[Study] LinkedIn Content Research: 141.474 Business Posts Show the Best LinkedIn Content Strategy for B2B Marketing

Whether we’re talking about content marketing or social media marketing, the key to gaining success and taking your business to the next level is engaging content.

And speaking of great content, do you know what’s the top-perming post type on LinkedIn for B2B marketing?

By examining 141.474 LinkedIn posts from 1.126 LinkedIn pages, we’ve uncovered what type of content delivers the highest engagement, highest click-through rate, and more.

To better analyze your LinkedIn page performance and learn how you can improve your LinkedIn content strategy in 2022, check out the in-depth insights revealed below!

LinkedIn content performance stats for 2022

A. Summary
B. Key insights

1. Native documents generate 3x more clicks than any other type of content
2. Video generates the highest engagement per impression rate for small to middle-sized accounts
3. In 2022, LinkedIn’s video views rate stands at an average of 15.61%
4. The average LinkedIn page reach rate is 3.49%

C. Methodology

A. Summary

Reading this study, you'll discover:

What is the average click-through rate by impressions: we uncover which type of content is more likely to make people click on a post on LinkedIn after seeing it repeatedly.

What’s the average engagement rate by impressions: we analyze the interaction level per view, for those cases in which a post appears multiple times in the same user’s feed.

What's the average video view rate: what percentage of a video do people watch on LinkedIn.

What's the average page reach rate: to how many people is the content posted on page exposed.

1. Native documents generate 3x more clicks than any other type of content

Having a unique, more professional approach, LinkedIn has become the number one social media platform professionals and B2B companies rely on to gain brand awareness and - why not - even increase sales.

As there’s nothing more trustworthy than numbers and stats, we rely on data to showcase precisely how valuable LinkedIn is - especially for a B2B company.

For example, did you know that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn (vs. 13% from Twitter and 7% from Facebook), while it also generates 3x more conversions compared to the other two mentioned platforms?

Since we talked about traffic-related stuff here, which is one of the most important social media objectives, it is essential to optimize your LinkedIn content to favor that.

When doing your LinkedIn content strategy and getting to the brainstorming process of designing your LinkedIn posts, keep in mind that native documents generate 3x more clicks than any other type of content on LinkedIn.

In 2022, LinkedIn’s click-through rate across all types of content is located at an average of 2.20%.

However, businesses that want to have a strong LinkedIn performance can boost their LinkedIn marketing strategy by integrating more native documents into their LinkedIn content plans.

According to data, native documents have an average click-through rate of 3-8%, depending on the account size, while all the other types of posts rarely exceed 2.00%.

Like carousels on Instagram, native documents are the LinkedIn content type that performs best from multiple perspectives.

Not a huge surprise here since this is LinkedIn’s way of rewarding content and pages that succeed in keeping the users on the platform longer.

As data has revealed (in another study related to the performance of posts with different link placements that we conducted), posts without links are the best-performing ones on LinkedIn.

2. Video generates the highest engagement per impression rate for small to middle-sized accounts

Moving forward to another key metric that marketers focus on - engagement, there is evidence that the best-performing LinkedIn content type varies depending on the page size.

While the average engagement per impressions rate on LinkedIn is 3.16%, accounts under 50K followers have the chance of getting an up to 4.49% engagement per impressions rate with videos.

With video content ruling the internet these days, LinkedIn is also pushing videos more into the user’s feeds.

As a result, video content gets more impressions and has greater chances of making LinkedIn users interact with it.

The biggest surprise data shed some light on was that in the case of middle to large profiles:

• for pages between 50-100K followers, images are the ones that generate the highest engagement levels (up to 4.06% average engagement per impressions rate) - for this account’s size, all the other types of posts (including videos) hardly generate an engagement exceeding 1.00%.

• large accounts (with more than 100K followers) have their particularity - these pages get the highest engagement per impression rate through native documents, reaching values ‘til 4.84%.
  

A good explanation for this would be that thanks to their budgets, businesses that own that large LinkedIn page have enough resources to invest in creating cool and catchy materials.

And the LinkedIn algorithm, which encourages the usage of native documents - as mentioned earlier - is, of course, a bonus.

3. In 2022, LinkedIn’s video views rate stands at an average of 14.46%

Since we mentioned how much terrain video content has gained on the internet lately, it’s worth asking how many videos people consume on social media. Sticking to LinkedIn, the video view rate is located at an average of 14.46%.

To help you shape and improve your LinkedIn content strategy in the future, we’ll break down the numbers a bit and give you a couple of more in-depth insights:

• the smallest accounts have the highest video view rate, of 17.18% on average;
• middle sized-accounts (between 10-50K followers) seem to have a harder time making the users watch their LinkedIn videos - having an average video view rate of 11.29%.

TIP: If you want to make people watch more of your videos, you should, above all, front-load your video with interest! This is the best strategy for beating that two-seconds mark and gaining their attention.

4. The average LinkedIn page reach rate is 3.49%

When looking at the LinkedIn page reach data, we dug up a lot of insights, some of which were pretty easy to predict, while others not so much.

For example, the highest reach scores small LinkedIn pages got - with an average reach rate of 6.17% is pretty understandable.

After all, it is only normal for pages with a small following to reach a greater percentage of that entire audience and have higher numbers.

However, while numbers significantly decrease and even get down by half when talking about pages with bigger followings, pages between 50-100K followers struggle the most to reach people on LinkedIn.

All in all, when doing a LinkedIn audit and analyzing your LinkedIn page performance, make sure to keep an eye on your LinkedIn page reach rate.

If it is below the average - which is 3.49% - probably you’ll have some optimization to do on your LinkedIn content.

C. Methodology

To identify the best strategies for creating top-performing LinkedIn content for B2B companies and not only, we analyzed 141.474 LinkedIn posts from 1.126 LinkedIn business pages of international brands.

The accounts examined had a following of between 1000 - 100.000K followers and an active presence on LinkedIn between January 2021 and April 2022.

The Click-through rate metric shows the percentage of people who clicked on a post and is calculated by dividing the number of link clicks by the number of impressions.

Total engagement: represents the sum of likes, comments, clicks, and shares received for the posts published in the selected period.

The average engagement rate reveals the average level of interactions an account has through published content, measured in percentages.

Note: This LinkedIn content performance study includes only organic posts.

Total impressions: the total number of impressions received for the posts published in the selected time period. The impressions of a post represent the number of times that specific post was seen.

The engagement per impression rate counts how many people interacted with your LinkedIn posts from those who watched repeatedly.

It is calculated by dividing your engagement by impressions, then multiplied by 100.

Average views per video: the metric shows the average number of views per video.

This is calculated as the total video views divided by the number of videos published in the selected time period.

The video views rate represents the percentage of video views divided by total impressions, multiplied by 100.

While the total post reach indicates the number of people who have seen that particular post in the selected time period, the average page reach rate indicates the number of people who have seen any of your LinkedIn page’s content, shown as a percentage.

NOTE: Reach rate stats are available only for LinkedIn pages as LinkedIn does not offer information about the post's reach through its API.

Related articles:

• How to Start a Competitive Analysis on LinkedIn
• Top 8 LinkedIn Metrics to Track
• [STUDY] LinkedIn Engagement Rate
  

* This article was originally published here