B2B Best Practices in LinkedIn Content Posting: What 400 Posts Revealed

What is the ideal ratio of curated LinkedIn content posting that a company should use as a guide? From my days studying digital marketing, the suggestion was to use the 80:20 rule on company social networking pages. Eighty percent of your posted content was supposed to be curated. But, in practice this is simply NOT possible. If you are running an effective content marketing practice, you have your own blog posts, white papers, infographics, press releases, webinar announcements, and other highlights - in addition to the curated articles - to post. Having 80% of your LinkedIn company page content as curated - would simply be overload, or overwhelming for readers.

So I asked two Gartner analysts that same question. In both cases, they referred to the 80:20 rule as a best practice to post on Linkedin. Interestingly, these opinions were more 'rule of thumbs' than resulting from empirical evidence. To answer this question empirically, I set out to observe real B2B company practices for content curation on LinkedIn posts.

Company LinkedIn Profiles

To get an empirical sense of actual best practices used by companies on LinkedIn posts, this research observed 16 companies, reviewing their latest 25 posts. B2B sectors include retail, high tech, consulting, systems integrators (SI), and associations. Below you will find a review of the types of posts, and types of content included in company LinkedIn pages.

Thanks to the following companies in this study:

• Retail: Sephora, Gap, Ikea
• High Tech: HP Enterprise, OSF Digital, Envista, ContractPodAi
• Consulting: McKinsey, Deloitte Management, Accenture
• Systems Integrators: PixelMedia, Astound Commerce, BORN
• Associations: AMA, IABC, PMA

All data collected for this peek at social media marketing practices - taken on 23April2021. Total sample size of N=400.

Company Practices

This first pie graph shows a breakdown of the company page Linkedin content postings (full sample of 400 post observations). As to be expected, the largest number of posts were for blog posts, video logs (Vlogs), and podcasts at 29.8%. Events is the next biggest category at 14.5%, followed by celebrations and promoting causes at 12.0% (mental health awareness day, women's day, etc). Fourth on our list is the curated shares on Linkedin, at 10.5%. This followed by company page 'status updates' of the employee category at 10.1%. These include team photos, employee awards, callouts, and hiring announcements.

Strictly speaking, this analysis included the full subset of industries, which included retail. Arguably, the retail sector is B2C. Even though LinkedIn is a B2B focused platform, the retail industry posts are probably influenced by B2C leaning marketing practices oriented toward consumers. Although Linkedin users are not generally thought to be the consumer target audience (a B2C social media platform), we are all ultimately consumers. So the analysis below focuses on strict B2B sectors, by pulling retail out of the data.

B2B Company Practices

With this second cut of the data, we exclude the retail sector, to focus in on B2B best practices on LinkedIn content to share. The pie chart below represents a sample size of n=325, with retail removed. In this case the Blog | Vlog | Podcasts have a much stronger showing at 36.0%. This followed by event post at 17.8%, and curated content at 9.5%.

At this point, we can answer the question about whether B2B companies are following the 80:20 rule of thumb. The answer is definitely NOT. Even with a very broad definition of curated content, it comes out to 36.5% broadly curated. Broadly curated includes events, relevant content that was curated, quotes, and celebration | comments on causes.

So for those marketing managers worried that you are somehow missing the mark by not including enough curated content to meet the old rule of thumb, you can stop your worries. The curation B2B industry best practice seems to be 10:90, or in it's broadest definition 40:60 for curated content vs branded content.

Full Breakdown by Sector

In case there was an interest in the details down to the sector level, see the chart below. This chart includes the detailed observations by sector, as a comparative benchmark.

When reviewing the chart, it is clear the retail sector is distinct from the other B2B sectors. There is a much greater emphasis on emotional appeal posts, like celebration | causes (32% vs 1.3%-12.0%), and employee posts (20.0% vs 2.0%-13.3%). Also interesting is the very low focus on blogs | vlogs | podcasts (2.7% vs 31.0%-49.3%) in retail sector posts. Albeit not surprising, these are notable differences between B2C and B2B approaches.

What About Video?

Reviewing the full list companies, 24.8% of the 400 posts were video or animated Linkedin posts. After removing the B2C retail sector, that figure only drops slightly to 22.8% of the 325 posts being video or animated posts.

Although the video subject does require a deeper dive, and a broader perspective, a viable hypothesis is that video posts result in greater engagement on Linkedin. However, let's reserve that as a fascinating discussion for a future article.

Cursory results show that the highest rate of video use on LinkedIn posts were from Consulting (54.7%), Retail (33.3%), and High Tech (25.0%). Lowest use were among the SIs (6.7%) and Associations (4.0%). Low video post use could be the result of the greater complexity, and cost of creating video. For the case of SIs, it could be that videos are non-condusive to showing the work that a systems integrator provides. If there are other reasons, please include them in the comments of this article.

Leapfrog Opportunities

Looking again to the B2B totals chart for Linkedin content postings, there are opportunities for differentiation. For example, surprisingly there seemed to be very few organic ads promoting the company's downloadable content and assets. Yet, lead generation from LinkedIn is exceptional - when it is toward a targeted group offering a free report download. B2B companies should promote their content at a greater rate, on their company feeds. Currently at 2.8% - there is no reason this could not be as high as 4.0-5.0%.

Keep in mind that this organically promoting your own content downloads is a fair marketing practice on your LinkedIn company page. In fact, customers and prospects want to find your content here - so help them out. Also read Content Binge: 9-Tactics for B2B Marketing, as it is associated with this approach (but in other areas, too).

Engagement with your target audience is ideal for social media marketing. Frankly, it is ideal for any marketing! In this regard, using more share-able infographics can be a great way to get your brand name extended further into the mindshare of your target market. And, the use of Linkedin Polls should definitely be used to experiment with drumming up greater direct engagement with your audience. If too many companies start using it, there will be a saturation point. However, currently only 3.7% company posts are polls or infographics. So there is plenty of room to grow, perhaps as high as 10.0%.

Interestingly, the consulting sector has pushed the infographics | Linkedin poll boundary to 10.7% of their company posts. This does highlight an opportunity for a product or service centric company to mimic the tactic, to garner greater engagement (and hence mindshare), with customers and prospects - ahead of your competitors.

B2B Best Practices

Central to this discussion about B2B best practices with Linkedin content postings, was the opportunity to empirically review actual practices. Certainly, this sample size needs to grow to bear more weight, to be a conclusive observation rather than directionally interesting. Again, another opportunity for a future article. However, this article and research provides marketers with a directional benchmark against which to compare your own results. There are several opportunities for improving, and even jumping ahead of the competitors on your social media marketing practices.

Finally, having this empirical evidence give me greater comfort in laying to rest the old rule about 80% of your content being curated. From running a marketing team, and reviewing our own practices - I know this is simply NOT realistically achievable. Curated content on Linkedin company pages currently run at 9.5% of their posts. If you are in the 9.0-15.0% range, then you are above average!