TOP format for engagement according to Shield
Shield analyzed 167,940 LinkedIn posts and discovered the TOP format for engagement.
I was surprised. It's my favorite. 🌶️
It's an image (to stop the scroll) and a very long caption of 250–350 words.
Image: can be an infographic, a screenshot, or a picture.
Things that help with engagement:
Airy one line spacing.
Short hooks.
So far not much news. What IS strange is that these things also counterintuitively hurt your reach, according to the data.
If you want more impressions:
Write longer, content‑rich hooks.
Use longer sentences/paragraphs and avoid one‑line spacing.
When you use carousels/documents, keep the caption short so all the attention goes to the carousel. Long captions hurt reach here, and don't help with engagement either.
My own top performers get both big impressions and big engagement.
That shows that when the post is strong, you can beat the averages.
But you’re still making a choice with every post.
For your next post, what will you go for:
more people seeing your work, or more people engaging with it?
Thank you Shield for the data, love it.
