Advice for coaches & consultants on LinkedIn is usually written by people who have never measured it. We isolated 3,958 posts from 14 coaches & consultants inside a dataset of 12,988 posts and compared their strongest work against their weakest. The short version: the median post earned 86 reactions and 6 comments, while their top-decile posts ran 91 comments. The gap is not the topic. It is whether a specific person is visible in the first two lines.
The short version
- Sample: 3,958 posts from 14 coaches & consultants.
- Median post: 86 reactions, 6 comments (0.29 per 1,000 followers).
- First-person openers: 38.6% of their top posts vs 17.6% overall.
- Most-written topics: Technology, Productivity, Leadership.
What do coaches & consultants write about on LinkedIn?
Ranked by how many of their posts touch each theme. A post can count toward more than one, so these overlap. Each links to the real examples and engagement data for that category.
- Technology (1,142 posts)
- Productivity (657 posts)
- Leadership (414 posts)
- Marketing (391 posts)
- Customer Experience (361 posts)
- Finance (331 posts)
- Education & Learning (322 posts)
- Career Growth (283 posts)
This is what coaches & consultants in this cohort do write about, which is not automatically what earns the most engagement. Compare the list above against the per-category medians on the examples hub before deciding where to spend your effort. A crowded category needs a sharper hook, not a different topic.
What separates their best posts from their worst?
Hook patterns: top-decile posts by coaches & consultants vs all their posts (%)
Opens in first person
Says 'you' in the hook
Contains a question
Contains an emoji
Four or more hashtags
The comparison above is deliberately internal. It holds the author constant, which removes the biggest confounder in engagement data: some accounts simply have more engaged audiences than others. When the same coaches & consultants write a top-decile post instead of a typical one, first-person openers and questions go up and hashtag stuffing goes down. That is the pattern worth copying.
How much engagement should a consultant expect?
| Measure | Coaches & Consultants | Whole cohort |
|---|---|---|
| Median reactions | 86 | 122 |
| Median comments | 6 | 12 |
| Median rate per 1,000 followers | 0.29 | 0.4 |
| Top-decile median comments | 91 | 72 |
Benchmarks are only useful against your own follower count, which is why we report the rate per 1,000. To place yourself precisely, run your own numbers against the percentiles in the engagement benchmarks.
Which formats do coaches & consultants use?
| Format | Coaches & Consultants | All posts |
|---|---|---|
| text | 13.3% | 21% |
| image | 42.5% | 36.4% |
| video | 13.9% | 12.4% |
| Shared article/link | 29.8% | 29.4% |
| Document/carousel | 0.4% | 0.5% |
| poll | 0.2% | 0.3% |
Cohort-wide, native video appears in 26.3% of top-decile posts against 10.1% of bottom-half posts. If the row above shows coaches & consultants posting video at 13.9%, that is the cheapest unclaimed advantage available to this group. The video breakdown covers how to start if you would rather not be on camera.
Real examples: 10 of their highest-performing hooks
Real posts by coaches & consultants in this dataset, shown as readers saw them before the fold, with author names removed.
My little brother passed away last week. He was 18. Three weeks ago he asked to work for me after he graduated high school. And I said yes & there was nothing I was looking forward to more. To everyone …see more
Can’t describe my excitement right now!! Our SoGal Ventures seed stage investment in March 2017 is now a $1.3 Billion dollar unicorn 🦄 !!! BlackRock and many amazing new investors including women focused …see more
LinkedIn needs more black & brown creators. I started creating on this platform when I was 23. There were only a few people creating on the platform that looked like me. I saw opportunity in that but I know …see more
Proud to be the cover story of A Magazine’s November issue! Whenever we get featured in media or conferences, instead of a personal accolade, I see it as a way to spread a much needed message. The mission at …see more
What an honor it was to sell Getting There at this year’s Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting next to the amazing Robert Cialdini ! Plus a visit from the awesome Danielle Town ! #warrenbuffet …see more
2008 and 2018. I was 23 on the left and just starting my company, Zen Media. I’d just finished graduate school and writing my thesis on Twitter. No one believed social media would be a field. It was early …see more
#data #startups Aha! was recently ranked in the top 25 start-ups in America and Linked-In asked Brian to answer questions about their growth, continuous innovation and how Aha! has helped teams all over the …see more
Can you show me any more useful healthcare infographics than this one? It's created by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, summarizing its latest guidelines for the investigation and …see more
Would any of my Operations network like a lifestyle change and relocate to the South Coast? Are you an Operations Manager looking for an opportunity to make a significant impact on cultural change and …see more
I tried to collect companies which are on top of their game in the conventional fertility and/or pregnancy area, but also start-ups and ventures who are looking way beyond that. Here’s my guide to 10 …see more
A practical starting system for coaches & consultants
The point of posting is qualified inbound without cold outreach, and the audience you are writing for is prospective clients who are quietly reading before they ever reach out. That narrows what belongs on the page.
- Pick three recurring themes, drawn from the topic list above, and stay in them long enough that people learn what you are for.
- Bank moments as they happen. The specific detail is what you cannot reconstruct later, and it is the thing the data rewards.
- Open in first person and cut at the fold. See how to start a post.
- Ask a real question when you want comments, which carry the most weight of any signal.
- Show up on a cadence you can hold without the quality collapsing. Frequency matters less than consistency.
Frequently asked questions
What should coaches & consultants post about on LinkedIn?
In our cohort, the topics coaches & consultants write about most are technology, productivity, leadership. But topic matters less than treatment: 38.6% of their top-decile posts open in first person against 17.6% of their posts overall. Write the specific decision, mistake, or moment rather than the general lesson drawn from it.
How often do coaches & consultants get engagement on LinkedIn?
Across 3,958 posts from 14 coaches & consultants in our cohort, the median post earned 86 reactions and 6 comments, or 0.29 engagements per 1,000 followers. Their top-decile posts run 91 comments at the median. Note this is 14 accounts, so read it as a directional benchmark rather than an industry average.
Should coaches & consultants use video on LinkedIn?
13.9% of posts by coaches & consultants in our cohort are native video, against 12.4% cohort-wide. Cohort-wide, native video appears in 26.3% of top-decile posts and 10.1% of bottom-half posts, roughly a 2.6 times over-index. That is one of the strongest format signals in the data, and it is under-used by most professionals.
How long should a consultant's LinkedIn post be?
The visible hook is what gets judged, roughly 210 characters before the "see more" fold. Among coaches & consultants the median hook is 206 characters. Hook length does not separate strong posts from weak ones anywhere in our data, so spend the effort on what the opening line says rather than how long it is.
About this data
Numbers come from our analysis of a public dataset of 34,012 LinkedIn influencer posts. We scored 12,988 English posts from 65 creators by engagement rate (reactions + 4× comments, divided by the author's followers) and compared the top 10% against the bottom half. The dataset captures each post's text up to LinkedIn's “see more” fold, which is exactly what a reader sees before deciding to engage. These are correlations, not guarantees. Full methodology and caveats are in the full study.
Role buckets are assigned from each author's LinkedIn headline, so they are approximate, and each bucket covers a small number of accounts. Treat these as directional benchmarks rather than industry averages.