There’s a lot of discussion on what type of posts work best on LinkedIn at the moment. With people talking about lots of tactics which are outdated or counter productive. There’s no way to cheat your way to success on LinkedIn, like everything in marketing these things take time.

A huge caveat is that lots of this will totally depend on your content and how interesting it is for your audience.

There are NO silver bullets in social media marketing, these are my observations over the last 6 months or so on what works for me on LinkedIn.

I’d love to know if you have other ideas, or if your experience differs to mine.

Here we go

1. Short posts don’t appear to work, even with Hashtags and an image.
2. Long posts work well. Format them with returns between short snappy paragraphs so they are easy to read and digest.
3. Long posts can work well as just text, no need for an image.
4. Hashtags don’t appear to have any effect anymore.
5. But if you MUST use Hashtags on LinkedIn never use more than 3 and ensure they don’t have too many followers or too few. You can check that by popping your #Hashtag in the search bar.
6. Posting just one image isn’t enough, I suggest 4 or more.
7. Tagging people in your post can work well as long as they are relevant to your post. Tagging your mates may work short term but it looks spammy.
8. Writing a hook first line works well. But don’t clickbait people, when they click to read the rest of the post it needs to deliver on the hook.
9. On hooks, please don’t do “6 things Leeds United missing out on promotion taught me about B2B sales” you look like a tool.
10. If you are posting a link don’t rely on the featured image pulling through, LinkedIn has started to make them small thumbnails now and they look terrible. Upload an image, or several images, natively.
11. This is also happening to YouTube links. The full video is reduced to a thumbnail which makes sharing other people’s videos pretty much impossible.
12. Post in the morning. Generally, I post between 8.45 and 10am. There’s no perfect time, you’ll need to test to find the best time for you.
13. Don’t post more than twice a day, and make sure they are separated by a few hours.
14. Be consistent, I don’t think you need to post every day, but if you leave it too long between posts your reach will suffer.
15. Commenting on other people’s posts works really well. Some people say that you should stay on LinkedIn for 15 minutes after posting and comment on other posts. That feels a bit try hard to me. I generally only comment where I have a question or where I want to join in.
    Re-sharing other people’s posts doesn’t appear to work well.
16. You can share URL’s but it does feel like the reach is less. I think lots of that comes down to the content, if you are posting your own content the temptation to be salesey is huge and the posts are generally a bit dull.
17. You can post URLs in the first comment and tell people you’ve done that in your post. However, I’m not seeing that that makes any difference to the success of a post.
18. Carousel posts get good engagement but take more thought and work to pull off.
19. Video content feels like it has a mixed response despite it being heavily pushed. If you are doing a video, upload it natively, and ensure it has subtitles and ideally a thumbnail image.
20. Fancy styling (bold and italics using code tricks) doesn’t appear to help reach.
21. If you have nothing to say, don’t post. Quality posts are much better than lots of rubbish.
22. Commenting is a really good way of posting without having to write your own ideas down. It shows you’re interested and have a point of view.
23. Scheduling posts doesn’t appear to have any effect positively or negatively.

There you go. My thoughts, in no particular order on what type of posts work best on LinkedIn at the moment?

I’m not going to claim I have insider knowledge or that these observations are true for everyone, or that they’ll be the same a few weeks, or even days from now.

But these types of posts seem to have consistent results right now for me so my assumption is that you’ll have similar results when you post to your Linkedin profile.

The rule are very similar for Business Pages on Linkedin like our own Marketing Optimist page.

Let me know if they work for you or if you get different findings from these. I’d love to share ideas.

Can we help you with your LinkedIn marketing strategy?

Struggling with more than just what to post on LinkedIn?

We run LinkedIn marketing strategies and campaigns for lots of businesses, and if you are struggling with how to run your feed, there are a few ways we can help.

1. Book your team on our LinkedIn Training Course.
2. Get in touch and talk to us about how we can run your social media on LinkedIn using the form below.

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