LigoSocial Research
LinkedIn Research by LigoSocial
Most LinkedIn advice is somebody’s hunch. This is measurement: what actually happened to real posts when people changed the day they posted, the length, the format, the hashtags, or let a model write it. Every report shows its sample, what we threw out and how sure we are.
Sample134,522 posts from 1,499 real LinkedIn profiles, January 2023 to September 2026
- Free to read
- No email gate
- CC BY 4.0
- Aggregated and anonymised
Annual report
September 25, 2026
The State of LinkedIn 2026: what works for everyday professionals
40 findings from 134,522 posts, plus what works at each follower count.
-21%Engagement on posts that read as AI
Read the annual reportLinkedIn statistics
Single-finding reports
Do AI-written LinkedIn posts get less engagement?
AI-sounding posts get 21% less engagement, and the share of them peaked in 2024 to 2025.
-21%Engagement on AI-sounding posts
Read the reportBest day and time to post on LinkedIn: 134k posts analysed in local time
Sunday wins (+9%); the hour barely matters; spacing matters more.
+9%Sunday vs the author's average
Read the reportHow often should you post on LinkedIn? Frequency, consistency and follower growth
Post most weeks: 2.7% monthly growth vs 1.0%. Never twice in 24 hours.
2.7%Monthly growth, posting 75%+ of weeks
Read the reportEm dashes and AI: how often LinkedIn posts use them
Em dash use rose sevenfold, then fell. The dash is a marker, not the problem.
3.5%Posts with an em dash, 2023
Read the reportDo hashtags work on LinkedIn? What 134k posts show
Hashtags: no penalty, small lift. Tagging people: +35% to +126%.
+3%1 to 2 hashtags
Read the reportHow long should a LinkedIn post be? What 134k posts show
Longer posts win: 2,400+ characters +24% vs 600 to 900.
+24%2,400+ characters
Read the reportLinkedIn post formats compared: images, carousels, video, text, links and polls
Images +36%, link previews -15%, polls -50%. Carousels only pay past 10 pages.
+36%Image posts vs text-only
Read the reportWhat is a good LinkedIn engagement rate? Benchmarks by follower count
Typical engagement rate 0.32%; 0.96% under 1,000 followers, 0.12% at 10,000+.
10Engagement on the typical post
Read the reportWhat makes a build-in-public post on X get 10x engagement
1,209 tweets from 15 build-in-public creators: how rare a 10x hit is, and what the ones that repeat have in common.
3.6%Core tweets that reached 10x the creator's own median
Read the report
LinkedIn company pages
LinkedIn Company Pages 2026: what earns engagement, from small brands to global ones
200 selected company pages of every size, 5,530 posts: benchmarks by follower band and industry, what to post, formats, timing, AI, and how pages differ from people.
+82%Team and culture posts
Read the reportLinkedIn company page engagement rate benchmarks 2026
Engagement rate by follower band (0.37% under 2,500 followers to under 0.01% past 1 million), by industry, and vs personal profiles.
0.37%Typical rate under 2,500 followers
Read the reportBest time to post on a LinkedIn company page: 5,193 posts in local time
4 to 6pm local time +17%, every other hour about average; weekdays are all the same; posting more did not hurt.
+17%4 to 6pm vs the page average
Read the reportWhat to post on a LinkedIn company page: content types ranked by engagement
Team posts +82% and company news +80% vs product posts; thought leadership, the most common post, -22%.
+82%Team and culture vs product posts
Read the report
Free tool from this research
LinkedIn AI DetectorPaste a LinkedIn post and see which phrases, patterns and punctuation make it read as AI, using the same judge we ran on 134,000 real posts.Check a postMethod
Using this research
Everything here is free to read with no email gate, and free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Quote the numbers, embed the charts or download the CSVs, with credit to LigoSocial Research and a link to the report. All figures are aggregated and anonymised: no individual, profile or post can be identified. Want a figure checked or a cut we have not published? Ask us.