ICT firms have the expertise but no safe, repeatable way to post it. What social media coaching for ICT companies fixes, and what a good program includes.
Picture an IT lead at a mid-sized Belgian company. Her MSP contract is up for renewal, and she's drawn up a shortlist of three suppliers. She does her research the way most buyers do. She reads each supplier's website, checks the services pages and the case studies, and asks around. Then, before she calls anyone, she does a final check of their LinkedIn pages.
The first shows a Microsoft partner badge and a job ad from last autumn. The second hasn't posted since a trade show in spring. The third has a post from last week: one of its engineers explaining how they cut a customer's backup restore time, with the client's name left out and the lesson left in. She doesn't know yet which firm is best. But she knows which one she wants on the first call.
If you run an ICT company, you probably recognise the first two pages. This post is about why that happens, and why social media coaching for ICT companies fixes it when a one-off course doesn't.
Technical buyers check the people behind the offer
In our experience, buyers rarely pick an IT supplier from a brochure alone. They ask a peer, they check certifications, and they look at who they'd be working with. LinkedIn is one place that last check happens.
In the 2024 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report from Edelman and LinkedIn, 55% of decision-makers said they use thought leadership to vet vendors. Around three quarters said they trust it more than a company's marketing materials. And 86% said they invite high-quality thought-leadership producers to an RFP.
Two caveats. This is global data, not European: the 3,484 respondents were LinkedIn members in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Singapore, Australia and India, so treat it as a direction rather than a Benelux benchmark. And it doesn't say LinkedIn wins deals. Referrals, certifications and technical proof still weigh heavily on any shortlist.
What it does say is that a silent company page is a gap in the evidence. And for technical buyers, who read sceptically by habit, a page full of badges and job ads fills that gap badly. A concrete engineering lesson fills it well.
What actually stops ICT firms from posting
Your team solves hard problems every week, and the United Codes customer story describes a company with no lack of ideas or expertise that still needed a consistent rhythm. In our experience, three things usually get in the way.
Nobody knows what's safe to share
This is the big one, and it's legitimate. Your best material comes from client projects, and most of those sit under an NDA, a security policy or both. Imagine an engineer writes "we fixed a misconfigured firewall for a hospital in Leuven". They've just told the world something the hospital never agreed to.
Add GDPR, and Belgium's NIS2 law of 26 April 2024 (in force since 18 October 2024), which requires covered organisations to send an early warning within 24 hours of a significant incident and a notification within 72 hours, as Unizo's guide to NIS2 explains. Whether your firm falls in scope depends on its size and what it does, so check with your own advisor.
So the safe default becomes silence. And silence is exactly what the shortlist check punishes.
Engineers see it as marketing
Technical people tend to dislike marketing speak. If posting means writing "thrilled to announce", they'd rather not, and Triniti's founders said it plainly: "We're not marketers." Many would happily explain a clean migration approach to a colleague over coffee, without ever thinking of it as content.
Billable hours
Your best people are also your most billable. And they're hard to replace: in 2024, about 63% of recruiting enterprises in both Belgium and the Netherlands reported hard-to-fill ICT vacancies (Eurostat, enterprises with 10+ employees, all sectors). Nobody can spare an engineer for a day of writing workshops.
What social media coaching for ICT companies actually means
Coaching gets sold in several ways, so it helps to separate the goal from the coaching itself.
The goal is a posting routine your firm can keep up, and a safe way to turn project work into posts. That routine rests on three habits. The coach helps you build them, but your own people carry them out.
A steady posting rhythm. A post goes out most weeks, including quiet ones. Our own data backs this up: in an analysis of 43,738 posts across 488 LinkedIn company pages, pages posting in most weeks reached about three times the yearly impressions of pages posting in some weeks. Irregular, bursty posting did worse.
This data covers B2B pages in general, not ICT firms specifically, and it measures reach, not leads. But it's the clearest evidence we have that rhythm beats enthusiasm.
A quick way to get the story out of the expert. Fifteen minutes with the engineer or project lead who ran a project that just closed: what was the problem, what did you try first, what would you tell the next team? That is enough to shape into a draft, and nobody has to write from a blank page.
A client-safe check. Before anything goes out, the post runs through a short filter: no client name without written permission, no identifying detail, no configurations, versions or architecture that would help an attacker. Share the lesson and leave the setup out. This is a working method, not a legal standard. If a contract is strict, the contract wins, and your legal contact signs off.
What the coaching itself looks like
At Willow, coaching is not a weekly call. It has three parts, and they run at different speeds:
- A busy first 90 days. Coaching is most active at the start, while the habit is still forming. For an ICT firm this is where you settle the client-safe check, work out who in the team will contribute, and get the first posts out.
- Strategic sessions after that. Once the habit is in place, you meet your coach on a video call: monthly on the Pro plan, quarterly on Kickstart. These calls are about direction. What worked, what didn't, and what is worth saying next.
- Follow-up in between. Between sessions your coach is a short email away for a post to review or a second opinion on a headline, and keeps an eye on whether the posts keep going out.
The calls are not where the posting happens. The posting happens in your firm, week by week. The coach gives it direction and feedback, and makes sure a slow month doesn't turn into a silent one. The aim is that you can run it yourself.
How this differs from the alternatives
A one-off LinkedIn course gives your team a good afternoon. It doesn't install a routine or a rule for what's safe to say. A marketing agency or ghostwriter can keep a calendar full, but they sit outside your projects, so the question of what's safe to say about them still lands on you. Doing nothing is the cheapest option, until the shortlist check.
Coaching sits closer to your own people. They stay the authors. The coach brings the structure, the feedback and the follow-up.
What good coaching looks like
If you're comparing options, here's what to look for in the coaching itself:
- A dedicated coach who stays the same. Someone who learns your firm, not a rota of whoever picks up the ticket.
- A heavier start that tapers off. Intensive in the first quarter, then a lighter rhythm. A good coach works towards your independence, not your dependence.
- Strategic sessions with the calendar open. A regular call about what to say next, not a status meeting.
- Real follow-up between calls. Someone you can email about a draft, who also notices when the posting dries up.
- Help setting the client-safe filter. A coach can propose the rules, but the sign-off sits with whoever handles contracts and security at your firm.
- Your people in their own voice. Drafts the engineers review and recognise as theirs.
- A realistic volume and time budget. Around 13 posts a quarter, one a week, is the pace our own plans are built around, with an AI assistant drafting for you to review. Plan on roughly an hour a week from your side.
- Honest measurement. Impressions and engagement tell you whether the rhythm is working. They won't tell you about leads, and a good coach says so.
What it looks like in practice
Our customer stories show the range. United Codes, a software company building Oracle APEX tools, gained 31.21% in LinkedIn followers (308 people) over two years. Their COO, Jackie McIlroy, put it simply: "As a company with no real marketing experience, I have learned quite a lot from my sessions with Kjell."
Triniti Solutions, a Dutch custom software company, started with three coaching sessions before moving to a one-year plan. Impressions rose 215.47% to 5,527 and engagements 235.43% to 852. They gained 58 followers (+187%) from a small base. Their own summary: "We're not marketers, but Willow made it feel doable."
At the larger end, Jeroen Pets, who leads digital strategy at Fieldside (part of Cronos Groep), described the problem in Fieldside's story: the marketing team wasn't yet large enough to support the whole group of companies, so "the coaching aspect was very welcome at the time." He also noted that people sometimes approach them at trade shows saying they saw something on their socials.
For more on how coaching works in other professional services, see our posts on accountants, recruitment agencies and real estate.
Where to start this week
You don't need a program to test this. You need one closed project and an hour.
- Pick one project that finished recently and went well. Ask the engineer who ran it three questions: what was the problem, what did you try first, what would you tell the next team.
- Strip the client out. Remove the name, the sector detail, the numbers that identify them, and anything technical an attacker could use. What's left is the lesson.
- Run the filter. Would the client's legal contact be comfortable seeing this? Would your own security lead? If either answer is no, cut more.
- Post it under the engineer's name, with a short, plain headline. No "thrilled to announce".
- Block the same slot next week. The second post is the one that proves it's a routine.
If you'd rather have a coach to set the direction and follow up in between, that's what coaching is for. Plan on around an hour a week from your side, and see how Willow's version works before you talk to us.
One project, one hour, one post. Start there.