LinkedIn is the go-to platform for B2B. If you have a B2B product or service, there is an 80% chance, you need to be there. Posting stuff on LinkedIn is a no-brainer…for those who haven't tried. Because if you have, you probably want to know:
- What content works best?
- When is the best time to post?
- How often should you post?
- How do you reach beyond your current followers?
We decided to figure this all out.
This article is based on the 120+ page Algorithm Insights 2024 Report shared by Richard van der Blom on LinkedIn, along with insights from our own experiences writing for our clients’ LinkedIn profiles.
Ready to get the ball rolling? Let's discuss the main types of content you can find on LinkedIn.
What types of content are popular on LinkedIn?
Based on our findings, we can single out six content types currently trending on the platform.
Now comes the tricky part. All content types highlighted differ in terms of reach and popularity. For a better understanding, let's explore the most popular types of content on LinkedIn and see how each performs, using 1 as the average reach index:
So based on the numbers, it’s safe to say that all you have to do to grow your company page on LinkedIn is post polls and carousels, right? We wish things were that easy, but no. You might be tempted to choose the most popular type of content and start “growth hacking,” but that’s not the best strategy. There are many factors that contribute to a steadily increasing organic reach, which we will cover further.
For now, the best piece of advice we can give is diversify your content and see what your audience engages with the most. This way, you will be able to come up with an optimal strategy that will help you engage more people with your content. Let’s discuss what content to prioritize.
What content should you post?
As said, everything depends on your vision and how you want to communicate with your audience. For example, if your company is focused on thought leadership content, sharing carousels, text+visuals posts and text-only posts can be your go-to. On the other hand, if you are looking to post educational content, we’d recommend prioritizing newsletters, carousels, and text-only posts with external links to your blog page.
But remember, you shouldn't post just one type of content. Your content strategy should cover at least three types of content, so that your company page remains interesting and engaging for your audience. What’s more, except for text-only posts that don’t affect the reach if published consecutively, 3 consecutive posts of any type lead to a 35-50% drop in reach.
Based on our experience, here’s how we would recommend publishing content on LinkedIn depending on your goals.
Our recommendations are not set in stone and there’s always some room for experiments.
How to format content to gain better reach
The first to read your LinkedIn post won't be human, but the LinkedIn search engine. LinkedIn has many limitations that affect the post's visibility. For example, the platform doesn’t allow you to edit more than 15% of the post without getting a penalty (making you republish it), while poorly formatted content gets worse visibility.
So if you want your content to perform better, make the search engine happy. Depending on the type of content you choose, here are some essential recommendations and how they affect the post stats.
Text+Visuals:
- Optimal length: 900 – 1,200 characters
- Use relevant images (+15-20% in reach)
- Aim for personalized images (up to +45% in engagement)
- Each additional image gives +5% in reach, but only up to the fifth one.
- Use brand colors and themes (+15% in brand recall)
Carousels:
- Optimal length: 12 slides (carousels less than 12 slides have 20% worse reach, while longer ones go down to 45% drop in reach)
- Post’s guidance length: fewer than 500 characters
- Word count per slide: 25-50 words
- Write more than one sentence per slide (one-sentence slides lead to a 30% decline in reach)
- Optimize content for mobile (unoptimized content leads to 75% drop in reach)
- Add relevant visuals for slides if possible (+20% in performance)
Text-only posts:
- Optimal length: 1,800 – 2,100 characters (longer or shorter posts tend to perform 15% worse)
- Start with a strong hook (reader retention increase by 30%)
- Structure the post in brief, readable paragraphs, up to four lines (+15% in engagement)
- Aim to end the post with a question (+20-40% in engagement)
- Proper formatting can improve performance by 25%
- An external link can be added to these posts, which won’t affect the reach
Polls:
- 3 is the optimal number of poll options (more or less options lead to 15-20% worse reach)
- Keep the post below 500 characters
- Clarify the intent of your poll (+30% in engagement)
- The optimal duration for a poll is one week (shorter poll duration leads to a 35% drop in reach)
- Avoid overly niche topics (leads to low engagement)
Articles:
- Optimal length: 800 – 1,200 words (more than 1500 words lead to 10% decrease in reach)
- Structure the article in short paragraphs with clear headlines (+50% views increase and 20% better engagement)
- The average LinkedIn article contains at least 3 relevant hyperlinks, 2 tags, and 4 images
- Consider adding relevant keywords to your article
Videos:
- Optimal length: between 1 and 2 minutes (tend to improve viewer interaction by 40%)
- Pair the video with a concise text post of up to 500 characters (+18% in reach)
- Add subtitles to the video (+35-40% in viewership)
- Opt for vertical format (+15% in reach)
There are some other things to watch out for, but we tried to cover the most essential ones. Once you define the type of content you want to publish and take care of the formatting, it’s high time to think of the publishing schedule.
How often should you post and when is the best time to do it?
When talking about publishing content on social media, consistency is key. You can’t just post one post per month and expect your company page to blow up. A schedule outlining what content you will be publishing and when is paramount, so if you want to grow your reach, don’t slack off.
The Algorithm Insights report suggests publishing from two to five posts per week depending on your domain and content strategy. From our side, we can provide the following recommendations when organizing your publishing schedule.
- Post when it’s morning for your audience. Even though LinkedIn user activity is from 7 AM to 9 PM, aim to publish content from 8 to 11 AM in your audience’s time zone. Posting in the morning keeps your content visible for a longer period, allowing for more interactions throughout the day.
- Don’t post more than once a day. A new post within 24 hours may split the reach between the two for your company page, which is why you should wait at least one day before publishing new content.
- Avoid publishing on weekends. LinkedIn members are usually active on the platform on workdays (Monday – Friday), so we don’t recommend publishing on weekends when most people are out of the office.
With that in mind, here is a raw sketch of how you can approach content publishing to achieve the most optimal performance.
Okay, now you have some ideas on the publishing schedule and the content you сan post on your company page. But are there any ways for your content to gain even better reach? Of course there are, and we are just about to share them.
Ways to optimize your posts for better visibility
As we've mentioned above, the LinkedIn search engine analyzes each post and decides whether to move it up or down in reach. There are some proven practices that can help make your content more visible, BUT you should be careful when applying them. It is crucial to remember that LinkedIn doesn't encourage overly promotional content and penalizes posts focused more on tagging as many companies as possible rather than, you know, sharing some useful info.
In general, there are four tried and true methods to optimize your LinkedIn posts. These are profile tagging, applying hashtags, adding external links, and commenting.
Profile tagging
Tagging is one of the best practices for growing your organic reach, but approach this practice with caution. LinkedIn penalizes pages that tend to abuse profile tagging so that individuals and companies won't get spammed with irrelevant tags all the time. As an outcome, posts containing over 15 mentions risk triggering a Spam check and up to 90% drop in organic reach.
For that matter, we recommend applying the smart tagging technique. With smart tagging, your goal is to tag up to four relevant profiles for your posts, asking them to engage with it. If tagged individuals or companies interact with the post, it immediately gets a 15% reach per each profile (+60% reach in total).
Hashtags
Back in 2020, hashtags were considered an important part of any post that helped the search engine group the posts and show them to the relevant audience. But with the search engine becoming smarter and algorithms more complex, hashtags have become more like keywords that should be included in the post itself. So, for example, if your post has #SaaS, the word should be included in the text part as well.
You can add up to five relevant hashtags that would lead to up to a 9% increase in reach, but again, similarly to SEO keywords, hashtag words should be included in the text.
External links
This method works well if you repurpose existing content and want to drive more organic traffic to your company blog page or if you want to inform your audience about an upcoming event. In general, LinkedIn doesn't encourage editing or sharing links to external sources, giving penalties to those who dare. However, there is a small loophole that can help you overcome this challenge.
If you want to publish external links safely, the best way to do it is to leave an external link in the post comments. That way, you won't break any rules and LinkedIn won't have any reasons to trigger the post inspection. A bit riskier, but still a go-to way for sharing an external link directly in the post would be to edit the post after publishing. The platform allows users to edit up to 15% of the post without triggering any additional reviews or penalties, making it an optimal strategy for sharing an external link. Just make sure your content is properly edited and you won't need to change more than 15% of it. Otherwise, you will have to republish your post and witness a drop in organic reach (up to 30%) or worse, a LinkedIn penalty.
Commenting
Be it your personal or company profile, commenting is one effective technique that allows you to gain better visibility for your post and a wider reach. For example, let’s say you have a valuable piece of content, an e-book or an article like the one you’re reading. But you don’t just go and share it via a link – you’re asking your audience to leave a comment, say, “growth”. Then you send the e-book to the person who commented via DM.
At this point, we have covered almost everything there is to it for growing your LinkedIn audience. Just one more thing, and we can roll the credits.
Last but not least, nurture your posts
Once your post is published, don’t just leave it hanging. Any piece of content requires attention, so give your newborn post some love. There are different ways to nurture your LinkedIn posts, but we will focus on the best practices known so far:
- Make a repost with an insightful comment. This can help you kill two birds with one stone. Writing at least 15 words to an existing post will help increase its reach by at least 5% and up to 20% in engagement, while your profile’s visibility to the network will increase by 15%.
- Consider internal engagement. Although this method is 17% less effective than external engagement, reactions left by company employees to company page posts still lead to better organic reach and additional engagement from their existing network.
- Respond to comments rapidly. The best way to interact with the comments is to answer as many of them as possible within the first hour after the post has been published. It would also be good to share some additional insights with two to five comments from the post, which can foster an ongoing conversation and drive more organic reach.
- Like and get liked. If you leave a like on any post from your personal profile, it would be presented to an additional 1.4% of your connections and approximately 2.5% of the network belonging to the second and third-tier connections. Likes do help increase the post reach, but more than 50 likes is the threshold that caps algorithmic response. The reason is somewhat unclear in this regard, but in our opinion, LinkedIn might apply this cap to discourage the “Like for like, follow for follow” and other artificial reach growth practices.
- Master the art of commenting. Sometimes readers might have some additional questions after reading the post. When possible, consider referring to your previous posts and sharing additional useful content with your audience by adding a link or providing a relevant image. That would definitely help your post grow.
Well, seems to be about it. Hope you learned something new and can now grow your LinkedIn audience like a true master of the craft. And if you could use some help, Zmist & Copy is here for you.
