Businesses fail to engage LinkedIn users

by Stratton Craig

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While the vast majority of big businesses have established a presence on LinkedIn, many of them are failing to use it to their best advantage, thus missing out on a number of opportunities, a new survey from Sociagility suggests.
The study found that just one in five companies in the FTSE 100 are actively using their LinkedIn accounts to engage users of the social networking site by making at least one status update a month. Overall, 96% of the FTSE 100 businesses have a profile on LinkedIn and between them they have 2.6 million followers and 978,000 employee accounts.
However, over a period of one week very few of them (12%) actually manage to engage these users by moving them to ‘like’ or comment on a status update. This suggests that the majority of companies miss out on important opportunities, as the survey found that every single company that posted an update over a period of 30 days recorded some sort of engagement from LinkedIn members. Among the businesses that listed products or services, 87.5% were found to be recommended by other users.
Overall, fewer than one in four FTSE 100 companies have listed the services or products they offer on their profile pages. The number of companies that updated their status over a seven-day period was even smaller – just 13%.
Commenting on the findings, Josh Graff, director of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions EMEA, said that even though four in five UK professionals have established a presence on LinkedIn, many businesses are still not using the social platform to its full potential.