For the past month we have tested the performance of short form videos versus traditional blogs posted on LinkedIn.
Why do it?
Two decades ago, I started blogging. Back then, keeping a post under 2,000 words felt like a constraint. (I was a management consultant — so yes, I used a lot of words.)
A couple of years later I began writing for Forbes which trimmed my posts to 1,200 words. Then, while writing for The Drum,down even further to 800. As attention spans shrank, so did my word count.
Fast forward to today: content is everywhere, AI tools are flooding our feeds, and the pressure to stand out is greater than ever. So I find myself asking: Should I still write, or do I shift to short-form video?
The Experiment
To measure the effectiveness of each, we created three tiers of key metrics. Tier one being the most important, tier three being the least.
● Tier 1 – form fills on our website or DMs on Linkedin
● Tier 2 – profile views or website visits, views/read time of the content, new followers
● Tier 3 – reach, engagement (impressions, engagement, shares)
To track performance, we used Linkedin Analytics (post performance), Hubspot (form fills), GA4 (web performance), Warmly (web visits), and Looker Studio (blog performance). The time period included all posts and performance for the last 90 days (March 1 to May 30th) allowing us to have enough data to measure the performance before and after.
The top 8 viewed posts of the last 90 days were evenly distributed between video and blog content posted in the last 30 days as part of our test. The first video was released was the top viewed post, with the remaining three videos making up the 3rd, 7th and 8th most popular.
Correspondingly, blogs ranked 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th, were almost of perfect distribution to compare, with both having a median between 4 to 5.
Overall performance for the last 90 days on LinkedIn, compared to the previous period, experienced a 20% lift in content performance (impressions) and a 42% increase in engagement. Even more striking is the 28 days compared to the previous period, which produced a 408% increase in impressions, and a 290% increase in engagement.
Given the Tier 3 performance, it might be logical to believe that increases will be seen in the other tiers.
The Results
Before I jump in, it’s important to recognize how LinkedIn counts impressions and views of videos.
An “impression” is registered every time your post appears in someone’s feed. It reflects overall visibility, not necessarily engagement, or that it has been seen/read. Think of it as a billboard along a road. The cars pass by but may or may not glance at it.
LinkedIn’s algorithm, based on the content and responses to it, then decides to distribute more broadly…or not.
A video view is counted when someone watches for at least 2 continuous seconds (down from 6 seconds in 2023), either via autoplay or a manual click. In this case, we are using autoplay.
To dig deeper into evaluating the performance we downloaded Richard Van der Blom’s Algorithm Insights Report 2025 for LinkedIn metrics and benchmarks. We tried to download LinkedIn’ Benchmarks for Brand Awareness, but the link is broken on the LinkedIn for Marketers page…I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
Okay, now for the results. I’ll start with “members reached” defined as the number of distinct members and pages that saw the post. Caveat, this number is an estimate and does not include repeat displays. I’ll begin with Tier 3 metrics and work my way to Tier 1.
- Reach – no real difference between videos (60%) and blogs (57%).
- Consumption (read or watched) – video (70%) outperformed blogs (12%) but that number is misleading. The videos were set to autoplay and a view “counts”, even if it’s for only 2 seconds.
- View/read times – this becomes a more important metric given the prior statement and is closer to the truth. Videos still outperformed (35% to 20%), but this is an average. For video, it’s total viewed time divided by views, for blogs it’s average read time divided by total read time (eg. 1 min read time on a blog that is a 5 mins read).
- Reactions (likes, etc.) – video outperformed content significantly (almost 2 to 1), but that is skewered by video #1 which has nearly half of all the video reactions.
- Comments – viewers were more likely to comment on blogs, by 52% .
- Reposts – viewers were 5 times more likely to share a video.
- Profile views – blogs were twice as likely to generate a profile view. But, when compared to the previous period, my profile views over the last 28 days decreased.
- Audience growth – you might assume given the previous statement about the 90 day overall improvement in performance would net an increase in my audience, but unfortunately, that was not the case. There was no change. Additionally, most of the views, (almost 90%+) came from my first connections.
- Web visits and/or visits to the Linkedin Company page – recognized no change, and visits to our corporate page actually declined by 18% during the period.
- Tier 1 metrics – neither format produced a form fill or a DM.
Interestingly enough during this test period, a post on ABM written by Ruth Stevens, mentioned an article I had written years ago drove more traffic to our site in one day than anything else we did on LinkedIn the past 90 days..
Learnings
How you view these results really depends on how you view LinkedIn as a channel and your desired goals…a la the key metrics listed. I also came away with as many questions as I did answers.
For me, blogs have a slight advantage over short form videos (for now), purely from the ease of creating them. Additionally, based on the performance of the comments and profile views, I feel like viewers were more invested in the content.
Now for some caveats… I’m making this comment as a Gen X twenty-year blogger with a mature senior executive audience. This brings up an interesting challenge we faced, and soon I’ll be creating another post going into more detail.
Trying to reach a new audience, we tested upgrading my account to Premium and using paid ads on our corporate site, hoping to boost video views for the last two weeks. Neither produced the results we hoped for, and/or was promised by LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Premium claims it will “expand your network and increase visibility.” We saw no evidence of that being true, as I mentioned 90%+ of the reactions came from 1st connections. Paid ads dramatically increased impressions (a relatively meaningless Tier 3 metric) but performed poorly, producing a 0.13% CTR with no conversions.
This raises a question on the value of the 800 lb gorilla of B2B channels, LinkedIn. LinkedIn has changed its algorithms to bring you more content from the creators you interact with, which somewhat explains the concentration of my audience.
The key insight from this experiment, at least for me, is that LinkedIn’s algorithms are geared towards the content consumer and not the creator.
The change in their algorithm means you are more likely to see more content from one creator than a vast group of creators. For example, you are 60% more likely to see a post from someone that you have interacted with on your feed. LinkedIn, like other social media platforms, is changing what you see in real time as you interact with what’s on your feed.
As a result, as pointed out by the Algorithm Report, reach, engagement and follower growth have declined dramatically since last year.
Source: Just Connecting™ and Richard van der Blom
The bottom line – the performance of short form videos may have been handicapped because I wasn’t able to reach an audience that prefers that content format.
LinkedIn lives on creator content and that content, according to the report, is quickly moving to video (an increase of 23% in 2024 over 2023). What the report doesn’t show, nor could we, is that it is any more effective than anything else.
If you’re searching for an ROI for the business impact of any type of content posted on LinkedIn, it may not be the format but rather the channel that is the problem.
Now let’s see if anyone reads this content…don’t make me do another video!
Special thanks to Ben Armstrong at 9Mile media for the creation of the videos and Naheed Somji, our social media guru for his support and advice.
