Don't Believe Every LinkedIn Statistic You Read

Today, the wonderful world of Sales and LinkedIn related statistics. I originally published this article on LinkedIn about 18 months ago, and have updated it for today. I thought it would make good reading for my LinkedIn newsletter, and I think we all need reminders from time to time that there is a lot of malarkey out there.

Part 1: The Case Of The Non-Existent Sales Authority

How many of you have seen this list?

Hands up everyone who has actually seen it and liked it, commented on how pithy these statistics are, or shared it with their network. I have found references to this graphic on Google going back to 2013.?

Well, sorry to say, but these “facts” come from the department of made up statistics.

If you google the “National Sales Executives Association” the one thing you won’t find is any reference to such an organization existing or ever having existed.

These statistics appear to have just been made up, but we believe them because we want to. We want to believe that these stats show that perseverance is critical to success and will be rewarded.???

A lot of social media statistics and social selling statistics are shared with very little reference as to where they came from or how they were generated. So let me suggest that if someone quotes a statistic that may contribute to you making a business decision, that you do a little investigative work before making that decision.??

This graphic surfaces on LinkedIn less often than it used to, but it is guaranteed to make me laugh when it does.?

Part 2: The Case Of The Really Old Statistic That (Added Bonus) Is Often Taken Out Of Context

How many times have you seen someone use the following to support some claim they are making about LinkedIn:?

“LinkedIn is 277% More Effective for Lead Generation Than Facebook & Twitter”

Sometimes it comes with this graphic:?

I kept seeing this statistic pop up from time to time, so I did some research and came up with what can best be called an investigative tribute.

Here’s where it came from: Hubspot gathered data from 5,198 businesses and it turns out that traffic from LinkedIn to the companies’ websites turned into leads more often.

The 277% stat was released by Hubspot on January 30th 2012. That’s right, this statistic will be ten years old next January.

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are very different animals than they were nine?years ago. Nine years ago LinkedIn had “Answers” and “Signals”. That's so long ago that LinkedIn "Polls" went away and came back again. Nine years ago, the idea of LinkedIn Influencers like Bill Gates was a gleam in someone’s eye, still nine months away from being announced on Oct 2, 2012. With the changes in the three companies studied, and new players arising like Instagram, you have to be pretty sceptical that this statistic is still valid.

Let me put it another way. If I wanted to use the 277 statistic honestly, I would probably have to say:??

“In a Hubspot study conducted almost ten years ago, LinkedIn was 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook & Twitter”

Doesn’t sound quite so compelling anymore, does it?Since it was first published, the 277 stat has often morphed into a lot of...variations. Many authors love to cite the exactness of the 277% but then fudge what the 277% is better than. While researching this post I found the following post or article headlines:

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective at generating professional leads”

Comment: What's a professional lead? One that's lost its amateur status?

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective for blogging”

Comment: The original statistic said “Facebook and Twitter”. How did blogging get in here?

“LinkedIn is 277% more effective than all of social media”

Comment: We went from Facebook and Twitter to everybody.

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective for marketing and sales”??

Comment: Kind of drawing an extra conclusion from the data there, aren’t we?

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more likely to drive website traffic”

Comment: An interesting distinction. The original statistic talks about the quality of the traffic (someone who came from LinkedIn is more likely to become a lead). It’s been changed here to imply quantity.

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective than other social networks”

Comment: This is just lazy. What does "other social networks" mean? And “effective” is open to interpretation too.

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more effective at driving B2B sales”

Comment: More effective than what? Wearing a sandwich board on Main Street??

“Why LinkedIn is 277% more likely to lead to a sales conversion than any other social media.”

Comment: We went from leads to conversions and added any social media, not just Facebook and Twitter.

The lesson here is not to beat on LinkedIn's effectiveness now or seven years ago, or Hubspot's research then or now. They aren't the culprits here. It's people who find a statistic and don’t bother to check its origins, and then it's the rest of us who swallow these things whole without question and let the writers get away with it.

The day I edited this article (July 19th, 2021) I searched LinkedIn for content containing “LinkedIn is 277%”. The search results contained multiple posts revolving around this statistic as proof of how great LinkedIn is.?

Part 3: The Case Of Trying To Get The Genie Back into The Bottle

Here’s a statistic that I saw in January 2019:

“40% of LinkedIn users log on every day.”

And I thought to myself, “Uh-oh.”

The last time LinkedIn regularly published user figures was the third quarter of 2016, their last before becoming part of Microsoft. And the figure they published then was:

“106M - or 22.7% - of LinkedIn members log in once a month or more often.”?

From 23% logging in every month to 40% logging in every day was...unbelievable. As in: I didn't believe it. So I did some digging for the source of this marvelous statistic.?

And I’ll be, the source turned out to be LinkedIn! Apparently, LinkedIn put out an ebook in January 2019, and one of the stats in the e-book stated that 40% of members were logging in every day. So I found the ebook and downloaded it. And there it was. I checked the source and it was from a company called Omnicore which made me suspicious all over again.?

Because I would have thought that if LinkedIn was going to use a statistic on LinkedIn user engagement that the source of that user engagement statistic would be...LinkedIn, not some outside agency.

I looked up the article on Omnicore and couldn’t find the 40% statistic. I InMailed the author asking about it. The author kindly responded and said he had just taken it down "because the source where we got this statistic was no longer valid." (Hat tip to Mark Williams who had discovered the statistic independently in December 2018 and got Omnicore to fix it)

I InMailed the author of the LinkedIn ebook and told him that he probably shouldn’t be stating something that people may base business decisions on - advertising on LinkedIn would be a good example - if it couldn’t be backed up. To his credit, he immediately pulled the stat.?

But by then, people had been downlaoding the ebook, and people had latched onto the stat. Now there are articles out there on the web stating that 40% of LinkedIn users check in every day. Maybe I should write those article's authors and suggest they just change the attribution from LinkedIn to the National Sales Executives Association.?

Sources: here’s the original story on Hubspot

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/30030/LinkedIn-277-More-Effective-for-Lead-Generation-Than-Facebook-Twitter-New-Data.aspx

If you do a content search on LinkedIn for "LinkedIn is 277%" and even just "sales statistics" you are likely to find examples of people still using the first two of my examples. Be careful, it's a jungle out there.

No authors were hurt during the writing of today's newsletter. Maybe some bruised feelings, but no injuries.

The obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month.

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/