“LinkedIn Sucks.”
“LinkedIn is Boring.”
I often hear phrases like this, but I want my 365 Driven family to be better informed than the others.
Yes, the OLD version of LinkedIn sucked. It was a boring cesspool of snooze-fest corporate updates and press releases, and thousands of people job-seeking. It was basically an online resume storage site, where recruiters mostly hung out.
LinkedIn isn’t like that any longer. In the last two years, it has dramatically changed.
Some of you may not know that Microsoft owns LinkedIn as of 2016. It now has a huge financial backing.
Microsoft wants to play ball against social media titans like Facebook and Google (YouTube).
They started changing LinkedIn to operate more like a social media platform, rather than an article post dump. Like buttons, share buttons, video upload capability.
There are now thousands of people creating informative content around the topic of business and professional careers.
Think of LinkedIn as becoming the Business Social Media.
But here is why you should be on LinkedIn…
The main advantage on LinkedIn is the tremendous organic reach potential of your posts. This means far more people will see the posts and content that you create. This won’t last forever. Social platforms reward us with huge organic reach potential to entice us to participate more. They control this with their algorithm.
Think of these social media sites as crack dealers. They give you some free product to try, and then you get addicted and want more. They start out by charging you a little, and then the price continues to increase over time.
Right now, that crack is basically FREE on LinkedIn. Very similar to how Facebook was, about 5-6 years ago.
I get it, you want some hard data to review…
Now for some split test results. You need to see hard data to fully comprehend why you should be spending more time on LinkedIn, vs other social platforms.
Compare the images attached. I posted the exact same post on the exact same day. These are where they stand this morning.
Facebook Business Page (6K followers) = 484 reach / 33 engage
Facebook Personal Page (7K followers) = unknown reach / 162 engage
Instagram Business Page (9.3K followers) = 2063 reach / 210 engage
LinkedIn Personal Page (4.2K followers) = 2130 reach / 39 engage
Results divided by follower count, shown in percentages:
FB Business = 8% reach / 0.05% engage (super weak!)
FB Personal = unknown reach / 2.3% engage
Instagram = 22% reach / 2.2% engage
LinkedIn = 51% reach / 0.9% engage
If you are a business owner, you really should be putting some effort into building your presence on LinkedIn, especially in 2020. You won’t find cheaper attention for your business or personal brand.
While you are there, connect with me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonywhatley/
-Tony