A few years ago, LinkedIn was my strongest marketing channel for my job search coaching business, Recruit the Employer, and I had amassed over 40,000 followers. But then I got a full-time job and put my business — and my social media presence — on pause.
When I decided to relaunch my company this year, I knew returning to LinkedIn would be part of my social media marketing strategy. But as I started to step back into it, I realized it’s an entirely different landscape than a few years ago. The platform is more saturated with content creators, so it takes more to get attention, and different post styles and content themes seem to resonate.
Not only could I see these trends while browsing my own feed, but I also tried reposting some of my most popular content from a few years ago, and it completely flopped. For instance, when I shared this post three years ago, it got around 20,000 impressions. I revised and reposted it recently, and it only saw 3,000 impressions and a fraction of the engagement.
I decided to go back to the drawing board and experiment. I committed to spending two months posting nearly every day, with the goal of trying as many different content approaches as possible. Sixty days, 58 posts, and 568,000 impressions later, I analyzed everything to determine my LinkedIn strategy moving forward.
Now, I have a new playbook for best practices for LinkedIn, which I’m detailing here. That said, every audience is slightly different, so I’m also including details on conducting your own experiment to give your content the best chance of resonating with your audience.
What performs well on LinkedIn now
Based on the results of my experiment, these are the guidelines I follow when I batch-create my content each month.
Text-based posts still reign supreme, but keep them snappy
LinkedIn had come out with new post styles since I had last used the platform, so a big goal of my experiment was to understand which would give me a strong ROI (return on investment). I tried polls, picture posts, carousels, plus text-based posts of various lengths.
Ultimately, I learned that my bread and butter would still be text-only posts — on average, they receive 5,000 to 10,000 impressions each, with top-performing posts seeing 20,000 or more. Plus, they require less effort than others (more on that in a bit).
But text-based posts require a slightly different style than before. A
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