Let’s just rip the Band-Aid off: LinkedIn business pages are about as alive as your Myspace login. And if you’ve been pouring time, effort, and budget into your company’s page hoping for organic reach, I hate to be the bearer of LinkedIn’s brutal algorithmic truth—but you’re screaming into a void.
Meanwhile, your intern posts a blurry selfie captioned “First day at the new gig!!!” and it gets 487 likes, 62 comments, and a job offer from Google.
What gives?
Let’s break it down.
LinkedIn’s Algorithm: Playing Favorites Like a Nepo Baby
LinkedIn’s algorithm is designed to favor people. Real people. With real job titles, career moves, opinions, and—let’s be honest—half-baked thought leadership posts that start with “Not sure who needs to hear this, but…”
Here’s what’s happening behind the blue curtain:
✅ Personal Profiles Get the Juice
- Average engagement rate for personal posts: 3.2%
- Average engagement rate for business page posts: 0.5%
Let that sink in. Your company’s beautifully branded, committee-approved post gets a couple of pity likes—one from Susan in HR and one from your old intern who’s trying to stay in your orbit just in case. Meanwhile, your CEO’s shaky iPhone clip about “what leadership really means” racks up thousands of views.
🚨 Reach Is Capped on Pages
LinkedIn throttles the reach of business page posts unless:
- You pay.
- You pay more.
- Just kidding, you need to pay again.
Even followers of your company page might never see your posts. LinkedIn shows them to just 2–6% of your followers organically. It’s like inviting 1,000 people to your wedding and only letting 20 into the venue… if they brought a gift.
Are Business Pages Pointless? Not Entirely.
Before you light a match and delete your page in a blaze of glorious rebellion, there’s still some value.
What They’re Good For:
- Credibility: You still need a company page so your employees don’t look like they work at a sketchy basement startup when they list their job.
- Ads: You need one to run LinkedIn ads. Period.
- Showroom: It’s a brand billboard, even if no one’s really looking at it unless you pull them in.
But if you think business pages are your content engine, you’re using a Swiss Army knife as a jackhammer.
So What Should You Be Doing Instead?
🧠 Use Your People.
Your employees, your leadership, even your weirdly inspirational project manager who ends every email with “onward”—they’re your new media network. Equip them. Guide them. For the love of B2B, enable them to post.
Here’s the punchline:
People trust people, not logos. People engage with people, not PR-approved platitudes.
💥 Go Native, Go Niche
You want reach? Start with thought leadership that’s actually thought-provoking.
You want brand awareness? Start with individual voices.
You want conversions? Ads. Run them. Stop being cute.
Will LinkedIn kill business pages altogether? No.
Will they strangle organic reach so much that your page is a glorified Yellow Pages listing? Absolutely.
So post that company update if you must. But if you want visibility, reach, engagement, or—God forbid—actual results, you’d better get personal. Or get ignored.
