10 September, 2019 | 1 minute read

More people read your LinkedIn posts than you think

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Samuel Page

Marketing Director

Get in touch

Samuel Page

Marketing Director

There's an interesting rule of thumb that is useful for understanding the reach of a post on a social network like LinkedIn or Twitter.

It's known as the 1% rule. Only 1% of the users of a site will create new content - the other 99% are passive participants, reading and observing but not engaging. This is often described as "lurking".

The 1% rule is consistent across knowledge sharing sites and forums of all shapes, sizes and legal statuses. Somewhere in between the lurkers and power users are those that engage fairly often. This is called the 1-9-90 principle.

In principle, for every one person that writes a post, there are roughly 9 people "liking" and commenting - but there is a vast number of people (90) who read and digest your information without you ever knowing.

If those are the right 90 people - then you are in business.

In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk. Variants include the 1–9–90 rule (sometimes 90–9–1 principle or the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.

en.wikipedia.org/...