About 6 months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I decided to crawl through my 100+ LinkedIn posts to see what type of content my audience was engaging with the most. Why? I wanted to know why certain LinkedIn posts were gaining so much traction while others were a complete flop. As with any content strategy, stepping back and looking at the data can help you determine what optimizations are possible/needed.
Most Engaging LinkedIn Content
To determine which of my posts resulted in the most engagement, I compared the number of views, reactions, and comments. There was no fancy weighting involved, but the following posts were clearly the most engaging based on those metrics.
Timely Insights
I’ve noticed that no matter how simple my post, if I’m sharing a timely insight, way more people see AND engage with my post. Check out these two examples, which were both viewed by thousands of people and generated a stream of comments:
Both of these posts provided content that would soon become common knowledge and outdated. However, because I was able to be one of the first in my network talking about these topics, people were excited to engage with me!
Easily Digestible
I like to post a lot of educational content. I spend hours doing so, but surprisingly enough, highly detailed insights usually don’t perform as well. People like quick wins, to feel like they learned something new in a short amount of time and with limited effort. I think that’s another reason why that “LinkedIn got an upgrade” post shown above performed so well.
On a similar note, easily digestible content can be more relatable. You welcome people to engage, like this post where I talk about a personal communication fail and donuts:
Or this post where I confess that I’ve been wearing sweatpants paired with work shirts and asked if anyone else could relate:
Relevant Tagging
A great way to make sure people engage with your post is to tag relevant people in your network. Now I’m going to pause there for a minute. Do NOT randomly tag everyone under the sun. This must be done tastefully or else you’re going to end up annoying your connections and this tactic will have the opposite impact.
One of my top ranking posts shared a photo of a thank you card the AMA Madison chapter sent me for being part of the volunteer team. Not only is this timely and easily digestible content, I was able to give a shout out to fellow volunteers and board members.
Showing Real People
At the end of the day, LinkedIn is a social platform. Our brains are wired to see faces, even when there isn’t really a face to be seen! So showing yourself, your team, and the people you help goes a long way. This can be done with images or video, like my posts shown below:
What About LinkedIn Trends, Elise?
For my fellow LinkedIn fans, you may be wondering why there aren’t any posts that incorporate the following post types:
- LinkedIn Articles
- Polls
- Slides
- Stories
The big reason these post types are talked about so much is because they 1) force people to look at your post for a longer period of time and 2) keep people on the LinkedIn platform. 2020 trends show that the LinkedIn algorithm loves when those two things happen.
Honestly, I’ve only experimented with LinkedIn Polls and haven’t been too excited about the engagement. Sure, it’s fun to ask a question and see what your network says. Plus, it’s an easy click of a button for people to give their input. However, I just haven’t found a very meaningful way to incorporate polls into my content plan consistently. At the end of the day, if a post is meaningful to your followers, that’s what’s going to capture their attention and encourage engagement and therefore more views!
What have you found to be the most engaging and meaningful content on LinkedIn? Connect with me and send me a message to let me know!
