How we tested adding links to content on LinkedIn

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As marketers rethink their LinkedIn content strategy, these questions are surfacing more and more. With bandwidth already thin for social teams, it pays to be sure the posts you push out on the platform are optimized for maximum social media engagement.

Our social team designed an experiment to answer this question. “I have seen an increasing volume of text-only posts on LinkedIn, which is why we wanted to do this experiment,” Sprout’s Social Media Strategist—and designer of this experiment—Greg Rokisky tells us. “I’ve seen a lot of carousel and document posts, and I’ve seen a lot of creativity being executed there. amazon data So it’s exciting to see how LinkedIn continues to adapt for various post types.”

Social media is part art, part science. Conducting social media experiments is one of the best ways to evaluate what content your team should be spending more time on.

Here’s how we designed our experiment—and the variables we controlled for—to get the most accurate results possible.

The post content
Over the course of a month, we created 8 posts designed specifically for this experiment on LinkedIn. First, we picked four articles from our blog that:

We wanted to post about in the upcoming weeks
Had actionable, social-first lists and takeaways we could include in a post
Shared similar takeaways
Then, we created two posts for each article: A post that would contain the link in the comments, like this one: