[STUDY] 2024 LinkedIn Benchmarks: Engagement Rate Data and Top-Performing Content Insights
In the last few years, LinkedIn has really stepped up its game and has become a go-to marketing tool, especially for B2B brands.
But in today's fast-paced digital world, it's crucial for marketers to keep their finger on the pulse of what's hot on LinkedIn and predict what's coming next. That's where LinkedIn analytics data swoops in to save the day!
So, why not take a peek at the latest LinkedIn benchmarks data, and use our findings to guide your path to an improved, data-driven content strategy?
LinkedIn benchmarks and key insights for 2024
1.1. The engagement rate on LinkedIn has increased by 44% YoY
1.2. Multi-image posts generate the highest amount of likes & comments on LinkedIn
1.3. Videos are the most shared content type on LinkedIn
1.4. Brands have increased their posting frequency on LinkedIn by 10% in 2024
1.5. Polls generate the highest impression rate on LinkedIn
1.6. Posts with multiple images and short captions have the highest engagement rate on LinkedIn
1. Key findings
1.1. The engagement rate on LinkedIn has increased by 44% YoY
There’s no better time than the present for brands seeking more engagement on their LinkedIn posts. The engagement rate on LinkedIn has increased by 44% YoY, reaching a whopping 3.85% in 2024.
What is interesting about LinkedIn’s engagement, when doing a year-over-year comparison, is precisely this significant increase, especially at a time when there’s an overall social media engagement drop, as per 2024 social media engagement benchmarks study.
Brands with a solid social media presence on LinkedIn are used to leveraging a variety of post types, depending on the topics of their content. Each post type brings its own set of benefits, but at the end of the day, it’s really important to find the right content format to deliver your brand’s message.
According to our latest LinkedIn benchmarks 2024, posts with multiple images are in the lead, generating massive amounts of engagement compared to other posts types. This trend got off to a slow start, but in 2024, multi-image posts are really taking off and are now the most engaging post type for marketers on LinkedIn.
Native document and image posts have also enjoyed higher levels of engagement in 2024 than the previous years.
If you’re looking for a sure way to boost your engagement, Xandrina Allday suggests looking closely at your audience:
B2B brands need to acknowledge that B2B is just human to human. That alone can have a huge impact on the content you produce and therefore the interactions on your pages too.
Secondly, brands need to take a deep dive into who their audience is through LinkedIn page analytics. Once you understand who your audience is on the platform, you can better serve content for your different audience types which can dramatically increase your post interactions.
1.2. Multi-image posts generate the highest amount of likes & comments on LinkedIn
As we go forward in this benchmarks report, you will begin to notice a pattern — multiple image posts are performing very well on LinkedIn in 2024.
Since the data suggested that they generate the highest amount of engagement, we decided to look deeper and found that they are responsible for the highest amount of likes and comments for profiles with large audiences.
This also led us to discover that the medium number of likes for LinkedIn in 2024 is 45 and the median number of comments is 4.
Looking to increase the number of likes and comments on your LinkedIn posts? Here's what Sarah Clay suggests:
Posts published on personal profiles receive up to 561% more interaction than company page posts. This is one reason why it’s important to involve your teams in your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
Empowering employees to set up and run their own personal profiles in a strategic way, will help increase the strength and reach of the company message right across LinkedIn. Not only this, but by encouraging and supporting your teams to use LinkedIn for effective networking, the status of each employee and therefore the company, can be elevated without a huge amount of effort or cost. This will lead to greater brand awareness and will, in turn, drive more people to the company page leading to higher post interactions and potentially more sales.
1.3. Videos are the most shared content type on LinkedIn
Video content is everywhere these days and there’s no denying it is the present and future of social media marketing. On LinkedIn, video is not the most engaging content type (yet), but more shares mean more impressions, and an increase in brand awareness.
According to our LinkedIn data, videos score the highest number of shares compared to all other post types.
This is particularly accurate when it comes to videos published by profiles with a large following (over 100k followers).
So, if one of your social media goals is to create more shareable content, don’t hesitate to venture into the video marketing business.
1.4. Brands have increased their posting frequency on LinkedIn by 10% in 2024
One piece of data that may explain the rise of significant increase in LinkedIn engagement is that brands have also started posting more frequently - averaging up to 18 posts per month.
By now, it’s common knowledge that a consistent posting schedule is key to staying top of mind for your audience. What’s more, the more you stick to a content schedule, the more the LinkedIn algorithm will pay attention to and promote your content.
It seems that now, more than ever, brands figured out that posting consistently is the recipe for success.
Louise Brogan, LinkedIn Marketing expert, has some thoughts on this topic:
The number one way pages can increase their post interactions on LinkedIn is by leveraging their own employee network.
Employee interaction on page posts is the key to sharing the post wider and further on LinkedIn. It is not enough just to ask your staff to do this though. Content on company page gives your team something to share with their own network.
By giving your team useful content to share, not only are you solving a problem for your employees who want to be visible on LinkedIn, but the company page gets more exposure too.
1.5. Polls generate the highest impression rate on LinkedIn in 2024
Out of all LinkedIn metrics out there, impressions are perhaps the most favored by the algorithm. They’re so important that they’re displayed first under every post you share on this platform.
Given the posting frequency increase we mentioned above, obviously there are more posts being published, which means more posts fighting for attention / visibility.
Impressions matter because they reflect your brand’s content visibility on LinkedIn.
In 2024, the average impression rate on LinkedIn has reached 9.50%, and we owe most of that to polls. Mostly likely due to its highly interactive nature, this content type scores the largest number of impressions, followed by multiple image posts.
LinkedIn is a place where people love to express their opinion, and polls make it easy for anyone to chime in on any given topic. Whether the poster is asking for feedback, an opinion or a prediction, the audience can actively participate in a decision making process.
Summing up, the top post types that generate a high number of impressions are:
- polls
- multiple image posts
- video posts
To increase impressions and implicitly, your brand awareness, Christina Le suggests this:
Your employees are your most powerful brand advocates. If you want to increase your company's LinkedIn page, inspire your team to openly discuss their work and integrate this into their personal branding.
Encourage them to share their achievements freely, and that's how they'll build a genuine connection with their audience which would naturally boost brand awareness for the company.
1.6. Posts with multiple images and short captions have the highest engagement rate on LinkedIn
When it comes to social media strategy, even on platforms that have been around for a while, people are always seeking the perfect content combo. The ideal content type posted at the right time, the ideal match between captions and visuals… the list goes on and on.
The truth is, nobody can give you a one-size-fits-all solution, but data can provide some insights into what works best on LinkedIn in 2024, in terms of engagement and impressions.
According to the data we analyzed for this year’s LinkedIn engagement rate benchmark report, pairing up multiple image posts with short captions (under 19 words) is the way to go if you want to see a major increase in your engagement rate.
Multiple images are a common denominator across all caption length brackets. So even if your captions run longer than 19 words, adding multiple images to your posts will still bring you more engagement than any other post type.
2. Key takeaways
We presented the data, now it’s your turn to take these insights and use them wisely, creating the best LinkedIn marketing strategy the internet has ever seen!
Before we wrap up, let us go over the key takeaways from our 2024 LinkedIn benchmarks:
- Opt for multi-image posts for maximum engagement. Native documents and single image posts are also highly engaging, so make sure you incorporate all three in your strategy.
- Prioritize video content if you want your LinkedIn content to be more shareable.
- Interact with your audience via polls to gain high levels of visibility (impressions).
- Keep your captions short and pair them with multiple images for higher engagement.
- Empower employees to create and manage their own personal profiles strategically in order to enhance your company's message on LinkedIn.
- Brands should delve deep into their audience through LinkedIn page analytics and create content for different audience types.
3. Methodology
This study’s dataset included accounts with an active presence on LinkedIn between January 2022 and December 2023. We only considered pages with followers between 1,000 and 1 million to eliminate any outliers that could skew average engagement or impressions.
The content formats references in this analysis consist of the following:
- Native documents: the type of post consisting of a PDF uploaded directly on LinkedIn that is similar to a carousel.
- Multi images: the upload of multiple photos at once, displayed similarly to an album.
- Text posts: LinkedIn posts consisting of a block of text.
- Polls: open for voting questions.
- Image: posts that include the upload of an image.
- Post shares: shares of other people’s/ company’s posts that were posted within the platform.
- Video: posts that include the upload of a video.
- Link shares: represents the share (as in insertion of the link) of blog articles.
We define LinkedIn metrics as follows:
- Engagement rate by impressions: 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. This is the same formula LinkedIn uses.
- Median number of likes, comments, shares: the midpoint value for likes/comments/shares. By calculating the median (instead of the average), we make sure we filter out the outlying values that are skewing the results.
- Average number of posts per month: how many posts pages post on average on LinkedIn
- Impressions rate: the percentage of your follower base that has seen your posts. The formula we use to calculate it is: total number of impressions divided by total number of followers, all multiplied by 100.