[STUDY] LinkedIn Engagement Rate: 108.026 Business Posts Show What’s the Most Engaging Post Type on LinkedIn
LinkedIn was created with the idea of becoming a platform for businesses to create a community of professionals around.
Therefore, with such a big reach potential, brands need to level up their game and stay up to date if they want to thrive, especially given this competitive social media world.
That's why we decided to conduct a new research to discover what's the most engaging type of content on LinkedIn in 2022, and analyzed 108.026 LinkedIn business posts.
Here’s a sneak peek of what data revealed. 👇
LinkedIn engagement stats
1. LinkedIn’s average engagement rate in 2022
2. More than half of brand's LinkedIn posts consist of images
3. LinkedIn's native documents get the highest number of likes
4. Images make people keener to comment in case of small and large accounts
5. Native documents generates the highest LinkedIn impression rates
A. Summary
What’s the type of content mostly used: we look at businesses’ preference for a certain type of post.
LinkedIn's engagement rate by post type: we unveil a post’s potential of generating engagement.
To what type of posts people usually like and comment: we show to which types of posts people tend to like and comment more.
LinkedIn's impression rate per type of post: we expose the percentage for the number of times that a post is displayed into user’s feeds.
B. Key insights
- On LinkedIn, native documents generate the highest number of likes.
- Images make people keener to comment in case of middle-sized accounts, while for small and large profiles, native documents have more chances to drive conversations.
- Native documents rule as well from a LinkedIn impression's rate point of view, driving the highest number of post impressions.
1. LinkedIn’s average engagement rate
While engagement is probably the number one social KPI marketers look at when analyzing their social performance, depending on the platform we’re talking about, it can be rather tricky to calculate it.
Especially in the case of the engagement rate.
Facebook and Instagram, for example, display engagement levels calculated based on the following count.
And of course, there’s always the possibility to calculate your engagement rate by reach - for when you want more in-depth info about your account’s performance.
However, in LinkedIn’s case, the algorithm works slightly differently.
What is most important to remember, when doing a LinkedIn performance analysis, is that this platforms calculates engagement based on impressions.
While in 2022, Linkedin has an average engagement rate of 3.16%, most brands have the highest chances of increasing their account's performance by using more videos.
Even if video content - as previously demonstrated - is not a priority for many LinkedIn profiles, in 2022, it makes for the most engaging post type.
However, as data has shown, the largest accounts can get average LinkedIn engagements rates exceeding 4.00% through images and native documents, rather than videos.
2. More than half of brand's LinkedIn posts consist of images
Whether we’re talking about charts or regular informative visuals, images are a great way of compressing high volumes of information in a manner that’s easy and fast for users to comprehend.
Just like on Instagram, on LinkedIn as well you can save an image and later rapidly consult that piece of information in times of need.
This is a simple reason for which images are the go-to type of posts brands are using on LinkedIn, with a percentage of 50.96%, followed by links, with 30.94%.
With LinkedIn being a valuable social platform for generating leads, especially in the case of B2B businesses, it is only normal for links to be among the most used content types.
Moreover, LinkedIn is one of the platforms with the highest social media CTR, and, according to data, 59% of B2B marketers are successful in generating leads through LinkedIn.
A particular reason for which companies may still make a heavy use of link posts could be the assumption that for being a professional social platform, people on LinkedIn may show an increased interest for discovering more information about a particular topic.
Even if trending right now, brands do not experiment that much with video marketing, this content type being the one that raises the most challenges, because of its many angles available, which implies a lot of testing.
3. LinkedIn's native documents get the highest number of likes
When they were first introduced on Instagram, carousels quickly became a post type that captured people’s interest, generating increased engagement rates.
For those of you who haven’t posted a LinkedIn native document yet - it’s worth mentioning this content type is a PDF that, once uploaded into the platform, is displayed similarly to the Instagram carousel.
The reason this post type became so popular that even LinkedIn chose to introduce it relies on its ability to generate a bit of suspense.
While the first slide it’s meant to stir curiosity, LinkedIn users must click all the way to the end of the carousel to get the entire piece of information that caught their attention.
The great news is that this type of behavior and time investment implies users find that piece of content valuable and the brand offering it helpful - which is, in the end, that way meaningful brand-consumer relationships are born, and how brand loyalty is created.
For being the type of content that generates the highest number of likes, regardless of the account size - as data has pointed out - these days, native documents should be a focus point for every brand interested in doing successful LinkedIn marketing.
Native documents prove to be particularly effective in generating more likes, especially in the case of large profiles.
Compared to the small accounts, the usage of LinkedIn’s native documents can generate double the amount of likes for the largest LinkedIn accounts.
Given the stats have unanimity in showing how successful native documents are in increasing the median number of likes and overall LinkedIn engagement, it’s pretty clear that in 2022 native documents are a must-try LinkedIn content type.
4. Images make people keener to comment in case of small and large accounts
Having an audience that presents interest in your topics, that’s open to communicate and shows involvement is every brand’s dream and every social media manager’s objective.
And being able to make your followers comment on a daily basis ain’t an easy job.
That’s why, studying a bit the digital landscape's trends before creating your social media strategy can be more rewarding than you think.
In order to help you with this task, remember there are plenty of LinkedIn analytics tools out there, that you can always turn to.
Back to our LinkedIn engagement analysis, according to data, there are two types of content that increase the LinkedIn median number of comments - varying depending on the account's size.
LinkedIn data has shown that to drive conversations, middle-sized accounts should integrate more native documents in their LinkedIn content plan, while small and large accounts may get better results by focusing on images.
However, while these LinkedIn engagement stats provide some guidelines, remember that every content strategy must adapt to a business' market trends and personality.
There are a lot of creative ways in which brands can inform and inspire their communities. In the end, the secret to a successful LinkedIn marketing strategy lies in making data-based decisions and listening to your audiences.
5. Native documents generates the highest LinkedIn impression rates
Moving forward with another Linkedin metric, we’ve come to the average impression rate. By analyzing which posts had more views, you can skyrocket your marketing strategy.
For example, you can determine which is the best time to post, specifically, for your brand.
By identifying the days in which your posts receive more views you’ll be able to optimize your posting schedule in order to deliver the information your community wants to learn about, in the time-window when users are most likely available to view it.
Also, this is a metric you should target to look at especially when thinking about sponsoring some posts, because it will show you which posts are best resonating with your audience.
This is an important step for improving your Linkedin performance, so make sure you always keep an eye on this Linkedin data.
The analysis of the LinkedIn average impression rate has once again proven how important LinkedIn native documents are, as they generate the higher impression's rate for all account's sizes.
Important to note is that the average impressions rate on Linkedin will have a higher value than the engagement one, because the number of people that actually interact with the post seen in feed is smaller.
C. Methodology
To identify the most engaging LinkedIn post types, we analyzed 108.026 LinkedIn posts from 1.126 LinkedIn business pages of international brands.
The accounts examined had a following of between 1000 - 100.000K followers and an active presence on LinkedIn between January 2021 and April 2022.
Engagement: represents the sum of likes, comments, shares, and clicks received for the posts published.
Linkedin Engagement rate: is the sum of likes, comments, shares, and clicks received for the posts published, divided by the number of impressions the page has, all multiplied by 100.
Median number of likes/comments: is the midpoint value for likes/comments.
Impressions: refers to the number of times a post / an ad has been viewed.
Linkedin average impressions rate: it measures how many impressions a page has, on average.