With reach favouring people over companies, on average your LinkedIn content will be seen by 3.84% of your followers. This is compared to 1.32% in Facebook. And, while Instagram is the clear winner, with 14.26% reach, unless you’re in verticals like hospitality, Instagram isn’t the best channel for B2B.
Linkedin is unique compared to other social media platforms for a couple of reasons:
Users explore the newsfeed with ‘work in mind’. As the only popular social media platform for work, the user intent on Linkedin is to ‘engage in work’ rather than ‘engage in play’ such as on Instagram or TikTok.
That’s a powerful difference. With the right content, targeted to the right users, you can achieve serious cut through and brand influence.
Linkedin is unique because you can curate your own audience. The platform allows you to find and connect with your prospective customers directly, and if you’re a ‘creator’, the opportunity for them to follow you. This allows unseen control over your audience and therefore outsized advantages of creating content on other social media sites.
Linkedin also differs in its likely future direction. Compared to other strong ad platforms, like Meta, Linkedin still heavily favours organic reach. As platforms grow in popularity (like Facebook), organic reach trends down while advertising inventory trends up. There is increasing pressure to deliver YoY revenue growth.
Although the anticipated growth of Linkedin as a channel is 22% between now and 2028, with over 900 million users on the platform, the revenue pressures on Linkedin are different.
While Meta relies solely on advertising revenue, Linkedin has 3 revenue streams; sales navigator, talent solutions and marketing solutions (ads). Since its acquisition, Microsoft has consolidated Linkedin revenue into their books, but prior to the acquisition the split was 18% from ads, 17% for sales navigator and 65% for talent solutions.
Assuming this trend has continued, this leads me to believe that Linkedin will continue to deliver strong organic reach for creators. Note that company page reach is much lower and less powerful.
People want to buy from people. In B2B, especially with larger deal sizes, that’s even more true than B2C. Linkedin provides the ability to build, own and earn your own community of highly engaged potential prospects.
The channel will continue to change, for example with the proposed introduction of short-form video to the platform, but fundamentally it will remain the sole place for professionals to connect, comment, like and learn.
Despite reaching 1 million users way back in August 2004, it’s still very early days for Linkedin. Many B2B verticals can reap the benefits of its targeted organic reach, provided that their ICP regularly uses the website.
If you’re thinking of building a Linkedin audience, my recommendation would be to put some thought into your strategy and create a clear point of difference.
Personally, I believe quality and impact is more important than consistency, especially as we see a proliferation of new creators trying their luck on the platform today.
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