Advice for marketers on LinkedIn is usually written by people who have never measured it. We isolated 1,616 posts from 8 marketers inside a dataset of 12,988 posts and compared their strongest work against their weakest. The short version: the median post earned 138 reactions and 28 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: 1,616 posts from 8 marketers.
- Median post: 138 reactions, 28 comments (2.85 per 1,000 followers).
- First-person openers: 28.4% of their top posts vs 16.1% overall.
- Most-written topics: Marketing, Finance, Customer Experience.
What do marketers 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.
- Marketing (710 posts)
- Finance (541 posts)
- Customer Experience (302 posts)
- Leadership (284 posts)
- Personal Branding (273 posts)
- Entrepreneurship (253 posts)
- Career Growth (218 posts)
- Education & Learning (191 posts)
This is what marketers 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 marketers 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 marketers 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 marketer expect?
| Measure | Marketers | Whole cohort |
|---|---|---|
| Median reactions | 138 | 122 |
| Median comments | 28 | 12 |
| Median rate per 1,000 followers | 2.85 | 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 marketers use?
| Format | Marketers | All posts |
|---|---|---|
| text | 27.8% | 21% |
| image | 22.6% | 36.4% |
| video | 23.5% | 12.4% |
| Shared article/link | 22.5% | 29.4% |
| Document/carousel | 1.7% | 0.5% |
| poll | 1.6% | 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 marketers posting video at 23.5%, 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 marketers 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
See this? This is a streaming disc. After launching streaming on PCs and then Macs, Netflix turned it's attention to devices that were already connected to the internet, used for video, and had massive …see more
A throwback to 17 years ago, when Netflix went public. You can see in Reed's answer one of the many reasons I joined the company amidst the dot-com implosion just one year earlier - strategic thinking. You …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
Unemployment caused my disability and I desperately wish more people understood the debilitating consequences of burnout before it's too late... The stress of not knowing where your next meal will come from, …see more
This is Red. Red is my service pup. You see... Red listens. He listens to intuition and senses heightened heart rates and emotion... He notices changes in movement and tone. When he is triggered by an …see more
🍗🍗🍗 A fried chicken triple hat win?!?!? LinkedIn Top Voice (not once, twice, but three times) 3-4 years ago, I hardly hanged out on LinkedIn, I thought it was a place to find jobs and put up your resume. It …see more
A year ago last week, I graduated from college. That day, I united with my family after the ceremony and asked my dad, “Are you proud of me?” “Absolutely. You graduated from the school you wanted to. But you …see more
4 is my fav number. 4 is the day I was born (thanks mum). 4 is 4th year I'm on the list of LinkedIn's Top Voices. Here are the key milestones for my brand on LinkedIn: 2017: Access to LinkedIn Video (beta) …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
A practical starting system for marketers
The point of posting is credibility that compounds into career and pipeline, and the audience you are writing for is peers, prospects, and future employers. 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 marketers post about on LinkedIn?
In our cohort, the topics marketers write about most are marketing, finance, customer experience. But topic matters less than treatment: 28.4% of their top-decile posts open in first person against 16.1% of their posts overall. Write the specific decision, mistake, or moment rather than the general lesson drawn from it.
How often do marketers get engagement on LinkedIn?
Across 1,616 posts from 8 marketers in our cohort, the median post earned 138 reactions and 28 comments, or 2.85 engagements per 1,000 followers. Their top-decile posts run 91 comments at the median. Note this is 8 accounts, so read it as a directional benchmark rather than an industry average.
Should marketers use video on LinkedIn?
23.5% of posts by marketers 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 marketer's LinkedIn post be?
The visible hook is what gets judged, roughly 210 characters before the "see more" fold. Among marketers 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.