The Most Successful LinkedIn Headlines & Topics Of 2016

I looked at 10,000 of the most shared posts published on LinkedIn this year and reviewed the most commonly used headline trigrams (three word phrases) and bigrams (two word phrases). Some of the most frequently used were as follows:

• How to
• You need to
• Why you should
• Can learn from
• The future of

I then pulled all the headlines that used these phrases from 300,000 posts published on LinkedIn this year. I found the posts using these trigrams and bigrams in the headlines were not only more common, ‘how to’ posts in particular, they also tended to get a higher level of shares on average. To put this into context in the last month the average shares of all LinkedIn posts was 230. As we can see below the popular headline phrases tended to do better on average though not significantly.

Here are some examples of high performing posts that used these phrases:

• In a Job Interview, This is How to Acknowledge Your Weaknesses (33,000 shares)
• If You Want to Be Successful, You Need to Be Relevant (32,000 shares)
• Why You Should Have At Least 1 Hour THINKING Time Every Day (16,000 shares)
• 17 Predictions About The Future Of Big Data Everyone Should Read (11,000 shares)
• A Few Things Every Company Can Learn From Silicon Valley (5,700 shares)

I then did the same exercise looking at single words or topics in headlines.  Some of the top performing words and topics are shown in the table below. These posts tended to do much better in terms of shares.

Note: For all the samples above I excluded a few articles with over 100,000 shares, as I felt these very highly shared outliers distorted some of the averages.

Here are some examples of posts using these words and topics:

• 7 Extremely Common Mistakes That Can Damage Your Reputation (12,700 shares)
• Will Working Remote Kill Your Career? (11,500 shares)
• Powerful Habits Of Highly Productive People (9,800 shares)
• Having a Bad Day? Here Are 5 Things Successful People Do to Turn Things Around (10,700 shares)
• How To Be A Leader When You’re Not The Boss (10,600 shares)
• Want to attract the best talent? Treat your employees like your customers. (16,000 shares)

It seems fair to make an assumption from this data that people like content which helps them to do their jobs better and to be successful at work. Thus the popularity of posts about advancing your career, habits to form or mistakes to avoid, and how to be successful whether as a senior leader or as team manager.

Posts about improving sales also performed well, here are two examples:

• The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen  (39,000 shares)
• Two Words Top Sales Reps Never Say (11,900 shares)

Industry trends also do well. Here is an example about content marketing:

• Content Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2016 (10,000 shares)

LinkedIn promotes content from their Influencer network quite heavily. Thus you would expect their content to get a lot more engagement. I was conscious of this and that content published by influencers could distort the findings, so I wanted to explore their posts separately, looking at some of the top posts from influencers and non-influencers to see if there were any differences.

Here are the top 5 most shared posts from three LinkedIn Influencers. I have highlighted some of the phrases, words and topics we found in the research above.

• Bad Mistakes That Make Good Employees Leave (263,000 shares)
• Signs You’re Successful—Even If It Doesn’t Feel Like It (59,000 shares)
• Habits of Highly Emotionally Intelligent People (54,700 shares)
• Critical Things Smart People Never Say (49,600 shares)
• Critical Things Ridiculously Successful People Do Every Day (48,500 shares)

• 10 Important Career Lessons Most People Learn Too Late In Life (205,000 shares)
• 9 Things That Destroy Successful Teams (36,000 shares)
• 25 Qualities the World’s Worst Managers Have in Common (30,500 shares)
• 8 Things Employees Desperately Wish Managers Would Do More (19,000 shares)
• One Important Thing Missing From Most KPI Dashboards (18,700 shares)

• This CEO’s Trick to Managing Hundreds of Emails a Day Is Absolutely Brilliant (26,200 shares)
• Warren Buffett Just Summed Up the Essence of Leadership In 2 Sentences (24,200)
• 7 Extremely Common Mistakes That Can Damage Your Reputation (12,700 shares)
• The Hard Truth About Success From a Fired CEO (11,200 shares)
• Develop This One Habit in 2016 and You’ll Be the Most Popular Person in the Room (10,900 shares)

A brief analysis of these Influencers most shared posts confirms my initial suspicions about the content that is popular and that does well on LinkedIn. They are posts aimed at managers and employees but they are all advice on how to be successful in one form or another.

It is interesting to note that Bernard’s posts are list posts and the posts from Travis all follow a common format eg Mistakes that.., Signs you’re.., Habits of.. and Things Smart People… I find that LinkedIn influencers do tend to reuse a format that has previously worked for them. For example, Travis has written 16 posts on habits this year. Which is a habit that makes him successful. You can see how these ideas get generated…

They are rare outliers but sometimes posts by ordinary people do go viral. The most shared post this year did not come from an Influencer but was a one off post which captured the imagination. The post basically argued that what you do in your free time determines your future.

After work, is what determines your future! Spend one hour per day doing these 5 things and your life will change forever! (374,000 shares)

Why Good Employees Quit (304,000 shares)

These exceptional outlier posts fairly much follow the same career success pattern we have seen above. This next post was quite different, in essence it was an appeal to keep posts and comments on LinkedIn professional.

LinkedIn is not Facebook…seriously, it’s not (146,000 shares)

The one thing that did surprise me was the viral success of Portuguese posts. Here are a few examples about bad bosses, leaders and the importance of recognising employees work:

Artigo revela que um chefe ruim pode adoecer os funcionários (3.2m shares)

Demitam os bajuladores! Líderes competentes não precisam. Alcançam as metas. (1.7m shares)

Reconhecimento é a melhor forma de estimular alguém (688,000 shares)

Interestingly long form posts appear to do well on LinkedIn, the average shares for long form posts over 3,000 words are typically higher than those for shorter content. Here are some examples from non-LinkedIn influencers

The 25 hottest tech companies that could be acquired next (August 2016) (44,500 shares)

LEGO engineered a remarkable turnaround of its business. How’d that happen? (20,400 shares)

LinkedIn looked at billions of actions to see who is winning the talent wars. Here’s what I learned (13,000 shares)

My impression, and it is no more than this, is that these longer form posts engage people with their stories and their writing. This is why they get shared. They are also quite unique and for this reason they are less likely to follow popular headline formats. However, they are still very much focused on the same topics such as industry trends, business success and personal success.