Linkedin Groups: "Members" Numbers vs. Real Audience - Structural Engineering (CAE/FEA) Groups as an Example

Recently, I posted a series of Linkedin posts with my article about open-source FEA. The statistics of these posts were somewhat counterintuitive but consistent with some of my long-term observations on Linkedin. This is not only seen in engineering Linkedin groups but also in other topics and is worth exploring in more detail. So I guess some analysis of this data would be interesting for those who work with Linkedin groups and are trying to find the most perspective groups for participation (and these are not always the groups with the largest number of members).

Generally, it turned out that the popularity of posts in a group correlates very weakly with the number of group members. In many Linkedin groups, 99%+ of group members are actually inactive and group posts don't reach them.

Below is the data on the number of views of my posts and the number of subscribers in 10 groups where I made these posts (5 groups are public and 5 are private listed). In 7 of these cases, the post reach (percetage of group members who viewed the post) was less than 1%. Only in 3 groups (all them are public) posts actually got the expected reach - of 5% to 17% of the group's members.

Here are the links to these posts in groups, as well as numbers of posts views, groups members, and  post reaches (I made this as a couple of lists instead of a table to make it easier to repost in Linkedin Pulse and easier to view on mobile):

Public groups posts:

• Computational Mechanics Research
  3,517 views / 24,457 members = 14.38% reach
• New Trends in CAE Simulation
  2,352 views / 13,796 members = 17.05% reach
• STRUCTURAL ENGINEERS
  1,612 views / 269,661 members = 0.60% reach
• Numerical Methods
  624 views / 10,925 members = 5.71% reach
• CAD/CAM/CAE Professional Network Group
  268 views / 27,974 members = 0,96% reach

Private Listed groups posts (are only available for group members, post content is the same):

• Ansys Users Group
  357 views / 56,052 members = 0.64% reach
  
• Finite Element Analysis (FEA)
  260 views / 36,400 members = 0.71% reach
• Finite Element Analysis
  170 views / 24,444 members = 0,70% reach
• Automotive Engineers
  162 views / 67,800 members = 0.24% reach
• MSC-Nastran
  52 views / 6,479 member = 0.63% reach

Thus, the number of group members actually does not correlate with the real size of the community. To evaluate the real popularity of a group, it is necessary to analyze other parameters as well.

A good indicator of real traffic in a group is the presence of posts with at least several likes or several comments. It should not be expected that all posts would have likes or comments, but the complete absence of such posts in a group indicates its very low traffic - if there is traffic in the group, then at least sometimes such posts should appear.

Also, the privacy of the group suggests that it probably has much lower traffic as compared to similar public groups - all private groups above had posts reach below 1%. Working with private groups is further complicated by the fact that without being a member, you can only get the number of its members and a list of your contacts who are its members. To analyze everything else, it is necessary to be a member of such a group.