What 180,011 Founder Posts Show

Welcome back to Viral Examples. Today (in 2 mins or less) we're diving into what 180,011 LinkedIn posts by founders tell us about what works.

The Founder Benchmarks: What the Top Posters Do

We pulled the last 50 posts from 4,485 founders and CEOs of funded startups, then compared every post with that founder's own typical post. That way a founder with 900 followers and one with 50,000 can both tell us something.

The typical founder has 4,853 followers and gets 39 reactions, comments and reposts on a typical post. 82% post less than once a week.

Here's what separates the founders pulling ahead.

1/ Post every week, and aim for three

Founders posting 3+ times a week get 24 times the weekly engagement of founders posting less than monthly, and have 4.6 times the followers.

Posting again the next day costs a post about 10%. Against 24 times the weekly total, that's a small price.

2/ Tell your news as a story

When the same founder posts the same kind of news both ways, the story version of a hiring post gets 2.15 times the press-release version. Milestones get 2.06 times.

The best post in the study: an origin story told alongside real news, with no moral tacked on the end. It gets 4.05 times the founder's usual engagement.

3/ Use a photo, skip the carousel

One photo gets 1.38x. Several photos get 1.69x.

PDF carousels get 0.84x, the same as plain text.

4/ Cut the promo phrases

"Highly recommend" gets 0.43x. "Learn more" gets 0.51x. "Join us for" gets 0.56x.

Posts that promote something or someone else get about half the founder's usual engagement.

See Where You Stand

Curious where you land? Paste your LinkedIn URL into our free benchmark. You'll get your percentile for followers, engagement and posting rhythm against founders at your company size, plus the three changes worth making first.

See where you stand

Want every table? The full study is 15 pages: formats, post types, stories, openings, tagging, and what makes a strong raise, hiring or launch post.

Download the full study

Time to Grow

There’s two parts to getting results from posting content:

1. High quality content

2. Relevant distribution

Megaphone, the team behind Viral Examples, helps with both.

1. Our writing team works learns your voice and delivers weekly batches of content for you to post.

2. Our creator network helps get your posts in front of the right audience.

Grab time here or just reply to this email to learn more.