2022-03-30 | Blog 009

I recently wrote a LinkedIn article on the lesser known, less mainstream designs in the Floating Offshore Wind industry. You can have a read of it here. I’ll get round to putting it on this website as well at some point.

I have a feeling that the article format on LinkedIn really doesn’t perform well. After posting the article 2 days ago, as expected, it wasn’t doing great. I spend last evening reworking it into a slide format and reposted it again this morning. I also gave tweaked it to be slightly more clickbait-ish. The original title was The Wonderful World of Floating Offshore Wind. The slides were changed to 9 Designs That Could Change Floating Offshore Wind. See it here. Note that the slides cut out a lot of content.

LinkedIn let’s you see how many times your post has “appeared in the feed”, as well as “reactions”. Right now, the article (with 2 days head start) has 65 views. Meanwhile, the slides already have almost 3,000 views. On top of this, I’ve had maybe 15 people add me this week, all since posting the slides.

I know I changed 2 variables here, format and clickbait-ness, so it’s not a proper experiment. Regardless, I’m surer than ever that the article format isn’t worth the effort on LinkedIn. The ability for people to click through your slides and not leave their feed is just that little bit less effort/commitment for people to engage with your post. The next level beyond this would be videos, but I know from past experience that video editing can be extremely time intensive…

I think this will change the way I post. After all, the reason I post on LinkedIn is to raise my profile and (hopefully) help with my research in the future. I always end each piece with a paragraph asking for resources/potential help. If more people see my stuff, then the better my chances.

Other LinkedIn data: Aside from "views in the feed", LinkedIn also tells you three things. (1) which companies your readers are from. (2) The titles of the viewers. (3) Where your readers are from. For each of the 3 metrics, it only tells you the top 9 entries (e.g. 159 persons from The Randstad, Netherlands. 118 from Greater Aberdeen area ...).