I'm a little ashamed to admit that I have a troubled relationship with the Passle corporate LinkedIn page.

The page is a fair amount of work to maintain, alongside everything else. We have the benefit of daily, fresh content from across our business but still, posting quality content, responding to engagement and being aware of what others are saying about the brand is a daily task in a schedule with little room for it.

I've often found myself thinking if it's worth the effort. Our posts don't generate large levels of engagement but to be fair we'd much rather have them get engagement one or two of the right people than thousands of the wrong people. 

So I looked a bit deeper into the posts on our corporate account to see if the effort is worth it.

Here is where I started to get surprised. Each of our posts was reaching about 300-500 impressions. By using the right tags and the right name-checks, we're getting nice organic reach.  300 impressions might not seem like much, but 300 of the right people, twice a week all year is nothing to complain about for a few minutes' work a pop.

So I went a little further into the analytics.

I found that the 300 impressions on LinkedIn (that are worth something by themselves) translated into nearly 40 reads of that content. Those 40 people we know are the right people - there's no other reason they are looking at #professionalservicesmarketing and reading a post on why professional services websites are hard to build.

So with just a few minutes' work, we've totalled over 300 impressions, 30 reads and 5 engagements (likes or comments) - from the right people. Not too shabby.

I looked at a random selection of posts and found that this pattern is relatively consistent. 

This lines up with research into the 1% rule for social media. For every 1 person engaging, there are 10 people reading quietly and digesting your message and 100 people that see your message.

WHAT'S THE POINT?

So I had a couple of takeaways from this - in order of how important they are.

1. More people are reached by using LinkedIn than I thought
2. Using the right tags in a post makes a huge difference to reach, reads and engagements
3. For a few minutes of work, a social post nets us a great impression in the right market, a decent number of reads and some engagement
4. This effort easily adds up across a year to a great amount of engagement with exact people we want to engage

Perhaps most importantly in all this was the reminder that sometimes as marketers we need to take a little step back and analyse our efforts. Whether our findings are good or bad, understanding the impact of our actions is critical.