Advice for founders & ceos on LinkedIn is usually written by people who have never measured it. We isolated 5,619 posts from 21 founders & ceos inside a dataset of 12,988 posts and compared their strongest work against their weakest. The short version: the median post earned 132 reactions and 12 comments, while their top-decile posts ran 19 comments. The gap is not the topic. It is whether a specific person is visible in the first two lines.
The short version
- Sample: 5,619 posts from 21 founders & ceos.
- Median post: 132 reactions, 12 comments (0.19 per 1,000 followers).
- First-person openers: 22.1% of their top posts vs 10.9% overall.
- Most-written topics: Finance, Productivity, Marketing.
What do founders & ceos 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.
- Finance (1,775 posts)
- Productivity (616 posts)
- Marketing (529 posts)
- Leadership (513 posts)
- Customer Experience (504 posts)
- Education & Learning (244 posts)
- Entrepreneurship (243 posts)
- Career Growth (241 posts)
This is what founders & ceos 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 founders & ceos 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 founders & ceos 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 founder expect?
| Measure | Founders & CEOs | Whole cohort |
|---|---|---|
| Median reactions | 132 | 122 |
| Median comments | 12 | 12 |
| Median rate per 1,000 followers | 0.19 | 0.4 |
| Top-decile median comments | 19 | 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 founders & ceos use?
| Format | Founders & CEOs | All posts |
|---|---|---|
| text | 27.9% | 21% |
| image | 36.2% | 36.4% |
| video | 8.4% | 12.4% |
| Shared article/link | 27.4% | 29.4% |
| Document/carousel | 0.1% | 0.5% |
| poll | 0% | 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 founders & ceos posting video at 8.4%, 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 founders & ceos in this dataset, shown as readers saw them before the fold, with author names removed.
Great first day as CEO of TransUnion Africa. Met some amazing people and super excited to be part of a great team that will use the power of data to make a difference for businesses and consumers across …see more
[Edit 8/31/19] ***Thanks for your votes! Here are the totals if you're curious*** I love data, so I got a python script to get all your comments into Excel, and then crunched the numbers: 405 of you voted on …see more
So fed up and just have to vent... I have 800+ LinkedIn connection requests pending. No way I can review them all. Of my last 100 connection requests (after accepting the valuable ones), only 23% are …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
Today marks the end of my almost 19 year journey with Accenture. An absolutely amazing journey working with some of the best people around to solve some of the coolest of problems. Like it started in 1997 …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
I'm excited to announce that EveryMove has been acquired by higi, a population and community health company that operates the largest network of over 11,000 self screening stations in the country. Amazing …see more
It was a privilege to attend James C. Rhee 's speech in NYC this past week - and his insights are a good reminder that we can embrace kindness and still succeed. …see more
As we approach 2019, we're updating our brand at CityLife to match the growth we've seen in our company. We're dropping the "app" from our name - not because we're any less enthusiastic about our platform …see more
I’m sorry to share that, sadly like a lot of people’s friends and relatives right now in these days of Covid, my mum Eve has also passed away. But rather than mourn her loss, I wanted to celebrate her …see more
A practical starting system for founders & ceos
The point of posting is inbound that shortens the sales cycle, and the audience you are writing for is customers, candidates, and investors. 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 founders & ceos post about on LinkedIn?
In our cohort, the topics founders & ceos write about most are finance, productivity, marketing. But topic matters less than treatment: 22.1% of their top-decile posts open in first person against 10.9% of their posts overall. Write the specific decision, mistake, or moment rather than the general lesson drawn from it.
How often do founders & ceos get engagement on LinkedIn?
Across 5,619 posts from 21 founders & ceos in our cohort, the median post earned 132 reactions and 12 comments, or 0.19 engagements per 1,000 followers. Their top-decile posts run 19 comments at the median. Note this is 21 accounts, so read it as a directional benchmark rather than an industry average.
Should founders & ceos use video on LinkedIn?
8.4% of posts by founders & ceos 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 founder's LinkedIn post be?
The visible hook is what gets judged, roughly 210 characters before the "see more" fold. Among founders & ceos the median hook is 205 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.