Can an organization still do without a LinkedIn page? It's become a hygiene factor! All of this calls for more insight. And because there's little data available, we've conducted our own research.
For this study, we were granted access to data from 55 companies and (educational) institutions. This mix primarily includes Dutch companies and a few international ones. From online marketing agencies to independent consultants, and from universities to multinationals with thousands of employees. For-profit and non-profit, B2B and B2C. In total, we examined the data from 5,485 updates.
A quick caveat: worldwide, 30 million company pages and 90,000 pages have been created by schools and universities. Given the sample size and its local nature, this is clearly not scientific research. However, in our view, it does provide some interesting insights and, in some cases, even clear benchmarks.
The organizations we studied are primarily from our mobile database direct network. It's therefore possible that this group is more interested in LinkedIn and therefore perhaps more active than average. Keep this in mind when reading the results.
What about the organic reach of company pages?
Is the organic reach of company pages doomed? After a few small studies in recent years, we thought so, but we've had to adjust this perception to some extent. In 2019, a company page update averaged 2,970 views. Unpaid, of course. To examine this trend, we compared data from Q1 and Q4 2019.
The conclusion? The average reach per update has decreased by 12.1%. However, there's one important caveat. This negative trend is almost universally seen in organizations with large followings. However, in small businesses (up to 50 employees), the average reach has increased by 23%.
Is this because LinkedIn wants to encourage its use? Or is it because these companies can grow their followers relatively faster, meaning there are more people to deliver their content to? You decide!
Followers of company pages
On average, the organizations in the study had 8,833 followers on January 1, 2020. That doesn't tell you much, as the average is determined by a wide variety of organizations, from freelancers with a few followers to Pages with more than 100,000 followers. What is interesting, however, is the growth all organizations experienced on LinkedIn last year. On average, the number of followers increased by 91 percent in 2019!
