To Post or Not to Post- A Data-Centric View

I am fairly new to publishing content on LinkedIn, so I have been following/listening to the experts like @Niel Patel.

As a trained/battle bruised Product Manager at startups where resources are scarce, you have to rely on data to make decisions and not opinions. So as always I decided to run some tests to figure out the best ROI for my content.

Over the past couple of months I have been publishing both posts and articles and the results of my A/B tests (not a true A/B test since the content was different but it's close enough considering the experiment) are pretty clear.

The posts seem to have 50-75 X times the reach than an article, so we developed couple of hypothesis.

1. LinkedIn prioritizes posts over articles.

Based on our limited testing with 1st level connections only, we did not find any evidence. Both the articles and posts would show up on the feed fairly quickly. It would be great to look at 2nd and 3rd connections about 30-40 % views do come from those connections.

2. Customer Empathy- With 58% of LinkedIn traffic coming from mobile it is quite possible people are leaning towards posts. In our surveys we found preference towards posts independent of the platform desktop or mobile.

If you are trying to increase your reach on LinkedIn to get hired or market your self it's better to post. If you have more content than what is allowed in a posts, then publish it externally and mention the summary in a post.

Cheers.