The 8 Types of LinkedIn Posts (and When Each Works)

Are you looking for the different types of LinkedIn posts, and which one you should be using? Most guides will give you the list and stop there. That's the easy part: LinkedIn's own composer shows you the options. The hard part is knowing which one to pick for your next post, and that's where everyone goes quiet. So we measured it.

Most people assume every format has its moment, and that video or polls are the way to get noticed. When we compared 2,500 creators' posts against their own text posts, we found big differences. A simple image was the clear winner. Video helped much less than it looks, and polls did worst of anything we tested.

In this article we'll cover all eight types of LinkedIn post, which ones get the most engagement, when to use each, and whether mixing them up helps. Read on to find out more.

What are the different types of LinkedIn posts?

There are eight. Six go through LinkedIn's main composer and appear in the feed as a normal post: text, image, document carousel, video, link and poll. The other two, articles or newsletters and celebration posts, are separate features that also show up in the feed.

The first six are the ones most people use most weeks, and they're the six our study covers. We'll be honest about the last two further down, which means telling you what we don't know.

Which type of LinkedIn post gets the most engagement?

Image posts. Compared with the same person's text posts, image posts got about a third more reactions, and that worked for 7 in 10 people. Carousels and video helped a little, for about half of people. Links cost a little, and polls got less than half the reactions of a text post.

Here's the catch. If you simply line up every format and compare how many reactions each got, you get this:

Read that as a ranking and you'd think images beat text by 70%, and video is nearly as good. But it's comparing different people. The people who post videos aren't the same people who post plain text, so part of the gap is about who they are, not what they posted.

So we did it the fair way. For everyone with at least three text posts and at least three posts of another type, we compared their own typical results. Same person, same audience, same subjects. Only the format changed.

Reactions, compared with the same creator's other posts

Image

+33%

Document carousel

+13%

Video

+11%

Link

−16%

Poll

−58%

No change

Table view

Each type of post against the same person's own text posts

Tactic	Reactions vs their own posts	Change in reactions	Creators tested	Who benefited
Image	1.33×	+33%	1,005	70%
Document carousel	1.13×	+13%	178	54%
Video	1.11×	+11%	504	56%
Link	0.84×	−16%	479	39%
Poll	0.42×	−58%	34	6%

The order stays the same, but the gaps change a lot. The gap between images and text is real. The gap between images and video mostly isn't. Video looked like a close second in the first table. Compared fairly, it gets about a tenth more than a text post, and helps only about half the people who use it.

This is one finding from our LinkedIn algorithm study of 130,000 posts, which tested other common advice the same way.

When should you use each type of LinkedIn post?

Use an image by default, text when the words are the point, a carousel for step-by-step content, and video only when the subject really needs it. Post links when the click matters more than the reactions, and skip polls. Here's the detail for each.

Image posts

Make this your default. Not because images are clever, but because adding one was the most reliable win we found anywhere: about a third more reactions than the same person's text posts, working for 7 in 10 of 1,005 people, in every region and at every audience size. If your posts typically get 30 reactions, an image would take that to about 40.

What we can't tell you is what the image should show. Our data records whether a post had an image, not what was in it. So the practical advice is simple: stop posting plain text. A screenshot, a photo of the thing you're talking about, or a simple chart all do the job.

The shape of the image decides how much of the feed you take up, and the LinkedIn image sizes that survive the mobile crop covers that. If you want several, LinkedIn allows up to 20 photos in one post, though we found no evidence that any particular number works better.

Text-only posts

Use these when the idea really is the words. Text is what everything else is compared against, and that doesn't make it bad. A personal story, a short argument or a bit of news often doesn't need a picture.

You also don't need to worry about length. We tested the 1,300-character rule on 83,495 posts, and for text-only posts, length made no difference at all. About half of people did better with long posts, and half with short ones.

Document carousels

Use these for anything step by step. A carousel is a PDF that people swipe through. It got about 13% more reactions than the same person's text posts, for about half of the 178 people we could test. A small, real gain, but only a coin flip on whether it beats what you'd otherwise post.

Carousels work best for a process with steps, a framework, or a breakdown of something. They don't work for one idea stretched over ten slides.

On the number of slides, our data points the opposite way to the usual advice:

Longer carousels did better at every step. Carousels with 12 or more slides got roughly 1.7 times the reactions of short ones, so the common "keep it under 10 slides" rule isn't backed up here.

An important caveat: this is the one table on the page where we couldn't compare people with themselves. We only had 3,532 carousels, too few per person for a fair test. So it compares different people, with the same weakness we warned about above. Take it as a reason to stop cutting slides, not as a firm rule.

Video posts

Use video when the subject really is visual. It got about 11% more reactions than a text post, for about half of the 504 people we tested. That's a small gain for something that takes far longer to make than an image, which got about a third more. On our numbers, a screenshot is a better use of an hour than a video shoot.

Link posts

Use them when the click matters, and accept the cost. Posts that were mainly a link got about a sixth fewer reactions than the same person's text posts.

That's a real cost, but much smaller than the "LinkedIn kills link posts" warnings suggest. 39% of people actually did better with links. So think of it as a trade: is losing about a sixth of your reactions worth the visits to your website? Sometimes it clearly is.

Polls

We'd skip them. Polls were the worst performer in our whole study.

That's the opposite of what some guides say. AuthoredUp's algorithm report (updated June 2026) says polls get the best reach of any format, and SalesRobot (March 2026) says they "double the engagement". Both compare different people, and both measure reach rather than reactions.

Two caveats from our side. Only 34 people had enough polls to test, so this is the thinnest result on the page: treat it as a strong hint rather than a final answer. And we measured reactions, not how many people saw the poll. But nothing in our data suggests a poll is a good idea.

What about LinkedIn articles, newsletters and celebration posts?

We couldn't test these, so we won't guess. Our data only covers ordinary feed posts. We have no engagement figures for articles or newsletters, and celebration posts are mixed in with ordinary posts in a way we can't separate out.

Articles and newsletters are published separately from the feed, so they aren't in our data at all. One thing is true regardless: a newsletter has subscribers who get notified, and a post doesn't. That's a real difference no engagement figure captures.

Celebration posts (new job, work anniversary, hiring, kudos) use LinkedIn's templates, and our data counts them as ordinary text or image posts. So they're somewhere inside our numbers, but we can't pick them out.

If you see a page giving percentages for these two, it's worth asking where the data came from.

Should you mix up your LinkedIn post types?

No, there's no evidence it helps. We compared posts that switched to a different type from the person's previous post against posts that stuck with the same type. Across 1,975 people, switching did about 4% worse. Do more of whatever works for you.

The advice to mix it up is everywhere. Hootsuite recommends posting "a combination of" content types, and AuthoredUp says mixing content types keeps followers engaged. Neither shows data for it. In ours, only 44% of people did better after switching. There's no bonus for variety.

Change in reactions compared with the same person's own text posts

Worth doing

• Image post+33%

  Worked for 7 in 10 of 1,005 people

• Document carousel+13%

  Worked for about half of 178 people

• Video post+11%

  About half of 504 people, and much more work

Don't bother

• Link post−16%
• Poll−58%
• Switching format−4%

How do you choose the right type of LinkedIn post?

1. Start with an image. It's the biggest reliable win we found, and the easiest to make.
2. Write plain text when the words are the point, and stop counting characters while you do.
3. Use a carousel for step-by-step content, and don't cut it down to ten slides.
4. Save video for when the subject needs it. It helps about a third as much as an image.
5. Post links on purpose. You'll lose about a sixth of your reactions, and sometimes the visits are worth more than that.
6. Skip polls.
7. Don't switch formats just for variety. There's no bonus for it.

Format is the choice you make once you have something to say. How you open matters just as much: starting a post with "I", "my" or "we" got about a fifth more reactions than the same person's other openings, the second-biggest effect in our study.

How we tested the types of LinkedIn posts

We studied 2,500 English-speaking B2B creators with between 1,000 and 500,000 followers. They were all individuals, not company pages. We collected their posts from July 2025 to July 2026 in one go, so every account's numbers were equally up to date.

We left reposts out, which matters more than it sounds. LinkedIn's data labels every repost as a text post, and leaving them in would have made text posts look much worse than they really are, which would have made every other format look better.

We only counted a post once it was at least 14 days old, when its numbers have settled. Where we say "typical", we mean the median, so one viral post can't skew the result. And we worked everything out person by person, so someone posting 40 times a week doesn't drown out everyone else.

To be included in a comparison, a person needed at least three posts of each type being compared. The number of people behind each finding is shown with it, and the two smallest, polls (34 people) and carousels (178 people), are flagged where they appear.

This page is one part of our LinkedIn algorithm study of 130,000 posts. See also how long a LinkedIn post should be.