Likes are down. Comments are down. Shares are down. Engagement is up. All four are true at the same time on LinkedIn right now, and the explanation changes how you should read your own numbers.
Metricool’s 2026 LinkedIn Study analysed 673,658 posts from 63,108 accounts, comparing January and February this year against the same period a year earlier. Likes fell 13%, comments 17%, shares 10%. Overall engagement rose 14%.
The gap is clicks. LinkedIn counts a click as an interaction, and a click is invisible from the outside. Nobody scrolling past your post can see it. It lands in your analytics and nowhere else. Engagement is holding up because people are quietly reading and clicking, not because anyone is publicly endorsing you.
The part that should worry a business owner
Only 6.89% of LinkedIn company pages gained enough followers to move up a tier last year. Ninety-three percent of pages posted through the whole year and finished roughly where they started.
Meanwhile, personal profiles generate 63% higher engagement than company pages at every account size, and 238% more comments per post. They also post more often, 3.05 times a week against 2.34.
Put those together and the conclusion is uncomfortable for anyone who has spent two years building a company page. The page is not where LinkedIn distribution lives. People are.
What we are seeing locally
On the South African company pages we manage, the click pattern is more pronounced than the study suggests. Across one page in January and February: sixteen posts, roughly 7,700 impressions, about 300 reactions, fourteen comments, and about 350 link clicks.
Clicks outnumbered reactions. They outnumbered comments by roughly twenty-five to one. If you judged that page on its comment count you would conclude nobody was paying attention. The click data says something close to the opposite.
Follower growth over the same two months was about 3.4%. Steady, and nowhere near a tier change. Entirely consistent with the 93% figure.
What we would do about it
Stop reporting LinkedIn on reactions. If your monthly report leads with likes and comments, it is measuring the part of LinkedIn that is shrinking. Clicks, and what happens after the click, reflect intent.
Give the founder a voice, not just the company a page. This is the finding South African businesses resist most, and it is the one with the largest effect. A company page is useful for credibility. A person is what gets distributed.
Ask questions in posts. Posts including a question get 77% more comments. Small change, measurable effect, and comments are the one public signal still worth having.
Treat day one as the whole game. Nearly 40% of a post’s interactions arrive on the first day. A post nobody tends on day one has already peaked.
And if you are looking at partnering with someone who has an audience, measure the right thing. In Metricool’s work with Favikon, a creator with 28,000 followers and a high authenticity score outperformed one with 490,000 followers and a low one. Follower count is the easiest number to see and among the least useful.
If your company page has been quietly going nowhere for a year, that is not a content problem. It is a structural one, and it is worth talking through properly.
Sources: Metricool 2026 LinkedIn Study and the Metricool and Favikon LinkedIn in 2026 playbook, June 2026. Local figures are aggregated from accounts we manage and are not attributed to any single client.
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