Every content calendar eventually runs into the same question: how long should this post actually be? We had a number in mind after our consistency research — customers kept asking us for one — so we pulled two years of LinkedIn data to settle it: 51,696 company-page posts, 158,602 posts total across every channel we manage, no cherry-picking. Here's what held up.
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What we analyzed
Every post published through Willow between September 2024 and September 2026: 158,602 posts across four platforms, scoped here to 71,297 LinkedIn posts, matched to their performance data and counted by word, not character. The core analysis below covers the 51,696 of those from 765 company-page channels, where LinkedIn's API exposes full analytics; the 19,379 posts from 614 personal-profile channels get their own section below, on the narrower metrics LinkedIn does expose for them.
The sweet spot is a plateau, not a number
- 1–50 words: median 3 engagements, 221 impressions. Too short costs you both.
- 76–175 words: the plateau. Median 8–9 engagements the whole way, impressions peaking at 352 around 76–100.
- 251+ words: median 6 engagements, 175 impressions. Barely better than posts a fifth as long.
- Consistency changes the shape. Pages posting once a week get a narrower plateau than twice-a-week pages; post less predictably than that and length starts to matter less than just showing up.
It depends on what you attach
The sweet spot moves by a factor of two depending on the format:
- Photo: 76–100 words. The image does the work.
- Plain text: 101–125 words. Nothing else on the page to carry the point.
- PDF carousels: 126–175 words for engagement. Impressions tell a messier story here: they actually peak on very short carousel captions (26–50 words), but that band is thin enough (n=244) to treat as directional, not settled.
- Video: 176–200 words. Almost double the photo sweet spot.
- Article and link posts: 176–200 words. Engagement climbs steadily the whole way there, no ambiguity.
Sharing a link? Go long
Median clicks climb from 1–3 under 100 words to 18 at 176–200 words. Short link captions aren't efficient: they're leaving clicks on the table.
Personal profiles play by different rules
- The plateau shifts, not just widens. Personal profiles keep climbing past where company pages top out, settling into a broad range of 150–300 words.
- Personal-profile video at 176–200 words hits a median engagement of 54: the single highest number anywhere in this analysis, on either population.
What you're already doing right, and wrong
- Photo captions: already right. A median of 92–106 words against a 76–100 sweet spot. Nothing to fix.
- Video and link captions: written at half length. 94–108 words against a 176–200 target for video, 58–72 against the same target for links.
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