We have a bad habit of ignoring LinkedIn in this newsletter. That’s kinda strange considering that we actually do love the platform. It can be killer for B2B companies. Or for personal branding. It’s just a useful platform. Period.
Scott Ayers, the Social Scientist at Agorapulse, agrees with us that LinkedIn is a great social platform. But, he wanted to know what types of posts perform best on the platform. So, he did what scientists do and conducted an experiment.
He set out to find out what post-type gives you the best organic reach and if hashtags make a difference.
Scott explained his experiment and the results on the Social Business Engine podcast, and we’ve got the full scoop right here:
- (03:57) Scott is the Content Scientist at Agorapulse. He runs social media experiments for a living. He takes it seriously by always following the scientific method. Luckily for us, he shares his results with the world.
- (06:57) To determine what a good experiment is, Scott keeps a running list of 300-400 test ideas. They try to only conduct experiments that have never been done before.
- (11:51) Scott wanted to test what type of post performed best on LinkedIn.
- (12:12) Scott’s hypothesis was that LinkedIn text posts would have the lowest organic reach.
- (12:30) They tested this with 3 LinkedIn accounts: Melonie Dodaro, Agorapulse, Scott’s personal account.
- (12:57) The result? Text-only posts on LinkedIn had an average view increase of 1,069% compared to other types of posts!
- (13:20) Why does this happen? Because people are having professional conversations on LinkedIn, and they want to engage with other professional talking about something in their industry. (Also, LinkedIn’s algorithm decreases the reach of link posts).
- (18:38) Scott’s next experiment was about hashtag-use on LinkedIn. He found that posts with hashtags get 30% more impressions.
There’s still 10 minutes left in this podcast. Tune in…
