For many brands, LinkedIn is a key social media channel–especially B2B brands, where LinkedIn can be a key awareness, engagement and even lead driver.

For the most part, companies are squarely focused on one audience when it comes to their LinkedIn content: customers.

And according to the data (and audit results I’ve done recently) I see recently, one audience is almost always being overlooked.

Employees.

LinkedIn says a whopping 30% of a brand page’s engagement comes from employees.

That same LinkedIn survey also says employees are 14 times more likely to share content from their employers than other types of content on LinkedIn.

In the social media audits I’ve done over the last few years, I almost always notice a big chunk of the comments on most posts are coming from employees of the company. I’ve never done the math on this (what percentage is employees vs. customers/potential customers/etc.), but if I had to guess it would easily be north of 50% employee comments.

What’s more, a recent Morning Consult survey claims people believe CEOs should be prioritizing the well-being and interests of their employees over all other audiences. In fact, 48% said just that vs. just 8% who said CEOs should be focusing on company shareholders!

This jives with the current environment, right? What did we hear, quite loudly, when all those folks were laid off at Facebook and Twitter recently? Were they being taken care of. What were the benefit and comp packages they were receiving. People were concerned that those employees were OK. That’s a big focus right now.

And sure, much of this communication with employees happens behind the firewall. Messages on corporate intranet sites, emails and town halls are all in play and are key strategies for reaching employee audiences.

But, LinkedIn can be a channel for this, too. And companies would be wise to take advantage.

Think about the numbers. The number of LinkedIn users is up from 604M before the pandemic in 2019 to 810 in 2022. And 48.5% of users in the U.S. use LinkedIn at least once a month.

So, what could this mean in terms of execution?

Couldn’t brands devote 20% of their LinkedIn content to targeting employee audiences? This could be content internal comms has already developed for internal audiences–just putting an external wrapper on it. Again, think about the programs and benefits your company has in place to support employees. Could be promoting and talking about corporate fitness and well-being programs designed to keep employees healthy–wouldn’t that make sense to talk about publicly? Or, what about what your company is doing on the DE&I front–even if it is baby steps?

Leadership can also play a role here. More leaders are now active on LinkedIn, but much like company pages, many are focused on customers with their messages. Why not use a handful of those posts a year to target employees? Why not have a specific video message thanking employees during the holiday season? Again, why not repurpose internal comms with an external wrapper focusing on messages that talk about the way the org is supporting employees? Or, what about simply taking a page out of H&R Block’s Jeff Jones’ book and actively liking and commenting on employee content regularly? All would make a big difference on putting the focus on employees.

Bottom line: Companies have a big opportunity with LinkedIn to use it (a little) as a tool to communicate with employees in a bit different way than they normally do.