Funds’ social strategies have leaned on posting only to corporate LinkedIn pages. Recent audience engagement trends prove why that’s dating fast.
Social media analytics have always been a tough nut to crack for funds. Views, impressions and clicks can be seldom, while IRs and marketers would be pushing for direct-to-investor messages sparked by whatever content they post to their firm’s page.
But this ‘main page’ is proving not to be the headline act. In a recent LinkedIn study analysing over 600,000 posts over 63,000 accounts, company profiles were pitted against personals to judge the difference. The gap was wider than could be predicted:
- Engagement rates on personal pages averaged 2.60%, compared to 1.74% on company pages.
- Text posts on the former generated 2.86 times more impressions than company profiles, when promoting the very same content.
- Personal pages draw around 238% more comments per post.
- Another benchmark study discovered organic company page posts make up only around 2% of an average LinkedIn feed.
Any funds’ channel strategy has to be rethought in light of this. It’s less an algorithmic quirk, and more a definitive challenge to the assumption that investors only want to see their market analysis, fund launches or hire announcements from a ‘business profile.’
So, what does this mean for fund marketers?
The corporate page should be only one distribution arm for a firm. Video commentaries and blog posts can be shared from portfolio managers, CIOs, IRs and other executives to give an authentic ‘human’ voice to any website-hosted piece of content. This helps involve many of a hedge fund or asset manager’s pool of experts that investors will want to hear from.
What is more striking now is that a corporate-page-only strategy is definitively limiting, with the platform’s algorithm suppressing plenty of thought leadership altogether.
Instead, having it posted, reshared, or tagged by a firm’s named individuals can automatically open up each resource’s chance of being amplified and digested by LPs.
Of course, there is a compliance caveat here. A firm so tightly regulated cannot always let personal posts run away too far, and step over the line for firm-branded content (as made clear by the SEC Marketing Rule). In this case, a documented review and resign-off process helps evade any potential compliance trouble before it starts.
To remain competitive in the crowded (and restrictive) LinkedIn space, the advantage will be in the hands of firms that leverage two or three personal-profile distribution channels. This then becomes the basic infrastructure for tailored social-based outreach, and a workflow to be replicated and grow with increasing LP appetite, being compliant all the way.
