June 8, 2026
We looked at every post our managed accounts published in May across our full roster of founders and experts, and asked a simple question: setting aside what the LinkedIn gurus claim, what does the data actually say about what earns reach, reactions, comments, and followers?
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Co-Founder & CEO
Some of the findings confirm what you would expect. Several do not. And one or two quietly contradict advice you have probably been given a hundred times!
Let's dig in.
This matters for reading everything below.
The accounts in this analysis are normal professional profiles, not full-time content creators or LinkedIn influencers. They are founders, executives, and subject-matter experts who post alongside a day job.
The typical account has around 3,000 followers, and most sit between 1,000 and 5,000. The bulk are Finnish professionals writing mainly for a Finnish-speaking audience – so these benchmarks reflect what real expert profiles achieve, not what someone with a six-figure following and a full-time content team can pull off.
If you recognise yourself in that description, this is your peer group!
Everything here is a median, not an average.
That matters more than it sounds. LinkedIn is a power-law platform: a handful of posts go semi-viral and drag the average into fantasy land. In May the average post reached nearly 4,000 impressions, but the median reached 1,524, well under half.
Medians describe the post in the middle of the pack, the one you will most likely write next.
The typical May post looked like this: 1,524 impressions, 26 reactions, 3 comments, a 2.08% engagement rate. Hold that in your head! It is the line everything else is measured against.
This is the clearest signal in the whole dataset, and it runs straight against the "keep it short, nobody reads" orthodoxy.
Sort posts by length and engagement climbs with them:
The longest posts reached more than twice as many people as the shortest and earned more than three times the reactions, with the highest engagement rate of any length (2.90%). The point is not that length is a trick. It is that a longer post is usually a post with an actual argument in it, something worth stopping for. Short posts tend to be throwaways, and the feed treats them that way.
Key takeaway: Substantial posts outperform short ones on reach, reactions, and rate.
What to do with it?: When a post has a real point to make, let it run past 1,000 characters and save the one-liners for quick updates.
By volume, artificial intelligence and tech is the single most common topic, 147 of the month's posts, around four in ten of everything published. It is also, by median reach, the weakest-performing major topic at 1,295 impressions, below the 1,524 baseline.
Among the topics with real volume behind them, the order by median reach looks like this:
Leadership posts out-reach AI by nearly double. The likely reason is saturation. When four in ten posts are AI takes, the bar to stand out is brutal, and the median AI post is just another voice in a very loud room.
Reach is one thing, reactions and comments are another.
Leadership as a topic leads decisively on reactions with a median of 47 per post, followed by sales at 38.
Personal posts sit at 27 and AI at 22. On comments, the metric that actually signals a post sparked a conversation, leadership again leads the high-volume topics at 4 per post, with sales and personal posts at 3 and AI at 2.
Takeaway: More of a nice-to-know than a rule: leadership and sales themes tend to travel furthest, AI travels least, and posts about marketing quietly pull comments.
What to do with it?: Write with a clear point of view in your own field rather than chasing a topic because it is popular. A strong opinion in your niche beats a generic take in someone else's. If leadership or business themes genuinely fit your expertise, lean into them, because they tend to reach furthest.
First, what is an engagement rate?
It is the share of people who saw a post and then did something with it: reactions plus comments, divided by impressions. A 2% rate means one in fifty viewers reacted or replied.
Here is the pattern worth knowing: Engagement rate tends to run highest when your audience is small, and it eases down as your following grows.
Everything else grows with your audience. Reach roughly doubles at each step up, reactions climb steadily, and comments go from near-zero to genuinely conversational at the top. But the rate itself drifts gently downward, because a small and tight audience engages more densely than a large one, where many followers are loosely connected or just passing through.
That is completely normal, and it is not a sign of weaker content!
Here is roughly what poor, good, and exceptional look like at each account size:
One thing this table hides is the most important thing to understand: the single biggest reason a post shows a low engagement rate is simply that it reached a lot of people. A post seen by 800 people will almost always show a higher rate than one seen by 10,000, even when the bigger one is the better post. In our data, posts in the lowest reach quartile ran about 2.2%, while the highest-reach quartile ran about 1.7%, for exactly this reason.
Key takeaway: Engagement rate is reactions plus comments divided by views, and it naturally falls as a post reaches more people, so a low rate on a high-reach post is normal rather than a warning sign.
And what to do with it?: Only worry if your rate sits consistently below the poor column for your size and your reach is also modest, which usually points to the hook or the content. A low rate on a post that travelled far needs no fixing at all.
Posts with an external link in the body reached a median of 1,185 impressions against 1,532 for posts without. There is a real but modest cost, because the platform would rather keep people on the feed than send them elsewhere. Worth knowing, not worth contorting your content over.
The old workaround of dropping the link in the first comment instead is not really worth the bother anymore, and it makes the post clumsier for the reader.
Key takeaway: A link in the post trims reach a little, and the "link in the first comment" trick is no longer worth it.
And what to do with it?: If a post genuinely needs a link, put it in the post, accept the small trade-off, and move on.
In our data, posts stuffed with emojis reached more people (3,303 median impressions for nine or more, versus 1,138 for none) but earned a slightly lower engagement rate (1.86% versus 2.22%). More eyeballs, not more warmth.
The more useful point in 2026 is about perception. With more than half of long-form LinkedIn posts now likely written by AI, readers have learned to spot the tells, and a cluster of emojis, especially the familiar rocket, sparkle, and chart set, has become one of them.
A wall of emojis increasingly reads as "a machine wrote this," even when a person did. We have noticed people dialing emojis back across the board for exactly this reason.
Key takeaway: Heavy emoji use buys reach but not warmth, and now risks making genuine content look AI-generated.
And what to do with it?: Keep emojis to a few, used as real signposts. When in doubt, leave them out. Consider establishing your own signature emoji!
Few topics divide LinkedIn advice as sharply as this one: some swear hashtags are dead weight, others insist you should add a handful to every post. The honest answer is that both camps are half right, because it depends on what you want the post to do.
Inside LinkedIn, hashtags no longer move reach or in-feed findability the way they once did. The platform retired hashtag following and stopped treating them as a discovery shortcut.
But they are not useless: they now work as search signals. They get indexed, they help categorise what a post is about, and the first three hashtags of the post direcgtly go in the postURL, they give search engines a clean, structured hook into your content.
For a post you want to be discoverable later, by someone searching a specific topic on LinkedIn or on the open web, a few precise hashtags genuinely help.
Key takeaway: Hashtags do not lift reach inside the feed, but they help your content get found in search, on LinkedIn and beyond.
And what to do with it?: Skip hashtags on everyday posts. Add one to three precise, relevant hashtags when a post is meant to be searchable for a specific topic.
The conventional wisdom is "always end with a question to drive engagement." The data says otherwise.
Posts without a question mark at the end earned more reactions and a higher engagement rate (2.26% versus 1.93%) than posts that ended with one.
A tacked-on "What do you think?" does not earn the engagement it promises, and may read as a tell that the post was built to fish for it.
Key takeaway: Posts without a closing question outperformed posts with one.
And what to do with it?: Drop the reflexive "What do you think?" and trust a strong post to pull replies on its own.
Almost every post on the roster carries an image, and that is no accident. In a feed, an image's first job is to stop the scroll. The brain pauses on a picture before it decides whether to read, and it pauses on a human face fastest of all. Whatever else the image does, being informative comes second to simply making the thumb stop.
That is also why it pays to put your own face in your posts more often than not.
Repeated exposure to the same face, voice, and ideas builds what psychologists call a parasocial relationship: the sense that you know someone you have never actually met. Every time a reader sees your face in their feed, you feel a little more familiar and a little more trusted, even if they never stop to read a word.
Video does this even better, because a face plus a voice is a stronger familiarity-builder than a still image.
So the real question is rarely whether to add an image. It is whether the image earns the stop, and whether it puts you, the actual person, in front of your audience often enough to be remembered.
Key takeaway: An image exists first to stop the scroll, and a face does that best while quietly building familiarity over time. Video does it even more.
And what to do with it?: Put your own face in your posts more often than not, and mix in the occasional talking-head video.
If there is one finding to act on tomorrow, it is this one.
Accounts that posted three to five times a week accumulated a median of well over 100,000 impressions across the month, many times more total visibility than accounts posting only once or twice a week, which landed closer to 17,000.
And here is the part that kills the "I will dilute my feed if I post more" worry: per-post reach did not drop at all.
Accounts at three to five a week actually reached slightly more per post (1,709 median impressions) than accounts at one to two (1,582). You get the compounding without paying for it.
The accounts posting less than once a week tell the other side of the story. Even when one of their occasional posts pops, their total monthly reach barely registers, a few thousand impressions for the whole month.
Showing up rarely means being seen rarely, no matter how good the individual post.
There is a ceiling: push well beyond five a week and per-post reach finally starts to thin, so three to five is the sweet spot. But the floor is the message that matters: get to at least three posts a week, hold it, and the visibility compounds.
Key takeaway: Posting three to five times a week multiplies your monthly reach and costs nothing per post, while rare posting leaves you barely seen.
And what to do with it?: Commit to at least three posts a week and keep it steady. Consistency, not intensity, is the lever.
Steady posting does not just win impressions in the moment. It builds the audience underneath them. Over the month, the typical account grew its following by 2.4%, with the strongest growers adding more than 7%. That sounds modest until you compound it. A few percent a month is the difference between a flat account and one that has visibly grown its reach a year from now.
Key takeaway: Consistent presence grew followings by a median 2.4% in a single month, and that compounds fast.
And what to do with it?: Keep showing up. The reach you earn today is also the audience you keep tomorrow.
When someone with 3,000 followers gets 1,500 impressions on a post, are they doing well or badly?
The honest answer is "compared to whom," so here is the comparison.
The table groups accounts by follower count and shows what reach looks like at three levels: a typical post (the median), a strong post (better than three-quarters of posts that size), and an excellent one (a top-tier result).
A few things make this genuinely useful as an "am I doing okay?" reference.
Reach grows with followers, but a typical post reaches roughly your whole follower count when you are small and settles to around a third of it as you climb, which still means far more people in absolute terms, just a smaller slice of a much larger base.
The gap between the typical and excellent columns is the real prize: at every size, the best posts reach three to four times what an ordinary one does, and that gap is won on content, not follower count. The number to your left tells you where the middle of the pack sits.
Building thought leadership and a personal brand is slow work. It takes time, consistency, and no small amount of patience, and it rarely shows results as quickly as you would like.
It is a lot like going to the gym! You do not see the change after the first few sessions, everyone starts from a different place, and the only thing that reliably works is showing up again and again.
The reach and the followers compound quietly in the background long before they feel visible, so if it seems like it is taking forever, that is normal, not a sign that it is not working.
And one more thing. As interesting as all of this is, the average person should not obsess too much about this stuff. Knowing what works, and turning it into posts that actually land, is our job at Haamu.
You bring the expertise and the point of view – we will handle the rest. 👻
