How You Should Start Your LinkedIn Post?

As you make LinkedIn post, you need to catch people’s eyes. Or else, risk dropping your post unnoticed from the world.

Carefully crafting the first sentence pitch is crucial.

It decides whether your readers want to expand your writing and keep on reading afterwards.

So what is the ideal way to start your post?

Let’s dive in.

Dataset

140,975 LinkedIn posts had been collected between November and March 2021. The unique user counts are pretty sparse: 104,913. It is well represented sample of average posts (not skewed a few mega influencers).

Ideal Length

As we noted, the longer writing performs better in LinkedIn posts. Ideally you want to write more than 550 characters for maximum engagement (think of it as twice as much as the maximum Tweet).

We will breakdown into first paragraph and first sentence. They convey slightly different messagings.

On average, the starting paragraph contains 133 characters. That is about 2 sentences. The length will get slightly short to 120 for the top 1% engagement post.

When it comes to the length of first sentence, the average posts have 100 characters in them. But the top 1% posts contain longer this time – 118 characters. That length is close to the average paragraph length of the top 1% post. That means, while each paragraph is smaller in the top posts, most paragraphs are self-complete with 1 whole paragraph. And leave a breakline thereafter.

It’s also worth mentioning that LinkedIn cuts the collapses your post after 120 characters. That makes sense why top LinkedIn users make the first paragraph at that length.

The bottom line is to write a longer sentence that completes itself in 1 paragraph, leaving plenty of empty breaklines.