What kind of posts work the best on LinkedIn?

WHAT'S the best way to successfully capture your audience's attention on LinkedIn? If you're looking to boost your presence on the professional social network, it seems that you should focus on certain kinds of posts, according to a study analyzing the most successful formats on the platform.

As on Instagram, some posts attract more clicks than others on LinkedIn. So suggests research from Socialinsider and Cloud Campaign, who joined forces to analyze 141,474 LinkedIn posts from 1,126 company pages between January 2021 and April 2022 to study the top performers.

Documents shared directly on LinkedIn, such as posts featuring PDFs, performed the best, generating three times more clicks than any other type of post. LinkedIn's average click-through rate -- which determines the percentage of people who click on a post -- across all content types is 2.2%.

With native documents, this rate rises to between 3.5% and 8.6% depending on the popularity of the posting account.

According to Socialinsider, the success of documents on LinkedIn is mainly due to the fact that the social network wants to boost active pages that offer content that encourages users to stay online longer.

Does size matter?

Videos also drive engagement on LinkedIn, meaning they generate more likes, comments and clicks. Accounts with under 50,000 followers manage to achieve a 4.49% engagement per impressions rate with videos, compared to the social network average of 3.16%.

Impressions refers to the number of times a post has been viewed. Since the advent of TikTok, platforms have chosen to develop video content in response to the observed enthusiasm for this format. The professional social network is no stranger to this trend, and therefore seems to push video content on its platform.

The video view rate is the highest among the smallest accounts (under 5,000 followers) with 17.18% on average compared to 11.29% for medium-sized accounts (between 10,000 and 50,000 followers). Even accounts followed by more than 100,000 people do not reach this level (16.36%). On LinkedIn, the average overall video view rate is 14.46%.

Images are still the most popular posts for accounts with between 50,000 and 100,000 followers, with an engagement rate per impression of 4.06%, while documents prevail for accounts with more than 100,000 subscribers, with a 4.84% engagement per impressions rate.

Finally, it is better to be a small account on LinkedIn to reach more users with your posts. According to the study, pages with fewer than 5,000 subscribers generate a reach rate of 6.17%, compared to 3.49% on average. Accounts with between 50,000 and 100,000 followers struggle the most to reach people on LinkedIn, with a 1.63% reach rate.