An Important Limitation In Publishing Content On LinkedIn™

While I am a proponent of publishing content on LinkedIn™, that does not keep me from recognizing a key limitation: not everyone you want to see it will be around to see it. 

A lot of your target people just don’t use LinkedIn™ that much, and will never see your content.

Let me illustrate this with an example. I ran a LinkedIn™ Ad for a client and as Sherlock Holmes would say, the results were instructive. LinkedIn™ Ads provide some pretty awesome filters for targeting ads – many of the same filters that are in Sales Navigator. My client was going after engineers and we were able to target engineers that were in specific geographies, that worked in specific industries and in specific sized companies. 

The Ad was successful – it ran for almost exactly one month, and was shown to the people in our target demographic 38,500 times. But while the ad was successful for my client, I found a little more digging into the numbers revealed a couple nuggets that I found disconcerting

Our target demographic, as defined when I set up the Ad, was 82,000 possible LinkedIn™ users. The Ad wound up being seen by 36,500 people over the course of the month it ran. But…only 11,500 unique people saw the Ad, meaning that among those people, they saw it an average of a little over three times each. 

There are two nuggets of information that I can infer from these figures. The first is that among these people only 11,500 out of 82,000 logged into LinkedIn™ over the course of the month that we ran the Ad. That’s almost exactly 14%. So my general conclusion would be only one in seven engineers log in to LinkedIn™ every month. I realize that this is only one sample from one industry and that there were other filters in play, but even if this result is a little skewed, what’s the best case scenario, one in six, or one in five? And it could just as easily skew the other way: maybe we were lucky and went after a really “active” subset of engineers! 

That’s my first observation and one that is crucial that we keep in mind when we publish. People may like to call LinkedIn™ the “professional social network” and LinkedIn™ of course does nothing to dissuade people from calling it that, but at least in this demographic, it isn’t that social at all. 

My second observation came from thinking about those 11,500 individuals that did show up and their behavior. I know that they showed up 36,500 times over the course of the month, or on average every ten days or so. Trying to figure out how many of the 11,500 show up at least every two weeks or weekly or more often than that would be complete conjecture, but I want you to take away one key thought here: thinking that very many of your target demographic are going to see any single post or video that you publish on LinkedIn™ is a very poor assumption to build your strategy on.

Okay, so this got me thinking, this applies to engineers, how can I see how engineers compare to other work functions, like salespeople, or purchasing, or solo professionals? Well, I could spend a pile of money on Ads to see how the results for different groups and professions stack up against engineers, but my money pile being somewhat depleted, I can use a filter on Sales Navigator to get a rough comparison by seeing how often these groups of people publish content on LinkedIn™. So that’s what I did.  

When I looked at how many people published content on LinkedIn™ over the past thirty days, then divided that number by the total number of people saying they did that job on LinkedIn™, here are my results: 

Consulting: 14%

Marketing: 7%

Solo Practitioners: 7%

Business Development: 6%

Sales: 5%

Purchasing: 4%

Education: 3%

Engineering: 3%

Operations: 2-3%

Remember that I am using “posted on LinkedIn™ in the last 30 days” as a proxy for “active on LinkedIn™ in the last 30 days”. While speculative, I think this shows which professions are more active on LinkedIn™ relative to each other.

The bottom line is that for any given piece of content that you publish on LinkedIn™, only a subset of your ideal customers will see it.