Data: How to drive web traffic and engagement with LinkedIn

Astanbul, Turkey - December 14, 2011: Woman hand holding an touching an Apple iPhone 4 in a coffee shop. iPhone 4 displaying start up screen of LinkedIn application. The iPhone 4 is a touchscreen slate smartphone and the fourth generation iPhone, developed by Apple Inc.

The conventional wisdom is that putting a hyperlink into a post on LinkedIn will kill your reach. Instead, you should include the link as the first comment.

But that’s just not true, according to new research from Metricool.

Their 2025 LinkedIn Study found that link posts have 4.9% higher impressions and 13.5% higher interactions than other posts. And the number of clicks on links has increased 28% year-over-year.

Does that surprise you?

Their research is based on an analysis of more than 577,000 posts from more than 47,000 LinkedIn pages — not personal profiles.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the data and see what other insights we can glean for better, more effective LinkedIn content.

Metrics show LinkedIn is booming

Across the board, engagement metrics of all kinds showed growth year over year, according to Metricool’s data.

As this graphic shows us, some of these increases are likely due to tweaks in the algorithm. For instance, such an explosive increase in poll reach is likely due to LinkedIn favoring this post type and boosting its reach. But it’s one that many page managers aren’t taking advantage of — only 0.00034% of LinkedIn page posts contain a poll. So, if you aren’t at least occasionally tossing a poll to your followers, you’re missing out on a huge potential reach.

Likewise, we’ve seen a high increase in link clicks YOY, again indicating an algorithmic change that should be welcome for page managers. Links remain one of the most popular post types — 30% of all posts contain links — so the major boost indicates some tinkering behind the scenes.

The highest engagement drivers on LinkedIn right now, overall, however, are carousels. These multi-image slides offer up the highest clicks, shares and interactions of any post type, emphasizing the increasingly visual nature of LinkedIn. Reinforcing this view is the underperformance of text-only posts. They ranked last by most metrics, including comments, likes and shares. So to have the best impact, your LinkedIn post needs a little something besides just words.

Video, a much-discussed emerging tactic on LinkedIn, ranked lower than you might expect, including last for engagement and second-to-last for comments, with reach and other factors in the middle of the pack. However, on a year-over-year basis, LinkedIn video is seeing tremendous growth, indicating the push that the platform is putting behind it.

The number of videos posted to LinkedIn is up a modest 13%, but views are up 68%. Clicks on video are up a whopping 160%, with other metrics like impressions and interactions also high. The only metric that has declined year over year is shares, indicating that while users may enjoy the content, they may not want to recirculate it in their feeds. But again, take caution: while these numbers are up year-over-year against themselves, video is not the most successful content form on LinkedIn. It’s one component of a strategy, not the whole thing. At least not yet.

How often to post

One of the greatest debates on any social media platform is how frequently you should create content.

The average LinkedIn account posts just over 12 times a month, the research found. But there is a direct correlation between how frequently an account posts and how many followers it has.

Now, some of this may be a chicken-and-egg situation: huge accounts likely have bigger teams to create posts and videos and thus are able to create more content. Or, after seeing returns, companies invest more resources into posting, thus fueling additional growth. But there is an opportunity even for small and medium pages to increase their activity and grow their following. Recycling old posts, mining podcasts for video clips that could be posted and other creative reuse strategies can boost your activity without significantly increasing your work.

But the best method for seeing growth? Experiment. See what works for your audience. Use the content as a guide but find your own rhythm.

Allison Carter is editorial director of PR Daily and Ragan.com. Follow her on LinkedIn.