You may have noticed your LinkedIn feed is filling up with short-form videos. You’ve probably also seen LinkedIn ads encouraging you to use video in your content strategy.
With attention spans shrinking, it seems like a logical shift. But do videos perform better than traditional posts?
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 I used many words.) A few years later, writing for Forbes trimmed that down to 1,200. Then, The Drum brought it down even further to 800. As attention spans shrank, so did my word count.
Fast forward to today: AI tools are flooding our feeds and the pressure to stand out is higher than ever. I find myself asking if I should keep writing — or is it time to shift to short-form video?
The experiment
Over the past month, we ran a test to compare the performance of short-form videos against traditional blog-style posts on LinkedIn. To measure effectiveness, we created three tiers of metrics — from high intent to low:
- Tier 1: Form fills on our website or direct messages on LinkedIn.
- Tier 2: Profile views, website visits, content view/read time and new followers.
- Tier 3: Reach and engagement (impressions, likes, comments, shares).
We tracked performance using:
- LinkedIn Analytics (for post data).
- HubSpot (for form fills).
- Google Analytics 4 (for web performance).
- Warmly (for web visits).
- Looker Studio (for blog insights).
The timeframe covered 90 days — from March 1 to May 30 — giving us a clear before-and-after picture.
As part of our test, the top eight viewed posts of the last 90 days were evenly distributed between video and blog content posted in the last 30 days. The first video released was the top viewed post, with the remaining three videos landing in the third, seventh, and eighth spots.
Overall performance on LinkedIn over the 90 days saw a 20% increase in impressions and a 42% lift in engagement compared to the previous period. Even more striking, the final 28 days showed a 408% surge in impressions and a 290% increase in engagement.
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The results of the test
It’s worth noting how LinkedIn measures impressions and video views.
- An impression is counted each time your post appears in someone’s feed, whether or not they engage with it. Think of it like a billboard: just because you drive by doesn’t mean you looked.
- A video view is counted when someone watches for at least two continuous seconds via autoplay or clicking play. In our case, videos used autoplay.
To evaluate performance more thoroughly, we downloaded Richard Van der Blom’s LinkedIn Algorithm Insights Report 2025 for benchmarks and context.
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 doesn’t include repeat displays.) I’ll begin with Tier 3 metrics and work up 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 someone only watched for two seconds.
- View/read times: A more meaningful metric, given the point above. Videos still outperformed (35% vs. 20%), but this is based on averages. For video: total view time divided by number of views.
- For blogs: average read time divided by estimated total read time (e.g., 1 minute read time for a 5-minute blog).
- Reactions (likes, etc.): Video outperformed written content almost 2 to 1, but this was skewed by Video 1, which received nearly half of all video reactions.
- Comments: Viewers were 52% more likely to comment on blog posts.
- Reposts: Viewers were five times more likely to share a video.
- Profile views: Blogs were twice as likely to generate a profile view. That said, my overall profile views actually declined over the last 28 days compared to the previous period.
- Audience growth: You’d expect the 90-day lift in performance to have led to some audience growth, but that wasn’t the case. There was no change. Nearly 90% of all views came from my first-degree connections.
- Web visits and/or LinkedIn Company Page visits: There was no noticeable change. However, visits to our company page dropped by 18% during the test period.
- Tier 1 metrics: Neither format produced a single form fill or DM.
Dig deeper: 6 tips for optimizing LinkedIn content for B2B marketing
Learnings
How you view these results depends on:
- How you view LinkedIn as a channel.
- Your desired goals (a la the key metrics listed).
Blogs have a slight advantage over short-form videos (for now) purely because they are easier to create. 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 commenting as a Gen X, 20-year blogger with a mature senior executive audience. That brings up an interesting challenge we faced — one I’ll dig into more in a future article.
To reach a new audience, we tested upgrading my account to Premium and ran paid ads from our corporate page to boost video views during the last two weeks of the experiment. We didn’t get the results we hoped for or those promised by LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Premium claims it will “expand your network and increase visibility.” We saw no evidence of that. As mentioned, over 90% of the reactions came from 1st-degree connections.
The paid ads dramatically increased impressions (a relatively meaningless Tier 3 metric) but performed poorly, generating a 0.13% CTR with no conversions. That raises a bigger question about the value of LinkedIn — the 800-pound gorilla of B2B channels.
LinkedIn has changed its algorithms to prioritize content from creators you’ve previously interacted with, which helps explain the concentration of my audience. The key insight for me is that LinkedIn’s algorithm favors the content consumer, not the creator.
You’re now 60% more likely to see a post from someone you’ve already interacted with, according to the Algorithm Report. LinkedIn updates your feed in real-time, like other social platforms, based on how you engage.
As a result, as the report points out, outreach, engagement, and follower growth have all declined dramatically since last year.
Dig deeper: How LinkedIn rewards tribal loyalty over truth
The bottom line
To be fair, the short-form videos might have performed better if I could reach an audience that prefers that format.
LinkedIn lives on creator content, and that content is quickly moving to video (a 23% increase in 2024 over 2023), according to the report. What the report doesn’t show, and neither could we, is whether video is more effective than other formats.
If you’re looking for ROI or business impact from any content posted on LinkedIn, the issue may not be the format — it may be the channel.
Now, let’s see if anyone reads this content. (Please, don’t make me do another video.)
The post Do LinkedIn videos work better than blogs? Here’s the data appeared first on MarTech.