2021 Construction Industry Trends on LinkedIn

If you’ve dabbled in social media at all, you know that there are very few hard-and-fast rules. So much of it depends on the platform, industry, audience and objective. 

You’ve probably read dozens or even hundreds of articles on best practices to engage your audience. But do you know what’s going on in your industry?

Even though we specialize in digital marketing for construction companies, we didn’t know the norms either. What are most companies posting about? How often do they post? What sorts of content gets the most engagement? 

These are just a few of the many questions we wanted to answer. So, we took a deep dive into the raw data to figure it out.

Our Methods

First, we identified 20 top architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) companies with revenue ranging from $280 million to over $4 billion. Next, we went to their LinkedIn profiles and ordered their posts by date to look at the ten most recent posts they’d published. So, in total, we examined 200 LinkedIn posts in AEC.

Here’s what we assessed: 

• Total number of followers
• The subject matter of each post 
• Posting frequency
• Linking practices
• Video posting
• Post engagement rate
• Video views rate 
• Commenting rate
• Tagging people & accounts 
• Hashtag usage 

After meticulously completing a giant spreadsheet with all of this data, we began analyzing it to find trends and identify insights that might help other construction companies to improve their LinkedIn presence and increase engagement. 

Click on any of the topics above to jump to that section or read on to see all of our findings. 

Followers

The very first thing we looked at was how many followers each company had on LinkedIn. While these numbers don’t tell us a great deal on their own, they are crucial for determining the rate of engagement for each post. 

Findings

• The average number of followers was just over 25,000
• The range of followers was 3,000 to almost 160,000
• 50% of companies had 11,000 followers or fewer
• 15% of companies had 30,000 - 41,000 followers
• 10% of companies had over 90,000 followers

Insights

It may seem like it’s stating the obvious, but it’s usually better to have more followers. However, more followers don’t always mean a higher rate of engagement. 

For example, it’s not much use having 100,000 followers if most of them aren’t active users and never interact with your content. In that case, a smaller audience that’s more active would be preferable. 

Subject Matter

What do construction companies post about most on LinkedIn? That was one of the biggest questions on our minds when we began this research. And which sorts of posts do their followers respond to most? 

While not every single post fits neatly into a box, we were able to classify each update using these general categories: 

• Awards and achievements
• Career opportunities
• Company news
• Company culture and values
• Direct promotion of services
• Holidays
• Industry news
• Press
• Project updates
• Projects won
• Thought leadership

Findings

After classifying all 200 posts, here’s how they were distributed by category in descending order of frequency: 

• Project updates - 32% 
• Thought leadership - 16%
• Awards and achievements - 13%
• Culture and Values - 9% 
• Holidays - 9% 
• Company News - 6% 
• Direct Promotion of services - 5% 
• Career opportunities - 4% 
• Press - 4% 
• Projects won - 3% 
• Industry news - 2% 

Insights

Our biggest takeaway was that very few companies publish original thought leadership. We saw a few that linked out to events where their team members would be sharing their thoughts on industry topics. But it would be impossible to access that content without attending. 

Promoting these sorts of events via LinkedIn is essential, but so is sharing original thoughts directly on the platform. If the objective is engagement, shouldn’t companies be sharing unique content that can start authentic conversations? 

Publishing Frequency

One of the biggest things that companies focus on in social media marketing is posting frequency. Tracking this was a bit difficult because Linkedin does not share the exact post date. They display the number of hours, days, weeks, months ago each post was published. So, we noted how long ago content was posted and assigned it to a specific week.

Findings

• 15% of companies posted about five times per week
• 70% of companies posted about 2-3 times per week
• 15% of companies posted about once per week

Insights

Companies that posted more...

• Published 6-9 posts per week
• 79% of their posts usually included tags of other companies or team members
• 70% of their posts usually included hashtags

Most companies are posting two to three times a week, which is a good place to be for consistency. The interesting thing we found was that more frequent posting did not correlate with a higher rate of engagement. So, when it comes to LinkedIn, it may be best to focus on a couple of high-quality posts per week rather than stretching to post daily.
Linking

Linking

Next, we looked at how many posts included a link to the company’s website or another website. While all social posts don’t need to link out, it can be helpful in getting potential clients to learn more about your company or the topic you’re posting about. 

Findings

• 19% of posts linked back to the company’s website
• 30% of posts linked to other websites
• 52% of posts contained no link

Insights

Over 80% of posts had no links or linked to a digital asset not owned by the posting company.

Why is this significant? This limits the amount of additional insights the posting company can get about how their social users engage with their content or don’t. Also, this seems like a missed opportunity to get your audience to visit your most valuable digital asset and collect data about their actions. 

Video

No matter who you ask, anyone in marketing will tell you that video content performs better than any other type of content. According to Social Media Today, LinkedIn users are 20 times more likely to share a video on the platform than any other type of post. Yet it looks like more than half of AEC companies we examined are only publishing between 0-10% of their posts with video content. 

Findings

• Video posts accounted for only 12% of all 200 posts
• 35% of the companies didn’t publish a single video
• 20% of companies published just one video
• 45% published two or more videos
• Of the 24 videos that were posted, they received a total of over 49,000 views

Insights

So, why aren’t construction companies posting more videos on LinkedIn? Some might think video production is out of reach or not worth the effort. But it’s important to remember that video content doesn’t always have to be slickly produced. Keep in mind that your team members all have video cameras in their pockets and could all be creating content that increases your engagement. With that said we have found videos to have the most impact when they are part of a larger planned campaign.

Engagement

If a social media post is published and no one responds, does it matter?

Engagement is really where the rubber hits the road. Likes and comments tell us that our followers connect with our content, but that’s not all. Engagement begets engagement on all platforms. The more people interact with a post, the more social media platforms want to expose it to more users because their goal is to keep people on their platform so they can serve up more ads and generate more ad revenue.

Findings

To calculate the rate of engagement, we divided the total number of video views or post likes by the company’s total number of followers.

• Each LinkedIn post we examined received an average of
  • 78 likes
  • 2 comments
• The average rate of engagement was .65%
• Project update posts got the highest level of engagement with an average of .85% engagement. Some posts got as little as .08% engagement and some as much as 3.01% engagement. 
• Industry news posts had the lowest level of engagement with an average of .12% engagement.
• Posts with a video received about the same level of likes and comments as posts without videos, but videos have an added metric of views. And videos were viewed by a whopping 16% of their followers. 

Insights

When marketing professionals are writing social media posts, they might imagine all or most of their followers seeing and interacting with their posts. But the reality is that less than 1% of these companies’ followers interacted with their content. 

This may feel discouraging. However, it’s a good reminder that engagement is not guaranteed. And it’s beneficial for your company to make a study of your various types of posts and which seem to get the most engagement from your followers. Not all audiences behave the same way, so take the time to categorize your posts the way we did (or in a way that makes sense for you) and look for patterns in engagement rates to let you know which types of content are most worth your time.

Tagging People & Accounts

On every social media platform we know, you can easily tag other accounts (individuals and company pages). This is an especially relevant practice in the construction industry, where companies often work with partnering businesses. 

Findings

• Almost 60% of all posts tagged an individual or company’s LinkedIn account
• Posts that tagged an individual or page were equally likely to achieve the same levels of engagement

Insights

Although there’s not strong evidence that posts that tag other accounts get higher engagement levels, it’s still a smart practice for a couple of reasons. First, it’s just good social media etiquette to tag relevant people and businesses. Social media is about relationships at its core and tagging other people goes a long way in establishing those relationships. Furthermore, you’ll increase your exposure if the account tagged shares your post, which often happens. 

Hashtags

Once just a Twitter feature, hashtags have now expanded to every social media platform. Put simply, they’re like labels or categories for your post. And, most importantly, they can help people who don’t follow you to discover your content.

Findings 

• Usage
  • 15% of companies used hashtags in 100% of their posts.
  • 30% of companies used hashtags in 90% of their posts
  • 15% of companies used hashtags in 80% of their posts
  • 20% of companies used hashtags in 30-50% of their posts
  • 20% of companies used hashtags in 10-20% of their posts
• 65% of all posts contained one or more hashtags
• 40% of companies used hashtags in 50% or less of their social content
  • These companies received on avg 567 likes
  • These companies avg less than 1 hashtag in each post
• 60% of companies used hashtags in 80% or more of their social content
  • These companies received on avg 921 likes
  • These companies average 4 hash tags in each post
• Companies that used hashtags 80% of the time received almost 50% more likes
• Companies that used hashtags 80% of the time received almost 120% more comments
• Posts that used hashtags performed 23% better

Insights

It wasn’t a surprise that content with hashtags performed better because they gave new people a chance to find the content. Many social media users search for new, interesting content and accounts using hashtags or even follow hashtags to continually be introduced to relevant content. 

There’s really no downside to adding a few hashtags to your posts to help them get found. However, be careful about limiting yourself to only using branded hashtags (hashtags that are specific to your brand). They can be a nice addition, but they won’t help your posts be seen by anyone new since no one is searching or following those unique tags. 

What Now?

This may have left you with more questions than answers, and that’s OK. While many social media professionals have helpful tips to share that can help you do better, it’s ultimately down to experimentation and testing. 

As a first step, take some time to go through your company’s posts for the last 1-3 months - categorize posts, look at who’s following your company and identify patterns in engagement. At the very least, this should leave you with some key observations that can help guide you in refining your social content. 

Don’t forget to also look at your peers and competitors and see what they’re doing that works well. While there’s no guarantee that their strategies will work for you, it’s worth seeing if they can also boost your success. 

Most of all, keep an open mind and be willing to step outside your comfort zone by trying new approaches that may resonate with your followers.