Dear GTM Strategist!
Every quarter, I analyze my list of 20-50 content creators to derive my insights for what is expected to work on LinkedIn, and this time, I want to share the most important insights from my analysis with you.
This analysis takes approximately 14 days to conduct. I spend the most time analysing the posts and trying to learn from them. I have tried AI-enabled analysis, but it has limited cognition in image analysis, and I learn more if I stare at those posts, trying to figure out what’s in it for me.
If you are thinking - “Maja, how on earth do you get time to do this?” - the answer is: because it matters to me.
Why:
LinkedIn's algo is changing all the time, and you and I have to keep on top.
I read general LinkedIn algorithm studies, and they are great for a general understanding of what is going on, but lack tactical insights for my specific vertical.
Some hard NOs for me on LinkedIn - overrevealing personal life, trash motivation posts, vanilla general knowledge carousels - are non-negotiables. I have to learn from creators who create knowledge.
Many creators use engagement pods and bot likes - I have to control the sample.
Method of collecting and analysing data:
I go through all my saved posts on LinkedIn.
If I saved 3+ posts from a creator, I include them in the analysis.
I monitor some creators regularly because they are really, really good, and I learn from them non-stop (about 20% of my observed sample).
Is the sample biased? Of course it is - because I curated it. I encourage you to run this analysis on your selected profiles.
I run my scripts to collect all the data.
I run some joint analysis - general trends.
I spend a lot of time learning from the board.
In this Substack, I will share a couple of lessons learned:
Best-performing formats of LinkedIn posts
When to post
How often to post
What topics work best
What are my bets in Q2 2025
Let's dive straight into whether that sounds like a good use of your time and bandwidth.
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Single image + long-form text is still a winning format
While the guru advice is “play around with different content formats,” I have solid data that “single image + long-form text” is a go-to format for most of the analyzed profiles. The rising formats are video (22.0%) and text only (18.6%). Other formats are marginal.
What I found surprising (and made me quite happy because that is lots of work) is that there were zero carousels (documents) among the best-performing posts from 30 content creators in the sample. While some LinkedIn advisors still rave about carousels, I think Canva AI ruined it for us :) - based on the number of really shallow carousels I have detected on my feed.
When to post: 2 daily spikes and TUE-THU safe zone
Based on cumulative posting patterns, the best time to post for the main US audience is at 2 pm GMT. Please note that nearly all the analyzed profiles are based in the US and Europe when you try to make sense of this data.
For example, if you are from the US, the best time to post is in the morning.
Based on the best days to post, anything apart from Monday, Friday, and Saturday is expected to do well.
It’s interesting that when I work with brands, they require content creators to post between Tuesday and Thursday. Seems to be a safe zone.
Once you have your list of LinkedIn influencers to analyse, you can use Pierre Landoin’s tactic to get emails of people who engaged with their posts and send email messages to them to book demos.
CEO of Icypeas, Pierre Landoin, prepared a free step-by-step guide for discovering 1,500–2,000 warm LinkedIn leads per day, finding your best-fit ICPs based on an automated filter, and running this on autopilot (he shares exact tools and APIs they use).
Grab this workflow - it is exclusively available for readers of GTM Strategist:
How often to post? Up to 18x a week if you ask some people 😺
But the average is about 5x a week. In my sample, you can observe two schools of LinkedIn posting:
Focus on quality posts 2-5 times a week - do less, do it better.
Go all in - 2x a day is a minimum.
I was trying the second strategy for a couple of weeks. I posted in my morning and late afternoon. The results did not justify the investment of my time (another hour spent on LinkedIn), so I am back to 5 posts a week for the foreseeable future.
Please note that the majority of these profiles have 30K-250K followers. I did not include smaller creators in this analysis.
What topics worked best for this batch of creators
Long story short, 5 topics that pop up again and again are:
Millions and billions + famous brands #greed
How to do X using Y (without Z) #tutorial
Simple visualisations of complex topics #education
Anti-mainstream content (VC, AI, small teams, bootstrapping) #contrarian
Personal updates and milestones #humanizations
What worked predictably well in my sample was AI-related content (tool updates), agents, weirdly popular MCPs, and mentioning numbers in the hook, very long but easy to read (lots of whitespace) essays, and tutorials on how to do something using AI.
Here are some outliers from the batch of analysed posts that did exceptionally well, even from smaller creators:
How will I apply these learnings to my LinkedIn strategy
Gosh, that was fun to analyse! I would love to say to myself: Spend more time on creating great content, work relentlessly to keep up, unlock new winning format - but I will not :)
Realistically, given all my other business obligations, I know how much time I can spend on LinkedIn and when I have a negative ROI.
Most of the analyzed profiles have content teams and $5K-15/month content strategists who spend a significant share of their week creating content. That is the cost I am not willing to pay now, and I can spend up to 1 hour a day (preferably less) on LinkedIn during my busiest time of the year.
Here is what I am gonna do instead:
I will feed some of these posts to my AI model
Come up with a list of topics I want to talk about
Create an AI-assisted workflow for creating content; and
Double down on my personal business experiences and tutorials on how to build things.
Something else struck me while observing this dataset: Reposts will have lower engagements per se, but they are a powerful tool for supporting other content creators and pushing your colleagues' content - this is something I will try.
11 out of 30 analysed content creators did not repost content, but those that did set aside up to 10% of their posts for reposting. This is something that I might add to my mix.
The entire board is available to my consulting clients (+ I create custom boards for them based on their relevant LinkedIn influencers) and has just become part of my GTM Checklist with 100+ assets, examples, templates, and prompts will power up your GTM strategy.
If you already have the checklist, just check line 99 in your spreadsheet (task: Publish 1-3 updates a week on social media to warm up for the launch) - you have an update there, as well as some helpful prompts for content creation that will get you started.
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Wonderful content! Thank you
Repost gets good engagement on LinkedIn, if done well! Great article Maja