Sponsored LinkedIn Posts Generate 56.5% Less Engagement (Compared to a Creator’s Average)
This case study reveals that sponsored LinkedIn posts generate 56.5% less engagement compared to a creator’s average. Discover why authentic creator content consistently outperforms paid promotions on LinkedIn.
Sponsored LinkedIn Posts Generate 56.5% Less Engagement (Compared to a Creator’s Average)
Influencer marketers often assume that their sponsored content will underperform compared to a creator’s average organic engagement rate.
The question is, how much does sponsored content underperform?
And are there any outlier creators whose sponsored content outperforms their average organic content?
These are important questions (especially if your goal is brand awareness), because it will dictate how much a post with that creator is worth to your brand.
In our study of 100 creators who had posted at least three sponsored posts, we found that the average sponsored post generates 56.5% less engagement compared to the creator’s average engagement on organic content.
Here's a detailed overview of the study and key takeaways to help your LinkedIn creator campaigns deliver better results.
How We Conducted This Study
We identified 100 LinkedIn creators who had published at least three sponsored posts.
To keep the playing field as even as possible, we gathered 5 creators to represent each of the following categories:
- 5,000-10,000 followers
- 10,000-20,000 followers
- 20,000-30,000 followers
- 30,000-40,000 followers
- 40,000-50,000 followers
- 50,000-60,000 followers
- 60,000-70,000 followers
- 70,000-80,000 followers
- 80,000-90,000 followers
- 90,000-100,000 followers
- 100,000-125,000 followers
- 125,000-150,000 followers
- 150,000-175,000 followers
- 175,000-200,000 followers
- 200,000-225,000 followers
- 225,000-250,000 followers
- 250,000+ (up to 517,211 followers) – note, this category had 10 creators
For each creator, we looked at:
- Average total engagement across all organic posts from the last 180 days.
- Average total engagement rate across all sponsored posts from the last 180 days.
The initial insight learned from this study was that the average sponsored post generated 56.5% LESS engagement compared to the creator’s average total engagement for an organic post.
However, the conclusion from this isn’t that LinkedIn influencer marketing doesn’t work.
On the contrary, many marketing leaders claim LinkedIn influencer marketing is one of the highest-performing marketing channels.
This marketer claims B2B creator partnerships (primarily on LinkedIn) is on track to 6x their revenue:
And this marketer is planning to scale their influencer partnerships:
Instead of viewing this as a negative sign, I see it as an opportunity.
How can you improve creator/brand alignment and the creative itself to generate more engagement?
This is the question we’ll attempt to answer (with data) in this post.
Engagement ≠ Value, But It Can Be a Useful Metric
Before we get into the study, I’ll acknowledge that not all of the highest engagement posts drive the most conversions or views from the right people.
Yet the goal of influencer marketing is often simply raising awareness with the right audience, meaning engagement is an important and relevant metric.
Therefore, always consider who is engaging with your post and the quality of that engagement (i.e., how impactful was that touchpoint?).
Insight #1: 7% of LinkedIn creators had a higher average on sponsored than organic post engagement.
Although most creators in this study had a significantly lower average engagement on sponsored posts than organic posts, there were a few outliers.
Seven of the 100 creators in this study had a higher average engagement rate on their sponsored posts than organic posts.
This statistic raises two questions:
- What was different about how these creators approached sponsored campaigns that made them so successful?
- How can we use those insights to make our creator partnerships more engaging?
We’ll dive deeper into these questions later in the post, but if you're curious, these were the seven top performing creators:
Insight #2: Follower count isn’t strongly correlated with engagement
I've seen plenty of posts from influencer marketers claiming that they don't use follower count as a metric when evaluating creators.
Today, we have data to support this anecdotal claim.
While there is some correlation between follower count and engagement, it isn't very strong:
Therefore, follower count doesn’t seem to be a reliable metric to estimate engagement.
Insight #3: “Micro” creators significantly outperform macro creators in sponsored content
Since follower count isn't strongly correlated with engagement, we separated creators based on their average organic engagement and compared organic to sponsored post performance.
As you can see in the graph below, micro creators (as defined by lower total engagement for organic content) tended to have the closest sponsored and organic engagement rates.
You can see in the graph below that as the average total organic engagement increases (significantly), the average engagement on sponsored posts stays relatively consistent after you cross roughly 1,500 to 2,000 average engagements per post.
The graph below shows that there’s a clear trend that as average organic engagement increases, the average engagement on sponsored posts decreases significantly.
For example, creators who usually generate 100 engagements per post on organic content might only generate about 86 engagements on a sponsored post.
As you move down the X axis, you’ll see that a creator who generally earns about 1,000 engagements on an organic post might only generate about 550 engagements on a sponsored post.
This insight means that while a creator with more average organic reach will still generate more total engagement, you should negotiate a lower rate per engagement with macro creators (if, of course, your goal is maximizing engagement).
What Makes a Highly Effective Sponsored Post?
We analyzed the sponsored content from the seven creators of the 100 sampled who had a higher average engagement rate on sponsored content than organic content.
Here are some of the key insights we discovered.
#1: Offer Relevancy and Value
It might sound simple, but a highly effective sponsored post follows the same guidelines as a highly effective organic post.
The post should provide something that's useful to the creator's followers.
Katelyn Bourgoin was the top performer across all 100 LinkedIn creators in this study, and as I scrolled through her sponsored posts, I found myself pausing to read each one because I was genuinely interested in what she was saying.
For example, this post had me engrossed, because she was sharing her unique perspective on a pain point relevant to my interests:
Delivering authentic, valuable information may sound like a simple and obvious point. Still, many of the sponsored posts from the lowest performing creators often had nothing more than a generic quote.
If there isn't any unique insight or value, the post likely won't perform well.
Below is an example of one of these generic sponsored posts. There are already tons of LinkedIn posts that start with "AI won't take your job. Someone using AI will."
This offers nothing unique to the conversation and could easily be copied and pasted onto anyone’s profile:
I also found that some of the lowest performing content was generic promotional text or video.
Here's an example of a campaign that tended to underperform the creators' averages as it was simply pushing a generic brand video:
If you’re going to push an advertisement, you’ll likely find ads are a more effective promotion than creator marketing.
#2: Audience Alignment
Choosing a creator who aligns with your audience and matches your ICP might seem simple, but there are some nuances to it.
When analyzing audience alignment, I found that the content from many creators whose sponsored content engagement significantly underperformed their organic content engagement often fell into one of these buckets:
1. Only a small percentage of the brand's ICP matched the creator's audience. This scenario is common with B2B enterprise products, because there simply aren't that many decision makers at enterprise companies. In this case, low engagement isn't necessarily less valuable because you only want the attention of that small percentage of the creator's audience.
2. The brand's ICP matches the majority of the creator's audience, but only a small percentage of the audience is in market and needs the product. This scenario is also okay, especially if you're using influencer marketing to raise brand awareness.
3. The product targeted a topically relevant audience, but the audience didn't match the product's ICP. Avoid this scenario.
While the first two scenarios are okay, avoid the third one because you aren't reaching your ideal customer.
For example, in the post below, the creator is a job coach who helps people get hired. The product the creator is promoting is for recruiters.
While the creator and brand are both in the recruiting industry, the creator's audience doesn't align with the brand's ICP.
Therefore, this post earned low engagement (it isn't relevant to job seekers) and didn't reach the right audience.
#3: The Post Feels Like It’s An Organic Post
As I analyzed creators whose sponsored content consistently outperformed their organic content, I noticed the top performers simply followed basic organic LinkedIn best practices more closely than the underperformers.
This is related to the first point (offering unique value), but it goes one step further.
For example, the hooks on the posts from the top performing creators were consistently highly compelling:
This isn't to say that the underperforming creators never used good hooks, but many of them were less consistent at crafting compelling hooks.
Similarly, I noticed that some of the lowest performing posts used "#AD" at the beginning of the hook.
Disclosing ads is important, but use LinkedIn’s partnership feature instead.
Using the "Brand partnership" tag is not only appropriate, but it also makes your hook much more compelling, as most people will simply scroll by a hook that starts with "#AD."
There are also plenty of different LinkedIn hacks, like commenting to receive a free resource. Katelyn, who was the top performer across all LinkedIn creators in the study, used this strategy in her sponsored post with Triple Whale, and it performed quite well.
The key takeaway is that if you really want your LinkedIn influencer campaigns to do well, you need to understand some elements of the algorithm itself and make sure creators are following them with your branded campaigns.
#4: Creator Format Consistency
Most creators have a specific format of content that they typically post (e.g., text, video, carousels, etc.), and they understand the nuances of what makes that particular format effective.
The creator's audience also clearly resonates with that format.
I noticed that several creators whose sponsored content significantly underperformed their organic content were using different formats for their sponsored content.
For example, this creator specifically called out that he usually only posts text based content, and this post only generated a fraction of the creator's typical engagement.
Similarly, the lowest performing creator (from an organic to sponsored engagement rate perspective) only posted a small percentage of video content organically (only 5% of their total posts).
And, that 5% of video content significantly underperformed all of their other organic content.
However, about 44% of all of this creator’s sponsored content was video content.
Had the brands simply asked that creator to create content in the format he felt most comfortable, those sponsored posts might have performed much better.
#5: Brand Reputation
One of the brands Katelyn promoted was Loveable. The reality is that Loveable is a novel, hot brand that most people are already talking about. The brand itself is essentially the trend.
Fair or not, the reality is that posts promoting brands that are trending (for a positive reason) will simply generate more engagement.
This means that pleasing existing customers, delivering a great product, and building the brand from the inside out impacts the efficacy of your influencer campaigns.
#6: Campaign Creativity
Tom Boston was one of the seven creators from the list who had higher average engagement on his sponsored posts than his organic posts.
However, when I looked at his sponsored posts compared to his organic posts, 100% of the sponsored content were entertaining video skits. While he did produce some organic video skits, they only made up about 25% of his organic content.
Therefore, the conclusion is that his sponsored content performed better simply because video skits generate significantly higher engagement.
One takeaway from this analysis is that video skits are effective at generating higher engagement.
However, another takeaway is that the creativity of the campaign itself has a significant impact on the post engagement.
Therefore, take some time to think of creative campaign concepts, similar to Hootsuite’s VHS tape campaign.
If you’re feeling stuck, look at the top performing content from your partner creators and use that as inspiration.
How to Further Improve Your LinkedIn Influencer Campaigns
Selecting the right creators is one of the most important variables that impact the success of your LinkedIn influencer campaigns.
However, finding the right influencers on LinkedIn, especially those who you might not yet know of and can bring a new audience to your brand, is tricky.
That’s why we built Favikon.
It’s an influencer platform that allows you to easily discover creators on any social media platform (including LinkedIn) and use advanced filtering to find the right creator for your brand.
In fact, you can manage your entire campaigns directly inside the platform, from influencer discovery to contacting them and managing collaborations.
You can try Favikon today to see how it can improve your influencer campaigns.
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