This is a recording from a webinar that was broadcast on 27th February 2026.

In this webinar we explore the differences that exist in posting participation on LinkedIn across job functions, job titles, seniority, company size and tenure.

Crucially we show the clear and consistent relationship that this all has with company growth rates, and what business leaders can do to increase participation among their employees.

You can view the full webinar recording along with accompanying slides here.

And you know, we'll get there eventually. You're gonna have to bear with me. But spoiler alert, yes, it absolutely does. And I'll be taking you through the data that proves it throughout this webinar. There is absolutely no shortage of advice about what content you might be posting, how the algorithm works, how to build a personal brand, what thought leadership content should include, all that sort of stuff.

What's quite rare is just stepping back and looking at the macro picture of participation itself. It's all about who's posting, who doesn't, and whether there's any consistent patterns that we can observe. Don't worry. This session isn't about telling everyone that they should

It is not about that. It's about understanding what LinkedIn activity seems to signal about businesses that are growing versus those that aren't. And as marketing leaders, as commercial leaders, what you might want to be doing about it. So keep the structure pretty simple. Um, first we're gonna be looking at just why LinkedIn matters at all, not in theory, but in terms of some reach and commercial relevance.

Um, all backed up by data. I'll give you a little bit of an intro, uh, about me and my journey to using LinkedIn and, and what my company ClickPop does. Uh, and after that we'll get into the data itself. Data's all about who posts how often, how that varies by role, et cetera, et cetera. And then finally, we'll pull this all back together into what commercial teams should realistically be taking away from this session, what you should realistically be doing afterwards, rather than just a generic post, more type advice.

It's not a niche. Or optional platform. There's over a billion members globally. More than 67 million companies are represented on there. In the UK alone, there's 45 million members, which means that basically LinkedIn reaches pretty much everybody with a white collar type job and more, uh, you'll almost certainly have a, a LinkedIn profile if you are in a sort of office type role.

Importantly, it's not just about passive usage either. So 54% of members log in, uh, at least weekly. So people aren't just creating a profile and forgetting about them. They're actually, uh, going into the platform and, and consuming the content that's on there. And then from a commercial perspective, two stats really stand out.

So first of all. 80% of LinkedIn users describe themselves as having influence over business decisions. So that doesn't mean,

It doesn't tell us how they, they've achieved it, but it does tell us that value is being created on the platform. Uh, for, for their, uh, organisation. So LinkedIn clearly matters. Uh, when I share these slides round later on, uh, you'll be able to see all the links to the different sources behind these, just in case you don't believe me.

So it's about then, um, it's, this is a screenshot of a project that I posted on Upwork in the very, very, very early days of LinkedIn.

So. That's interesting to recognize that. Now, at the time, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I don't think it even existed. Uh, it certainly didn't allow you to filter by, uh, people who had recently changed jobs. So what I did was I had a, uh, software developer build me a tool that scraped the careers pages of every website that I pointed it at, looking for mentions of vacancies that were along the lines of HR manager or head of HR or HR director, just to give me a heads up.

Because I was running the marketing team there. Give me a heads up as to who we should be targeting our sales and marketing efforts towards now. Eventually LinkedIn

That principle is that when a business makes a purchase at its core, it's still people buying from other people. More often than not those businesses and those people are gonna be giving off some kind of signal. It could be a signal that's online, it might be offline, but it might be on social media as well.

But giving off some kind of signal, that means we can target both our paid and organic marketing to them and their colleagues to help us sell more. And that's really the genesis of, of ClickPop. Um, so ClickPop is a LinkedIn first marketing agency that helps B2B companies to generate more demand, convert more pipeline into sales revenue, and grow existing customer accounts through smarter, more strategic use of LinkedIn.

We've developed a whole. Bunch. A whole array of unique

But crucially, human connection is what turns LinkedIn visibility into revenue.

And that brings us really onto the main topic for the day, which is a look at some of the data that we've been analyzing that's gonna shine a light on what you'll want your commercial teams to be doing on LinkedIn if you want them to support your company's growth. So this study uses data from LinkedIn's sales navigator tool, so it's LinkedIn's own data.

Anyone can go out there and and find it. We've just made the effort to go and do so, and it takes a deliberately narrow approach. So rather than analyzing content quality and engagement outreach, that's maybe gonna come in future webinars. Today is

And how does that vary by role, by seniority, by length of tenure, company size, and growth. In theory, if posting were primarily a function of sort of personality or enthusiasm, then participation, you would expect to be relatively evenly distributed and they'd only be pretty modest clustering by role or company.

If instead the converse is happening. If posting on LinkedIn is shaped more by context, by what someone does, where they sit, the culture of their employer, the conditions around them, how well they're incentivized, then you'd expect there to be real structural patterns that start emo emerging. And they do.

It's really, really obvious. It's plain as day, and when we get into the data, you'll, you'll see it across the data set. The likelihood that someone's posted in the last 30 days varies really sharply between groups. However you

So before we get into how posting on LinkedIn is related to an organisation's growth, I'll give you a bit of background then to the different segments that we looked at. 'cause it builds a bit of a backstory as to what's going on behind the scenes and then eventually what we might do as marketers about that.

So this slide looks at the percentage of employees who've posted. Anything on LinkedIn in the last 30 days it's broken down by organisation size and by the function that LinkedIn has classified that person as being in, and it highlights a couple of interesting things. So the first thing is that there is significant differences between functions and their participation on LinkedIn.

People within the business development function, they're about three to five times more likely to have posted in the last 30 days than people working in, say, customer success or admin

It was between six and 10% of people classified as being in the sales function, actually posted anything in the last 30 days. It does vary from organisation to organisation size. But look, if there's any chief commercial officers or CEOs or sales directors on the webinar, I would bet you would want your sales teams to be generating demand and nurturing opportunities on LinkedIn a lot more than this.

Data suggests that they probably are. And then one of the strongest patterns that emerges is related to the size of the organisation, so across pretty much every function. Excuse me, across pretty much every function, participation drops as organisations

Now, um, analyzing functions, that's kind of, it's interesting. Um, but functions themselves, they're derived by LinkedIn using a whole load of different signals. So, um, the sorts of things LinkedIn might be looking at to, to classify someone as being in a particular function are things like, yes, their job title, but also how they describe themselves, the company that they work for, their career, history, et cetera, et cetera.

To get really precise about it. We then looked at job titles directly here. The pattern becomes really quite clear, so founders, CEOs, chief marketing officers, chief commercial officers, they post far more frequently than middle

So sales titled roles, they consistently show much lower participation than say, business development or sales development. So it looks like these roles are definitely using LinkedIn to generate demand, but once it gets handed over to the sales teams, the sales roles, the people who are, are supposed to be closing the opportunities, they are largely failing to use LinkedIn to nurture the opportunities in the pipeline.

So the previous slide, uh, indicated some, some differences then between seniority just based on job titles, but you can isolate using LinkedIn. You can isolate seniority on its own, regardless of function, regardless of job title. And there's a real clear drop off. The more senior someone is, the more likely they are to have participated in LinkedIn in the last 30 days.

Typically about four to five times more likely than someone who's in a more junior role. Now that could be about motivation. So you might expect, say that the

It could also be that just understanding more about the nuts and bolts of the organisation. Really matters. So you might expect, for example, the chief finance Officer, they're going to understand more about the amount of investment that's gone into developing a new product. The market research behind it, the benefits that it's going to make to the customers, the users, the difference that it's gonna make to the future of the company, the long term success of the company, because they'll have been involved in the sign off process when committing budget to actually develop these new products and services.

It will all have been discussed in board meetings. So in turn they are going to have a very clear. So understanding and something interesting to say compared to, say someone more junior who's perhaps on the front lines, maybe they're speaking with prospects daily, maybe they're speaking with, customers daily, but all they've been given is a, short training session and a battle card about the sorts of things to

Someone who's a CFO that's been involved in those deep discussions, that's been able to question and, pull, it things apart a little bit and just really understand what's going on behind the scenes. They're much more likely to have something interesting to say. So they're not just regurgitating or, liking a post from the company's brand page, but they've actually got their own interpretations and value to.

add On LinkedIn when it comes to posting about it, it is probably also got something to do with psychological safety. So senior people, I would say, are less likely to feel like they're gonna be criticized or corrected publicly or punished for saying the wrong thing on social media. I've certainly been aware of businesses where there's been rules from on high from the senior leadership that nobody in the business was allowed to post anything on LinkedIn about the company unless it had been approved by a senior leader, a director, or the marketing team.

And surprise, nobody ever posted anything because of that. horrible situation. But you can, imagine that if you're working in that type of environment, the likelihood of you actually taking part

So this slide looks at data from UK organisations in the software and technology sector, so they're unlikely to be in customer facing roles. Uh, or consumer facing roles, sorry. Um, and therefore because they're selling to other businesses, being present on LinkedIn will have an impact on sales. So for this slide, it's looking at mid-size businesses in the UK that have got between 51 and 500 employees, and we've then split them out by whether that business has grown its headcount by at least 30% in the last year, in which case we've considered them to be a high growth company.

Or if their head count's grown by less than 1%, or sorry, 1% or less. Um, so it's gonna include some companies where they've just stayed stagnant or perhaps they're even shrinking. Then we are considering them to be a slow growth

You can imagine that companies which are hiring new staff at those sorts of rates are financially stable. They've got product market fit, they've got a product that's in demand. They're attracting new investment that they're investing into their own headcount, so they've got the capacity to deal with future growth, et cetera, et cetera, and across every job title that we analyzed.

People in high growth organisations were more likely to be posting on LinkedIn for some roles. That difference is absolutely huge. Job titles that contain sales or account executive or account manager in high growth companies were around twice as likely to have posted than their peers in slow growth businesses.

So that's the biggest gap between fast and slow growth companies. So while CEOs and MDs in those fast growth companies, they do post more than in slow growth companies, the difference seems to be less impactful than, than the

We'll come onto that in a bit more detail later on, but the consistency of the pattern's quite hard to ignore.

That same pattern holds when we look at enterprise organisations as well. So we defined enterprise businesses as having a thousand or more employees for this size business. We defined high growth as having grown headcount by 10% or more in the last 12 months. Obviously, it's a lot harder for an organisation with thousands of employees to be growing at 30%, so we lowered the bar a little bit.

For enterprise businesses, absolute participation rates overall are a bit lower. That fits with what we looked at in the earlier slides. But even so high growth enterprises, they still see materially higher participation across job titles, even in environments. Then for large growth organisations, sorry for larger organisations even.

Even though our data shows as companies get bigger,

That's kind of interesting. That's an interesting insight because it sort of helps to shape where we might go with that, uh, and what actions we might take in the future.

So it is interesting, I think to acknowledge then that the employees in fast growth companies are more likely to have posted on LinkedIn in the last month. So I was just then trying to test different hypotheses as to why that might be. And the first one that I wanted to test was, well, maybe people who post on LinkedIn regularly.

Maybe they've got

So this slide, then it tests that theory. It tests that hypothesis. It looks at the median number of connections per employee that have a sales or business development or account exec job title. And by looking at the median, it removes the effect of any outliers that have got like 50,000 connections on their own.

It's only looking at the median, so it's smoothing it out. And it's split four ways. So it's split between has someone posted in the last 30 days or not, and are they working for a high growth or a low growth organisation? It tells us a couple of things. Yes, there is absolutely a difference between network size amongst people who've posted on LinkedIn versus those who haven't.

Those who have posted have networks roughly twice as large than those who haven't.

Companies that, uh, that, that we analyzed, there is effectively no meaningful correlation between network size and whether that person works in a fast growth company. So in other words, fast growth organisations, they don't appear to be full of people who are just somehow better set up on LinkedIn in a structural sense.

They don't have meaningfully larger networks. They don't have a built-in advantage when it comes to reach. So network size in its own doesn't explain the relationship we're seeing between employee posting behavior and company growth. What really seems to matter is the behavior once they are on LinkedIn.

Another explanation I wanted to test was whether fast growth companies just simply have more stuff to talk about. So you'd expect a company that's growing really quickly, they're gonna

If the company's got more things to be talking about, they're gonna be posting more and therefore it should be easier for employees to follow suit. So what we did is we looked at the median number of posts per company page over a four week period, and we see something kind of counterintuitive. So fast growth companies actually posted slightly.

less Than slow growth companies on average. So that weakens the argument. Then that posting behavior is simply about having more stuff to talk about. Again, it seems that context matters more than convenience. And continuing with the idea of having something post worthy to share. We looked at whether someone had changed jobs in the last 90 days or not, so you might be familiar if you've changed jobs recently.

LinkedIn actively nudges people with ready-made prompts and posts that they can use when they move roles. It's easy, it's kind of pre-written, it's socially encouraged, and of course people want to announce that they're in a, in a new role.

Look, the, the effect is very, very clear. It's really, really obvious. People who've changed jobs are far more likely to have posted across sales and business development roles. Part participation rates are about. 50% following a job change significantly higher than the baseline posting rate. So yes, having something post worthy to share and having it within it in reach, it really, really, really does matter.

But it doesn't explain everything because the growth pattern persists even when we look beyond recent movers. This I, this slide extends the idea a bit further. Instead of just asking whether someone changed jobs recently, we then looked at how long they had been enrolled or been in the same company.

There's a really, really clear, consistent trend. The longer someone's been enrolled, the less likely they are to have posted in the last 30 days. That declines pretty gradual, but it's persistent from under a year to one year to two years, to three years and beyond. It's

Same for how long they've been in the same company, even if they've changed roles, uh, whilst they've been in that particular business. And at this point it's kind of worth pausing and asking why that might be. Maybe it's to do with motivation dropping. So you could imagine, for example, a salesperson who's been in role for 10 years.

They're probably well established, seen as a safe pair of hands. It's the sort of salesperson that when the golden opportunity phones up and says, oh, you know, I'm, I'm the perfect fit business for you. We are desperate for a new system. We've gotta sign by next week. 'cause that's when our new budget starts.

You're going to pass that on to your best sales person because it's the best opportunity for them and you know that they're gonna gonna close and win it rather than, than someone who's kind of new enroll and they don't really know everything that they might know about the products and services that you've got to offer.

That sales person, that sales person's probably not struggling to make quota if they've been enrolled for 10 years. It might also be that those people who stick in role

Excuse me.

So from there then an obvious question is, look, perhaps fast growth companies, maybe they've got commercial teams who post more simply because they're more likely to have hired someone recently. Again, we can get rid of that as well because in this chart, we've stripped out anyone who's been in the company or in the same role for less than a year, and employees in commercial roles at high growth companies.

They still participate about 30% more than in slow growth companies. We can get even more granular. So this chart then shows the difference between employees based on their tenure in the company and role. So whether they work for a high growth or a low growth company, again, it's looking at, organisations with between 51 and 500 employees.

The chart focuses on commercial roles.

So. I'm just gonna sort of pause for a moment and just emphasize the, uh, the idea or the fact I suppose that everything I've mentioned so far, it's a correlation and it doesn't prove causation. So to explain a little bit about the images that have popped up on screen, firefighters, you might expect to see firefighters around burning buildings.

That doesn't mean that firefighters go around setting fire to buildings, and you might expect to see lots of umbrellas when it's raining, but that doesn't mean that when people put umbrellas up that it causes rain. A bit like that. This data can't prove, it can't prove whether posting on LinkedIn causes growth

It might be that both are shaped by other factors. Well, we know that they are. It's not just gonna be about LinkedIn. There's some plausible explanations. It might be that people in fast growth companies, it might be that they're just happier and prouder to promote where they work. It could be that if you work for a fast growth company, that's a successful business.

Maybe. Maybe that business is attracting better quality hires who instinctively understand how to communicate value to their customers. Perhaps faster growth companies, maybe they've got clearer positioning. Maybe it's easier for employees to know what to say. Well, it might just be that those businesses they've invested in systems and guardrails and processes, perhaps they, they're giving their sales teams templates and guidelines and advocacy programs that make people feel safe about posting.

Maybe it's sort of incentivized to actually post something in the first place. With all that said, from what we've looked at, we can rule out a few things as well. We don't think it's gonna be leadership modeling because we saw in the data, um, CEO

So we can kind of maybe rule that one out a bit. We also don't think it's because fast growth companies have got more to talk about because we looked at the posting rates on company pages split by fast and growth and slow growth businesses as well. We also ruled out newness of higher, the length of tenure at faster growth companies.

'cause we've seen the differences persist even when we account for that as well. So while we can't prove that it's participation causing growth or growth causing participation, the truth is it's probably a bit of both. The posting, particularly by commercial teams, the, people working closest to the coalface, closest to the market, it's their activity on LinkedIn can cause their businesses to be more likely to grow.

And at the same time that companies that are growing are more likely to employ and foster a commercial team that's gonna post more often. So even without

Awareness for the brand in the market increases. Familiarity in the market increases with that person and with that brand, trust is gonna build faster. People are going to understand the problems that these businesses and these people are able to solve. They might not even be aware that they were experiencing that problem, but they see a post that really chimes them and they go, oh yeah, actually I'm suffering from that issue as well.

Perhaps I'll look into it further. All of that activity that makes outbound outreach more effective. 'cause prospects already recognize that salesperson that face that brand, it's likely gonna improve the win rates in existing pipeline as well. It's

And then for existing customers, if you are seeing regular posts about things like product updates and fixes and relevant events or webinars that you might wanna attend. The likelihood of you actually understanding that and using that product or attending that event. It's going to increase, it's gonna increase the relevance of that brand to you and subsequently your stickiness.

And none of this guarantees growth on its own, but all taken together, it helps to explain why posting shows up so consistently alongside it.

So what can we do about it? And we've seen some really consistent relationships in the data that posting behavior, particularly among commercially facing roles, varies dramatically depending on the context and it's consistently associated with the business's growth. We've ruled out a few easy explanations.

So number one, educate your people about the benefits of being active on LinkedIn, particularly if they're in a commercial role. Explain to them what the data shows. Look at your own data. If you've got salespeople consistently missing quota, dig into their data and see what's going on. How are they using LinkedIn as part of their toolkit?

are they using it at all? If they are using it, are they just posting sales message after sales message that, that people are gonna ignore? If so, they're gonna, they're gonna fail. If all they're doing is the easy route of liking a corporate post on the company page, they're probably not going to be getting the most value out of LinkedIn either.

Number two, make it really easy to post. We saw that when LinkedIn makes posting easy, for example, if you've got a job change.

Do your sales teams have prompts, examples, templates, starting points, or are they just expected to stare at blank box on the screen and somehow produce thought leadership content? Most people in business development, most people in sales, they're not going to be sat there for half an hour trying to craft the perfect message.

Let's try and make it easy for them, as well as making it easy. Let's make it safe. We saw very clearly that junior and mid-level roles post far less often than senior leaders, and that's unlikely to be because they just lack the capability or capacity to do it. It's much more likely to be about risk.

People really worry about saying the wrong thing about being corrected publicly or stepping outside some kind of invisible line. Put some training in place, give them some guardrails. give them permission. Safety doesn't mean just giving them control. Give them the confidence, give them the

The longer that someone stays in role, the less likely they are to post. That doesn't mean that they care less about the business, but for whatever reason, motivation clearly fades without reinforcement. It may be that one of the reasons senior leaders post more is because they're motivated. They're motivated by visibility, by influence and growth.

And similarly, the business development team, they consistently post more than any other function. It's not 'cause they've got nothing better to do, but they're hungry, they're rewarded for initiating conversations. So the question is, how do you connect those same motivations for the rest? Of your teams, can you build it into performance reviews?

Can you build little bonus payments around it? Can you create little in-house competitions and leaderboards? Whatever you do, how can you motivate those teams? 'cause it matters. The relationship that we've seen between posting behavior, participation on LinkedIn and growth, it's really strong, really consistent.

You don't need everyone posting every day, but just if your commercial teams are completely invisible on LinkedIn, you are leaving awareness, you're leaving trust, and

Look, hope. Hopefully you found this interesting and useful. if it's raised some questions for you about your own business and how your sales teams are using LinkedIn, I'm offering a free audit about just about how well your business and how well your teams are using LinkedIn. So we'll look at participation, and commercial roles and how you're stacking up against your competitors and will include some practical takeaways so that LinkedIn can work harder for your business as well.

If you wanna go ahead with it, there's no obligation to do anything afterwards. You'll just get some useful insights and some guidance on what you might wanna do. So if you're interested, connect with me so you can scan the QR code or, Richter's quite a unique surname and you won't struggle to find me on LinkedIn if you, just type that in.

So if you're interested, connect with me on LinkedIn or reply to the follow up email that I'll send. and we'll take it from there. Many