Measures of Linkedin influence

It was in 2018 when I restarted using Linkedin and found out that in the half-dozen years since I last used it, it had evolved from just being a professional social network to becoming one of the largest online content publishing platforms. By 2018, Linkedin had over 575 million members, of whom millions were creating, sharing, and reading a staggering volume of content daily. Linkedin had become a massive marketplace where the companies (and individuals) who created the best content acquired the biggest following.

When people follow your account, your posts appear on their Linkedin feeds and they become a captive audience of prospective customers, potential future employees, and ambassadors of your brand. So, the more followers you acquire, the more influence you gain.

But it also works the other way around: those with more influence (e.g. strong brand equity, leading market position, etc.), gain more followers. Number of Linkedin followers thus becomes a measure for influence.

A deeper look at Linkedin influence

In order to get a feel for the Linkedin influence of companies (with # of followers as the primary measure of influence) and understand the factors that contribute to it, I compiled and analyzed¹ publicly available Linkedin data for all the companies on the S&P 500. Some key observations are as follows:

• S&P 500 companies on average:
  • Had ~323,000 followers per company account
  • Had ~31,000 employees per company account
  • Made 18 Linkedin posts per month with each post receiving an average of 239 likes²
• There was a strong positive linear correlation (R=0.71) between number of followers and number of employees
• There was a large variation in the number of followers depending on the industry vertical:
  IT companies had the highest average at 769,000 and Real Estate companies lowest at 39,000
• There was a strong positive linear correlation (R=0.54) between the number of account followers and average number of likes per post

Among the variables I evaluated, the numerical data suggests that the number of followers to your company Linkedin account is influenced by at least two factors:

• Company size – the more employees you have on Linkedin, the more followers you’ll get (while the analysis was on correlation between employees and followers, the direction of causality is quite logical in this case)
• Industry vertical – even when controlling for company size, some industries have much higher Linkedin usage and more Linkedin followers than others

After a qualitative analysis of hundreds of company Linkedin accounts, I believe that there are two additional factors that contribute to Linkedin influence:

• Inherent strength of your company’s brand
• How well you are managing your Linkedin account

In order to understand these two factors better, I selected one particular industry where influence plays a strong role in business performance: Consulting.

Linkedin influence analysis for consulting firms

As an ex-consultant, I wondered how consulting firms stacked up against each other and whether the generally-recognized top firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain) also had the most followers on Linkedin (and ergo, the most influence).

In order to come up with my list of firms to evaluate, I used Vault’s 2019 (www.vault.com) list of top consulting firms as a reference. Given that I primarily wanted to compare pure consulting firms and needed to maintain a like-for-like analysis, I had to exclude the big 4 accounting/audit firms (Deloitte, PWC, E&Y, and KPMG) and the big tech consulting/IT implementation firms (e.g. Accenture, CapGemini, etc.) because most of them did not have separate Linkedin accounts for their consulting practices. I also only used each company’s main Linkedin account; secondary/regional/practice-specific company accounts were not included. All the data were collected over the period of September-December 2018.

The analysis involved tallying each firm’s number of employees on the x-axis versus its number of Linkedin followers on the y-axis. The figures were plotted on a scatter plot diagram, and shown in Figure 1 below.

One can quickly observe that in terms of number of Linkedin followers, McKinsey and BCG are outliers compared to the rest of the competition.

But given that McKinsey and BCG have significantly more employees than their competitors, they were also expected to have the highest number of followers given the strong positive correlation (R=0.76) between number of employees and number of followers.

So, if we wanted to compare influence that was independent of company size, the absolute number of followers is then an insufficient measure. A size-adjusted metric for influence can be derived by dividing the number of followers by number of employees. And this is what I did for each of the 59 companies above, and plotted them as shown in Figure 2 below.

With the size-adjusted measure which I’ve labelled “Linkedin Influence Index” (LII), McKinsey and BCG are still leaders for large consulting firms (>3000 employees), but they have now been joined by Strategy& (2^nd place) and Bain (4^th place).

McKinsey’s LII of 70 means that there are 70 followers for every employee it has on Linkedin. For the 59 firms included in the analysis, the average LII is 28. What this tells us is that McKinsey is significantly above its peers in terms of attracting followers to its Linkedin account. The generally-recognized top three firms (and including Strategy&) are also the top performers in terms of LII scores.

Some key observations I’ve made about LII figures are as follows:

• Small firms with less than 3,000 employees have significantly higher LIIs (average LII = 38) than larger firms (average LII = 25)
• The data suggests that as firms get bigger, LIIs typically go down, with diminishing “returns” (followers) for each new employee; this same observation was also made with the S&P 500 companies

The significantly higher performance of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain compared to their competition on both measures of Linkedin influence (# of followers, LII) provides some validation that brand strength translates into Linkedin influence.

Using the LII as a comparative measure of Linkedin performance

The LII is an easily-derived metric that gives you the number of Linkedin followers you have per employee on Linkedin. It is a “comparative” metric that only has value when compared to the LIIs of your competitors. It gives you an indication of your Linkedin influence relative to your competition.

The table below provides S&P 500 benchmarks for LII figures.

As this article has stretched much longer than I initially intended, please watch out for its continuation where I’ll be discussing my observations and analysis of how leaders and laggards in consulting managed their Linkedin accounts.

I hope you enjoyed reading this 😊

Footnotes:

1. Number of followers, employees, posts, and likes, were manually compiled from the company accounts of all the S&P 500 companies over the period Sep-Dec 2018.
2. The average of 240 Likes per post were over an average span of 6 weeks since the post was published.