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At one point in time, we wondered whether Linkedin was worth using for marketing Lisech…
Typically, we prefer to work with older clients (small business owners) – people who are past their “shiny object syndrome” stage.
So, we started digging into statistics and demographics, and doing some math…
What we found was fascinating, to say the least.
The realities of Linkedin content marketing:
1. Linkedin has roughly 1.15 Billion users. Out of that number, roughly 16% of users are active on a daily basis, and 48% are active on a monthly basis. That’s roughly 184 Million active users per day.
2. Fair enough, a large percentage of these users are young, with roughly 40 Million job searches done per week.
Side note: Roughly 9,000 job applications are submitted every minute. Roughly 7 people are employed from Linkedin job postings every minute. Do the math if you are a job seeker.
3. Roughly 3 Million Linkedin users post content on a weekly (or more regular) basis. Around 2 Million posts are made daily, but a substantial percentage of these are made by users who already posted once.
It is estimated that roughly 1% of active users post daily.
Let that sink in for a moment: 99% of the people on Linkedin are there to either look for a job (one in 7 weekly users, estimated), communicate, or consume content.
And the 1% that posts regularly are spread across multiple industries.
4. Fair enough, we noted that plenty of the posts in our feeds were from fellow marketers, so we did some more digging, and what we found is this:
a. Roughly 30% of Linkedin users are from the US. That’s around 305 Million users.
b. That means that – if the numbers are similar for each country – that’s roughly 55 Million US users visiting Linkedin each day.
c. Roughly half of marketers in the US use Linkedin. That’s around 200K users.
Logically speaking, that means there are – on a daily basis – an average of 110 users online for each marketer.
If every user views only 5 posts per day (remember, some are their to hunt for jobs, and some are there to communicate/send DM’s, but some also scroll a lot more)…
That means that (granted, it varies between posts based on following, content and quality) there are an average of 550 people who could see each post – more if you are willing to work at it.
Fair enough, that means (since we work from two personal Linkedin accounts) only around 50 views per day land in front of our target audience (age 50 and up) – while we grow our influence.
However, considering the lifetime value of any given client, the math works for us.
Side note: Those are figures for US prospects only. When you add potential clients form the UK, IE, AU and Canada, that number increases by quite a bit.
In conclusion:
Linkedin is not as highly engaged as other social networks. Fair enough, more and more people are trying to push “Facebook-type content” on Linkedin, with mixed results.
We suspect that while some of them are able to generate reasonable engagement numbers, it is unlikely that they are generating any meaningful business from their efforts. Why? Because as more users engage with your content, the algorithm will show your content to more people who are likely to engage with it…
Which may very well not fit your ideal client profile. The more viral your content becomes, the less focused your audience will be.
But all in all, Linkedin seems like “a boring place” compared to other social networks. The engagement rates are a lot lower too.
For instance, on one client’s Tiktok account we have seen engagement rates as high as 20% at times. On Linkedin, the average engagement rate is under 0.5%.
However, at the end of the day the vanity metrics don’t count. All that counts is whether your efforts are generating interest in your business, and eventually, revenue.
And as long as that equation adds up, it is worth it.
Have you done the math yet, and does Linkedin work for you?