genuinely cumulative. A programme where three executives each added 400 relevant followers a month is working even in a quarter where nothing converted, because next quarter’s organic reach is built out of it.
- Landing page clicks, never clicks. LinkedIn’s default click field counts reactions, comment expansions, see-more taps and profile visits. In our panel the median total click through rate is 4.56% against a landing page click through rate of 0.46%, meaning 91% of reported clicks never reach your site. If your agency cannot report the right field, every number you have seen is inflated roughly tenfold.
- Engagement rate per author, used only against your own authors. Inside one account the higher-engagement post earns a 50% better landing page click rate and wins 83% of the time, so it is a good internal ranking tool. Across accounts the correlation collapses to +0.19, so it is worthless as a benchmark against anyone else’s case study. The threshold that matters is high: click rate is flat between 2% and 7% engagement and only jumps above 10%, to 0.880%, around 3.7 times a post under 2%.
- Self reported attribution on the booking form. One free text field asking how the person heard about you. A presence programme generates a dozen touches from three different people over four months and then converts on a branded search, so last click will credit Google and you will cut the thing that worked.
What not to track: company page follower count, impressions as a headline, and anything an agency calls reach without saying whether it is unique people or impressions. The company page is a credibility artefact and a landing point, and its follower number moves mostly as a by-product of the personal accounts doing their job.
What it costs
Fees in this category are mostly unpublished. Where an agency on this page does publish, we say so in its entry. As a shape rather than a quote: single executive ghostwriting tends to sit lowest, a multi-executive programme with editorial management sits meaningfully above it, and a full presence programme with an employee layer and paid distribution is a different order of commitment because it includes media.
Kiin publishes $2,500 to $5,500 a month with no media mark up. If you are comparing quotes, the four questions that matter are: the fee, whether any of it is a percentage of media spend, the contract length and the notice period. Ask in writing, in the first conversation, before the case studies.
The budget decision that actually changes your outcome is not the fee. It is whether you fund distribution at all. Organic reach on a personal profile is real but capped by the audience that person has already earned. The measured advantage of a personal post over a company page, 22% to 47% cheaper clicks, is an advantage in paid distribution. An organic-only programme gives that up and waits for the audience to compound instead, which works and takes years.
What goes wrong
Nominating executives by seniority instead of by aptitude
The gap between a top-decile and bottom-decile author is 8.6 times on engagement rate, and audience seniority moves engagement only a little: CXO, VP, director, owner and partner all land between 4.30% and 4.42%, against 3.46% for senior individual contributors. The CEO is not automatically your best author. The most consistently interesting person in the company is, and they are often two levels down.
Buying writing when the constraint is selection
67% of engagement variance is which author posted. Every measurable craft feature dissolves when you hold the author constant. An agency that never tells you to stop posting for someone is not doing the part of the job that matters.
Running the company page as if it were a person
Personal posts beat company page posts by 162% on engagement rate across 205 accounts and win in 87% of them. The company page is a credibility artefact and a landing point, not an engagement engine. Resource it accordingly and stop measuring it against the founder.
Reporting total CTR
A 4.56% median total click through rate where 91% of the clicks never reach the site. Every account reporting that number has been overstating its traffic by roughly tenfold, usually without knowing.
Starting the employee programme before the executive one works
Employee advocacy needs content worth sharing and visible leadership doing it first. Launched cold, adoption stalls in month two and the tool licence becomes the thing you cancel next budget round.
How to choose
- Name the scope before you take a quote: single executive, executive team, employee programme, company page or full presence. Most mismatched engagements are a scope misunderstanding.
- Ask who they would tell you to stop posting for. Which person posts matters more than the writing; an agency that writes for anyone you nominate is skipping the valuable half of the job.
- Ask exactly what happens with comments: posts only, drafted replies for approval, commenting as you, or commenting on other people's posts. Four different risk profiles.
- Check whether they can distribute, or only publish. Organic reach is capped by the audience a person already has.
- Get the number in writing: the fee, whether any part is a percentage of media, the contract length and the notice period.