What counts as a good LinkedIn engagement rate?
Most benchmark pages quote a single percentage with no methodology attached, which is useless because engagement scales with follower count and every study measures it differently. Here are the actual percentiles from our cohort, expressed per 1,000 followers with comments weighted 4x.
| Percentile | Rate per 1,000 followers | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 50th (median) | 0.40 | A typical post from an established creator |
| 75th | 1.27 | Clearly above average, about 3x the median |
| 90th | 5.95 | Top decile, roughly 15x the median |
That curve is steep on purpose. LinkedIn engagement is not normally distributed, so judging a single post against an average is misleading. A post at the median is not a failure; it is the middle of the pack. What matters is the trend across your last twenty posts.
Reactions vs comments: why the weighting matters
Look at the raw medians from the study and it becomes obvious which signal separates good posts from great ones.
| Group | Median reactions | Median comments |
|---|---|---|
| Top decile | 235 | 72 |
| Whole cohort | 122 | 12 |
| Bottom half | 80 | 5 |
Reactions roughly triple from the bottom half to the top decile. Comments rise more than fourteenfold. If you want one number to optimize, make it comments per 1,000 followers. The playbook for that is in the comment strategy guide.
How to raise the number
- Fix the opening line first. Nothing else matters if the post fails its initial test audience. Run a draft through the hook analyzer.
- Ask something you actually want answered. Questions appear in 19.0% of top-decile hooks vs 14.2% of weak ones.
- Go native. Video appears in 26.3% of top posts vs 10.1% of the bottom half, while shared-link posts skew weak.
- Track the median of your last twenty posts, not your best one. One viral post tells you almost nothing.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate LinkedIn engagement rate?
We use (reactions + 4 x comments) divided by follower count, reported per 1,000 followers. Comments get four times the weight because they are far scarcer, take real effort, and push a post into the commenter's own network. Dividing by followers lets a 3,000-follower account be compared fairly against a 300,000-follower one.
What is a good LinkedIn engagement rate?
In our cohort of 12,988 posts, the median post scored 0.40 engagements per 1,000 followers. The 75th percentile is 1.27 and the 90th percentile is 5.95. If you are clearing roughly 1.3 you are in the top quarter of this cohort. Note the curve is steep: the top decile sits about 15 times above the median.
Why weight comments more than likes?
Because the data says they separate posts far better. Between the bottom half and the top decile, median reactions roughly triple (80 to 235) while median comments rise more than fourteenfold (5 to 72). A reaction is a reflex; a comment is a decision, and it exposes your post to a second network.
Does this work for small LinkedIn accounts?
The formula works at any size, but the benchmarks come from creators who all had at least 1,000 followers, so treat the percentiles as directional below that. Very small accounts often show high rates simply because a handful of colleagues engage with everything, which inflates the ratio without meaning much.
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.
For the full percentile analysis and what drives the differences, read the engagement benchmarks guide or the underlying 34,000-post study.