The Best Content Types For LinkedIn, According To A New Study

If you’re a LinkedIn user, you have probably seen a “you can’t post that on LinkedIn” message sometime. Well, LinkedIn has changed a lot in recent years, and so have its users. We’re seeing a lot of gurus telling us that short videos are the present and future on almost every channel, but is that true for LinkedIn?

A recent study from Socialinsider and Cloud Campaign can help us answer this question and understand the best type of content for the professional social media platform.

The study findings

SocialInsider and Cloud Campaign research examined more than 141 thousand LinkedIn posts from 1,126 pages with the objective of analyzing what type of content delivers the highest engagement, highest click-through rate, and more on LinkedIn.

According to the study, native documents generate 3x more clicks than any other type of content. So, if you want to entertain and engage your audience, remember that this is a good way to retain them.

Oh, another great piece of information, especially for B2B companies. Did you know that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn? This number is pretty high when compared to Facebook (7%) and Twitter (13%), so there’s a great opportunity to reach new audiences and generate more leads with your organic strategy.

But you can’t just rely on one specific format for all the content you have planned. If your brand is more of a video content type, I have some good news for you.

Video content generates the highest engagement per impression rate, especially for accounts under 50k followers. So yes, video is indeed a great resource for LinkedIn as well.

And besides those results, images are a must-have in every strategy, due to the simplicity to create (when compared to native documents and videos) and high engagement rate (up to 4.06% average engagement per impressions rate for pages between 50-100k followers).

Create meaningful content for your audience

With this data, you can create a successful content strategy for LinkedIn, but you should not exaggerate or create engagement-baiting content.

Recently, LinkedIn also updated its feed algorithm to downrank this kind of content. Since the channel is facing a constant increase in activity by users, it was only natural that some “growth hackers” would try to take advantage of overposting engaging types of content, especially polls. 

And here’s what LinkedIn says about this kind of action:

“We’ve seen a number of posts that expressly ask or encourage the community to engage with content via likes or reactions – posted with the exclusive intent of boosting reach on the platform. We’ve heard this type of content can be misleading and frustrating for some of you.

We won’t be promoting this type of content and we encourage everyone in the community to focus on delivering reliable, credible, and authentic content.”

Since LinkedIn is one of the best social channels for organic strategies and it’s having record levels of engagement, every brand and influencer must have this channel on their radar.

But, how can we as marketers surf that engagement wave? Understanding what the audience wants and giving it to them. We’re talking about a professional social network, so, what we usually see the most is careers and market-related content.

As marketers and content creators, we can take advantage of a new type of content to reach new audiences and boost our engagement rate, but we need to do it in a responsible way.

We need to create quality content that can genuinely catch the user’s attention and create a positive impression about our brands.