EP #030: What I learned from studying one year of my LinkedIn posts

Executive Summary

• Strategic Self-Review: Reflecting on my LinkedIn activity from 2023, I analyzed what worked, what didn’t, and where to focus my efforts in 2024, using data-driven insights to guide my strategy.
• Maximizing Impact: Significant growth in my LinkedIn presence was driven by increased activity, but I learned that more posts don’t always equate to better average performance, highlighting the importance of quality over quantity.
• Format and Timing Matter: Carousels emerged as my top-performing content format, and I discovered that Mondays and Wednesdays are my best days for posting, which will inform my scheduling strategy for 2024.
• Content Focus: Surprisingly, my Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Company-related posts outperformed others, leading me to prioritize these topics while reassessing the underperforming content.
• Continuous Iteration: LinkedIn success is not static. Regular analysis and strategic adjustments based on performance data are key to refining your approach and ensuring your content resonates with your audience.

Deep Dive

I’m always trying to figure out how I can better utilize LinkedIn to build my company’s brand.

So this week, I sat down to look at all of my activity from 2023 to understand what I’m doing right, what I’m doing wrong, and what I should focus on in 2024.

Fortunately, my team puts these reports together for our clients. I asked them to run me through the system as well.

By my reviewing my performance live in this newsletter, I hope:

1. You benefit from seeing how I think about LinkedIn strategy (even though my strategy will likely differ from your own)
2. You can get a glimpse of what the numbers look like for someone who has been active on LinkedIn for a few years now (there’s a surprising lack of transparency about this)

My overall numbers

I always like to start with the big picture. How are things going for me on LinkedIn? From the starting point, I’m really happy: not only did I get 1.8M free impressions on LinkedIn last year, but this represents a 92% increase from my previous year.

Candidly, a significant amount of this growth is simply from being more active on LinkedIn. In 2022, I posted 118 times on LinkedIn. In 2023, I posted 368 times on LinkedIn (a +212% increase).

I was happy to see that my Likes (20,174 in 2023), Comments (8,606 in 2023) and Shares (222 in 2023) all went up YOY. I also noted that, while all of these numbers increased, they went up less than the % increase in my posts.

This is not too surprising, since generally I see that posting more often helps your overall numbers, but may not positively impact your average post’s performance. So next, let’s look at my averages.

My averages

The first thing I noticed is that my posts received fewer impressions in 2023 than in the previous year. However, based on my previous research into the data behind LinkedIn's algorithm change , I expected my overall impressions to have decreased (as we saw across all creators in mid-2023).

I was happy to see that my likes and engagement rates went up for my average post, with a slight decrease in comments.

Overall, I view these post averages as a good indicator of the health of my account: on average, I’m getting 5k impressions per post, with 55 likes and 23 comments.

The main way I use that information is to get a sense on how my posts perform each day: over or under average. This gives me a gut feel throughout the week on whether I’m posting content that’s valuable to my audience.

The format of my posts

The next aspect I looked at was the format of content am I posting and how each format is performing.

Here’s what stood out to me:

1. Carousels were only 3.6% of my posts, but they were my best performing format. I want to do more carousels in 2024.
2. Surprisingly, my text posts outperformed my image posts (I hardly ever see this). However, my team reminded me of my embarrassing experiments with graphics in early 2023, which explains the underperformance of my image posts. Now that I’m only using photos, I expect engagement to increase.

Overall, as I’ve said before, original and relevant images cause an +115% increase in post performance. I’m making a concerted effort to use more images in my posts.

I also looked at how these formats are distributed across each month:

I’ll be looking to do more carousels to mix up the format of my posts, and will also try to get back to trying some video here and there.

The schedule & length of my posts

Next, I looked at how the day of the week affects my posts. This was pretty surprising to me:

I realized that Monday & Wednesdays do best for me, so I’ll aim to schedule my “best” posts for these days. I also noticed that Fridays don’t work well for me. However, as my team pointed out, I’ve just started to publish a LinkedIn newsletter on Fridays…so we’ll see how that impacts Friday’s performance.

I also wanted to see how the amount of copy affects the performance of my posts. I had a few post outliers, which my team removed from the data set, to leave me with this insight:

This made me happy - it doesn’t look like short or long is the right strategy for my LinkedIn content…it’s just a matter for writing the right length for the post. Some of my posts are short. Some are long. Based on this data, I’ll keep it that way.

The topics of my posts

This was the information I was most interested in: what topics should I focus on in 2024? Going into this, I had a sense of what to expect from watching how my posts perform each day. However, what I saw surprised me the most:

I thought that my personal posts would be my best posts - that’s usually the case for our clients. And I expected my company & promotional posts to be my worst-performing posts (as is nearly always the case).

Instead, I found that my Leadership & Entrepreneurship posts and my Company posts did the best. And, to my embarrassment, these top-performing posts were only 29% of my content.

If you read my newsletter from two weeks ago, you know I’m a huge fan of Cody Barbo , and am starting to learn from his culture of company evangelism. This plays in well to my desire to increase company-related content, while also adding value.

I did a double-click on these topics to go deeper:

I had a hunch that my pro-LinkedIn content wasn’t performing well. This analysis confirmed it, and it’s something I’ll aim to do less of moving forward. However, the employee spotlight and recruiting posts both came as a surprise - I’ll be investing in more of these this year.

I’ll also experiment with the subcategories that tend to do well.

Understanding your own performance

While fancy graphs and analysis help, you can learn quite a lot from seeing how your posts are performing, and what posts are inviting the richest discussion with your clients.

The most important thing I hope you take from all of this: LinkedIn is not a one-way medium. It works best when you create content, and then pay attention to how that content lands with your audience. Frequent strategic iterations are helpful, and the more you iterate, the better you’ll get.