LinkedIn Newsfeed: What Small and Medium Size Businesses Need to Know.

LinkedIn Update Tool, RIP.

There is a good reason that LinkedIn took away the little newsfeed insight tool. Because it would show businesses the truth.

Insight tool revealed the truth.

The average LinkedIn user will scroll through around 10 updates in their newsfeed a day, at most. Let's say the average user has 500 connections these days. Let's say each user posts to the newsfeed on average just once a day. This means each user will see just 10 out of their 500 connections' posts each day.

Conversely, they will miss 490 of their connections' posts each day. Similarly, each user can expect to have just 10 of their connections see their posts on average. Yes just 10. That's the facts.

In fact it's worse than this, because you are not just competing with 499 quality posts a day. Perhaps 2 out of the 10 posts people see are sponsored ads injected in amongst the posts. Now more and more inappropriate content, like games and offensive "soft porn" photo's, are going viral, with no way to flag up or report such posts (that is a most ridiculous situation on a professional, business-orientated network). This type of material can account for another 2 out of the 10.  So we are now down to 6. In fact, it doesn't end there, because big business are able to game the system by mustering their troops. Furthermore, when users start becoming aware of the reality of this situation, they start to panic. They start to post more and more material each day, but of lower and lower quality content.  So now of those 6 perhaps half are worth looking at in the first place.

If you are a small or medium size business, spending time or money on content and posting to the LinkedIn newsfeed as a strategy, then you need to stop and think very seriously about what you are doing. The numbers are stacked against you. That's what LinkedIn don't want you to see.