Should You Include Links In LinkedIn Posts?

It was in rumour that LinkedIn punishes post that includes links. It was trendy to put links in the comments back in 2019. But in June 2020, John Espirian experimented the change in LinkedIn algorithm that does not take into count whether your post contains links or not.

To have our own analysis into John’s argument, we will dive into our own datasets to validate the claim.

Let’s have a look at our data to see if sharing links in your post is a good or bad idea.

Datasets

The LinkedIn post datasets included are 140,975 from the total 104,913 unique users. The time collected is from November to March 2021.

First let’s take a look at the average ratio of posts that contain links.

On average, 32% of posts contain links in LinkedIn. If you filter the posts to only the top 1% (1,410) ranked by like engagement, only the 20% contain links. Looking at this, it’s tempting to conclude the popular posts tend to have less links. And link posts appear bad for LinkedIn engagement. You may say the conventional wisdom of leaving links in comments work better. However, we need to look into the context.

While it is ideal to fill your feed with inspiration posts (they tend to get high number of likes), it is perfectly reasonable to share useful industry news with your network. You may have a business reason to have call to action to onboard audience to your network.

It’s also difficult to come up with lengthy content out of blue. You don’t want to be algorithmic like catcher after all.

What differentiate bad link posts from good is its text length. If we limit the link posts to those with lengthy text of 550 characters, the average like count doubles. The max post length on LinkedIn company is 700. So that is sizeable length compared to Twitter. That’s what we want in LinkedIn feed: the fully contextual post instead of clickbaits.

Share your thought on the news. Be bold to share your opinions (opinion leader counts).

The bottom line is, if you plan on including links in your post, which you should sometimes, make sure to populate enough writing as well. Never share a link with one sentence alone.

If you need assistant in generating content, Inksprout Chrome extension is here to help. It generates natural language summary when you share links on LinkedIn. All you will need to do is add 1 unique phrase of your own.