What is a good engagement rate on LinkedIn?

Across hundreds of LinkedIn posts by founders over the past year, posts with an image or carousel averaged about 150 percent more likes than plain text posts. Video posts averaged about 45 percent more

Is there a reliable benchmark for a founder's profile?

Not one we would trust. In our reading, most published engagement rate benchmarks come from companies that sell social media tools, and many mix company Pages with personal profiles. They also define the rate differently, some dividing by followers and some by impressions, so two figures that look comparable often aren't.

LinkedIn itself doesn't publish an engagement rate benchmark for members. Its help page on post analytics counts engagements as reactions, comments, saves, sends and reposts, and lets you export your figures for up to the past 365 days. Your own daily, weekly or monthly averages are the comparison that holds up best.

How do you work out your own engagement rate?

Take one post and its engagements, the total of reactions, comments, saves, sends and reposts. Divide that total by the post's impressions, then multiply by a hundred to get a percentage. Do the same for each post over a month and you have a baseline of your own that is measured the same way every time.

Impressions are the better base because they count the times a post was displayed on someone's screen, as LinkedIn's analytics help describes them. A follower count includes people who never saw the post and leaves out readers who found it through someone else, so it blurs the picture for any single post.

Why does comparing yourself with others mislead?

Average likes differ a lot by format, as the figures at the top of this page show for image, video and plain text posts, though an average can't prove the format caused the gap. A rate from someone posting mostly carousels says little about your text posts, and the reverse is just as true. Compare text with text and video with video, starting with your own.

Reach changes the picture too. LinkedIn's engineers describe a feed that suggests posts to people outside your network based on their interests. Readers with weaker ties to you may engage less, so a lower rate on a post that travelled further isn't necessarily a bad week. Your post analytics show what share of impressions came from outside your network, so you can check.

What should you track instead?

Track your rate as a monthly average per format, and look for the direction over a few months rather than the swing between two posts. Next to it, keep a short note of which topics drew comments from the kind of people you want to reach, since those conversations are where posting starts to pay back.

If the rate keeps sliding against your own baseline, change one thing at a time, such as the opening line, the format or the topic, and give each change a few weeks. For how posting connects to actual customers, see whether posting brings in customers.