LinkedIn Performance Benchmarks

Being a quite unique social media platform, over the years, LinkedIn has turned into a powerful marketing tool, especially for companies in the B2B sphere.

But with the digital landscape evolving so fast, marketers need to be aware of what’s rocking on LinkedIn at this time and try to anticipate what the next big thing is going to be. Here is where data comes in!

Check out what the latest LinkedIn content data has revealed and create a solid linkedin content strategy for your brand with these stats!

LinkedIn benchmarks and insights for a top-notch strategy in 2023

A. Summary
B. Key insights

1. Native documents generate 5x more clicks than any other type of content
2. Videos make for the best-performing post type in terms of engagement
3. In 2023, LinkedIn’s video views rate stands at an average of 20.58%
4. Key takeaways

C. Methodology

A. Summary

Reading this study, you'll discover:

What is the average click-through rate by impressions: we uncover which type of content is more likely to make people click on a post on LinkedIn after seeing it repeatedly.

What’s the average engagement rate by impressions: we analyze the interaction level per view for those cases in which a post appears multiple times in the same user’s feed.

What's the average video view rate: what percentage of a video do people watch on LinkedIn.

1. Native documents generate 5x more clicks than any other type of content

With TikTok stepping into the world of social media marketing, all the major platforms are trying to level up their game and come up with new features and creative concepts in an attempt to keep their user base and stay relevant.

However, truth be told, each network can be attributed to different strong points, which is why having a multi-channel strategy is recommended.

For example, TikTok is great for getting views. On the other hand, LinkedIn offers higher CTR numbers. While across all social media networks, Facebook scores the highest click-through rate, LinkedIn is the next-in-line best-performing platform.

Actually, according to data, LinkedIn is responsible for more than 50% of social traffic on B2B website companies.

But what exactly is the best LinkedIn content strategy that marketers can leverage in 2023 to get to such great CTR and traffic numbers on LinkedIn?

Discover below LinkedIn posts’ latest CTR performance stats and get some answers!

While the average CTR on LinkedIn across all content types is 2.66%, you should be aware that native documents can generate up to 5X higher numbers.

According to data, native documents have an average LinkedIn CTR of 8-13%, depending on the account size, being the best-performing LinkedIn content type.

Nonetheless, for the platform’s algorithm to work in your favor, as well as keep your audience interested, your LinkedIn content calendar should include diversified post types.

To better understand your LinkedIn content performance, here are the LinkedIn CTR benchmarks for the other post formats available within the platform:

Native documents: average LinkedIn CTR of 11.50%;
Multi images: 9.19% average LinkedIn click-through rate;
Text posts: 6.11% LinkedIn average CTR;
Polls: 3.10% LinkedIn average click-through rate;
Images: 2.82% average LinkedIn click-through rate;
Post shares: 2.30% average LinkedIn CTR;
Video: 1.88% LinkedIn average CTR ;
Link share: 1.86% LinkedIn average click-through rate.

2. Videos make for the best-performing post type in terms of engagement

With video content ruling the internet these days, LinkedIn is also pushing videos more into the user’s feeds. As a result, video content gets more impressions and has greater chances of making LinkedIn users interact with it.

What is curious about LinkedIn’s engagement, when doing a year-over-year comparison, is a significant increase, especially at a time when there’s an overall social media engagement drop, as per our social media engagement benchmarks study.

While LinkedIn is probably an already powerful marketing tool for B2B brands, the presented LinkedIn engagement stats make all the more reason for such brands to invest even heavier in LinkedIn marketing.

In the ever-changing world of social media, quickly adapting to trends is crucial for social media success, as this is a way of staying more relevant to your social communities.

Speaking of trends, according to data, in 2023, the top three content formats that drive conversations are video posts, link shares, and single images.

And with an average engagement by impressions rate of 3.18%, topping all the other content formats’ scores, videos are an absolute must for any LinkedIn content strategy.

However, remember that in the end, there's no single magic formula for an effective LinkedIn content strategy. Since businesses are different, optimizing based on your own results and industry best practices is equally important.

3. In 2023, LinkedIn’s video views rate stands at an average of 20.58%

Speaking about how powerful video content is these days, and not only when talking about video-first platforms like TikTok, LinkedIn’s average video view rate values only back it up even more. Because this is a clear indicator of people’s predisposition to watch more and more video content on LinkedIn as well.

To help you evaluate your own brand’s video performance on LinkedIn, we also put together a breakdown of the average LinkedIn video view rate for various page sizes to offer you some comparison benchmarks:

Pages with less than 5K followers: 20.60% average LinkedIn video view rate per profile;
Accounts between 5-10K followers: an average of 23.84% video view rate per profile;
Pages with 10-50 K followers: 19.98% LinkedIn average video view rate per profile;
Accounts between 50-100K followers: 18.37% video view rate per profile on average;
Pages with more than 100K followers: 21.94% LinkedIn average video view rate per profile.

TIP: If you want to make people watch more of your videos, you should, above all, front-load your video with interest! This is the best strategy for beating that two-seconds mark and gaining their attention.

4. Key takeaways

When creating their LinkedIn marketing strategy, to better understand the platform’s algorithm and which content type is best to choose depending on multiple possible objectives, marketers should look for answers in the data.

According to our analysis, different content types perform best for different social media goals, so the key to identifying the best content mix lies in establishing them first.

All in all, here are the most important takeaways:

integrate more native documents into your LinkedIn content strategy if your goal is to generate more traffic, as this content type has the highest CTR;
post more videos to increase your page’s engagement;
use multiple images to showcase events and company highlights;
leverage a mix of content types to reach your goals;
offer value and be authentic.

C. Methodology

To identify the best strategies for creating top-performing LinkedIn content for B2B companies and not only, we analyzed 127.126 LinkedIn posts from 1.126 LinkedIn business pages of international brands.

This study’s dataset included accounts with profile sizes between 1000 - 100.000K followers and an active presence on LinkedIn between April 2022 and April 2023.

The content formats included in this analysis consist of the following:

Native documents: the type of post consisting of a PDF uploaded directly on LinkedIn that is similar to a carousel.
Multi images: the upload of multiple photos at once, displayed similarly to an album.
Text posts: LinkedIn posts consisting of a block of text.
Polls: open for voting questions.
Image: posts that include the upload of an image.
Post shares: shares of other people’s/ company’s posts that were posted within the platform.
Video: posts that include the upload of a video.
Link shares: represents the share (as in insertion of the link) of blog articles.

We define the click-through rate metric shows the percentage of people who clicked on a post and is calculated by dividing the number of link clicks by the number of impressions.

Total engagement: represents the sum of likes, comments, clicks, and shares received for the posts published in the selected period. The average engagement rate reveals the average level of interactions an account has through published content, measured in percentages.

This LinkedIn content performance study includes only organic posts.

Total impressions: the total number of impressions received for the posts published in the selected time period. The impressions of a post represent the number of times that specific post was seen.

The engagement per impression rate counts how many people interacted with your LinkedIn posts from those who watched repeatedly.

It is calculated by dividing your engagement by impressions, then multiplied by 100.

To offer accurate engagement benchmarks, we chose to calculate the engagement rate based on impressions, as this is the formula used by LinkedIn.

Average views per video: the metric shows the average number of views per video. This is calculated as the total video views divided by the number of videos published in the selected time period. The video views rate represents the percentage of video views divided by total impressions.

NOTE: LinkedIn counts as a video view of two or more seconds of playback while the video is at least 50% on screen.