Shifts in LinkedIn strategy are another ‘death and taxes’ certainty, where heeding engagement research can point funds toward effective changes.
For much of the last decade, fund marketing teams have seen the build-up of page followers on the professional network as a key metric of reach. Global asset managers and multi-strategy hedge funds sit in the tier of being large, established profiles. Unfortunately, it is a tier where growth is slowing.
Across a report into 1.3 million posts (from more than 16,000 active business pages) pages of all sizes have seen their average follower growth fall. But those with a 100,000 to 1 million range have plummeted: 21.6% to just 6.4% year or year.
That’s cause for concern, as are the unpredictable ways that once-popular post formats are falling out of fashion.
Interestingly, video views have dropped 36% across every page size. Text-only posts are underperforming, as they have continually.
Link posts – popular formats for funds sharing web-hosted factsheets, whitepapers, etc. – are an ill-performing format with around 3.3% engagement.
What’s proving most fruitful, though, are native documents. This includes PDFs and carousels uploaded directly to LinkedIn: ideal formats for infographics, screenshotted long-form commentary pieces and quarterly updates which lead the ‘Format League Table’ with a 7% engagement rate.
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
This format could be where funds can unlock LinkedIn’s secretly effective engagement gains, rather than the traditional ‘Headline, with outsourced link’ method that is fairly arbitrary, as suggested by current posting trends.
Luckily, native documents fit investment content well. Aesthetically on one hand, for being able to transpose quantitative and qualitative information easily via carousels. But also in regulatory terms, too. Content is immediately transparent, time-stamped, and contains all relevant disclosures then-and-there on LinkedIn posts without directing investors anywhere else.
This finding can also guide where to spend on social media in upcoming marketing budget planning. Company pages are already less performant than the individual pages of a firm’s employees, and the follower count KPI obsession is shrinking in the ROI department. Fund pages may find they are already large, and should shift tactics and investment to producing and distributing these more-clickable content formats.
Abandoning LinkedIn would be a mistake, as it stands as a unique platform where one compliant post may actually reach an institutional or RIA audience directly. A dynamic switch to native documents may be a quick fix to the social media engagement conundrum that continues to hinder IR and marketing teams today.
Source
Socialinsider, “LinkedIn Organic Benchmarks 2026”
