The Goldfish Bowl of Lurkers

It seems just about every human being on the planet with a job is on LinkedIn, OK, maybe not, but LinkedIn claims 1.3+ billion across 200 countries.

As a watering hole for B2B buyers, LinkedIn is peerless; it’s incredibly rare to meet someone in a business context who is not on the platform. Making it a very attractive place to do B2B business, and I am seeing a lot of advice for social selling that goes along the lines of:

1. Identify your ICP and prospects
2. Build trust and awareness by engaging with their content with likes and comments
3. Connect / InMail
4. Move to conversation
5. Slip into a natural sales motion

In the meantime, you run credibility air cover on your own profile by posting x times a week and all of that.

And of course, there are a number of tools, many AI-powered, that will enable you to automate the shit out of this.

This process makes perfect sense, and this nurturing “social selling” approach is way better than being hit with a random connection request and then “pitch slapped” the moment you accept it.

Plus, of course, unlike email, we marketers have not exhausted the channel (yet!), and InMail opens/responses are way higher than you’ll see in email.

Easy, right? Fishing in a goldfish bowl.

What other marketing does a B2B balladeer need?

However, I’d be stating the bleedin’ obvious to point out that having a LinkedIn account and being a user, let alone an active one, are not the same thing.

Cognism states that LinkedIn has 1.3B+ accounts, but only ~300M are monthly active, and ~130M log in daily. Of those, only around 1% actually post content*.

Plus…. you’ll probably find that in some industries, these ratios of engaged users probably vary hugely and, of course, cue the mandatory reference to the LinkedIn 95-5 rule; only 5% of your lovingly crafted Ideal Customer Profile and their buyers are in market.

So the socially addressable audience, buyers who are in-market, active, visible, and open to conversation, is tiny.

And… of course, if they are raising their head above the social media parapet, you can bet your competitors, using the same playbook, have noticed too.

Then, if we scroll up to point number 2 of the plan, “liking and commenting on content”, engaging with this diminishing minority assumes that they are posting content that sparks a conversation.

Of course, it’s not that, even when people post, they’re not necessarily inviting conversation.

What’s being posted is corporate PR, announcing their delight with the release of a new doohickey, hiring D.Hickey, or attending the event in Doohickey, Wisconsin**, and you’ll probably look like a dick starting a conversation with how much of a fan you are of doohickeys.

As I do right now, as I continually repeat the word doohickey.

My point is not anti-LinkedIn or against social selling as a tactic; for the right audience who choose to regularly inhabit this place, this absolutely works.

Plus, we need to think of the opportunity for success beyond this very small percentage of our audience who are active; we need to love the lurkers.

If the vast majority of active users are not posting, you have to assume they are scrolling and reading, but may never appear on your vanity metrics dashboard. What are we doing for them?

It’s about setting the right expectations and using this tactic as part of a broader mix.

Social selling works, although it's not the easy button but it only works on a very small slice of your market.

What’s your plan for the rest?

* https://www.cognism.com/blog/linkedin-statistics

** Yep, I do my research - there’s a gift shop called Doohickeys in Wisconsin Dells, WI