In this issue:
⇒ A post that generated 27,133 impressions
⇒ The most engaging post we've written
⇒ How to choose formats based on your goal
Our LinkedIn Employee Program results
Hi. Zmist & Copy team speaking. 5 of us spent the last 90 days (91 to be exact) posting on LinkedIn, testing every format we could think of. Our humble results:
237,658 impressions
95,203 unique people reached
3,178 new followers
4,537 engagements
Before we tell you which format won, guess: which post got the most impressions of all?
A) A carousel of recommended newsletters
B) A fight about em dashes
C) A dog writing a LinkedIn post
D) A selfie from a powerless apartment
Scroll.
(The answer is one more scroll down).
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Meet the winner post!
The post that got the most (27,133) impressions over 91 days was a fight about em dashes written by Yurii, our Managing Editor Yurii.
Not exactly your typical thought leadership, ‘vanilla’ value or hot take.
But if this makes you think: “I need to start arguing more online,” you missed the point. Anyone can get lucky once. We were looking for patterns.
Here are the posts that brought us fame in 90 days
📌 A carousel that kept pulling readers for a month
One carousel post kept generating reach for nearly a month. Nothing else in our sample did that.
Why?
LinkedIn rewards content that keeps people inside the post. Carousels do exactly that.
What most people don't know:
Carousels are a distribution bet.
They only work if:
you already have an audience
you can get early engagement
Below ~1K followers → most carousels die.
Repeat the same format too often → reach drops.
Takeaway:
Carousels compound. But only if you already have momentum.
📌 A personal photo (but make it specific)
Looks easy. It’s not.
One of our top posts: working from a café during a blackout. It's not “war content” or “stay strong.” It's a very specific moment inside a very big story.
What most people don't know:
Relatability is overrated.
Specificity wins.
The more precise the detail, the higher the engagement.
Hidden advantage:
This format takes 3 minutes to make.
Which means you can stay consistent, without overthinking.
Even low-effort posts can generate 500–800 impressions.
Takeaway:
Consistent over complex. But only if you’re specific.
Generic expertise doesn’t grab attention. But if once you add your personal angle, it does.
Example: a marketing insight explained through a Friends meme. It's not groundbreaking. But creative and personal.
What happens over time:
People don’t remember the post, but they remember who said it.
That’s the difference between content that performs and content that builds authority.
The catch:
You can’t switch voices. If you build a warm, personal tone, and then suddenly go all “corporate thought leader,” your audience disappears.
Takeaway:
Consistency of voice weighs more than the quality of any single post.
📌 The contrarian post (a.k.a. “I disagree”)
Take a popular opinion and disagree with it.
The post calling out AI plagiarism detectors got us 17,365 impressions and 331 engagements (the highest engagement overall).
Why it works:
People respond more strongly to disagreement than to agreement
Strong opinions create identity
But here’s the part nobody tells you:
With reach comes responsibility. Now you have to defend your take, stand by it, and repeat it.
Walk it back and you'll lose the audience you just gained.
Takeaway:
Provocation is a positioning decision.
Don't ask “What should we post?” Ask: “What result do we want and which format gets us there?”
Here is how to choose formats based on your goal:
Want fast reach → | Provoke | Challenge the norm |
Want stability → | Simplify | Share moments |
Want authority → | Personalize | Add your angle |
Want long-term effect → | Long-form | Use carousels |
If your goal is reach → argue and fight
Write contrarian posts
Share strong opinions
Publicly disagree
People don’t share what they agree with. They share what they feel compelled to react to. Disagreement creates a decision: “Do I push back or support this?” That’s what drives comments.
The fastest way to kill reach is to sound reasonable to everyone. The fastest way to grow it is to argue with a specific status quo that people feel the need to respond to.
If your goal is consistency → pick low-effort formats
Post personal photos
Write short observations
Share everyday moments
Think Instagram, but less polished. To make consistency less tedious, you need to lower the cost of showing up. These formats reduce production time to minutes.
The real risk isn’t posting something “low quality.” It’s disappearing for weeks. Low-effort formats keep your account alive and train your audience to expect you.
Share insights through a personal angle
Make analogies, produce metaphors, or post memes (whatever speaks more to you)
Expertise is as boring as it sounds. Unless you frame it as your personal unique story, so people recall the way you explain things.
Authority happens when your thinking becomes identifiable. If someone can remove your name and the post could belong to anyone, you’re not building authority.
If your goal is compounding reach → use carousels
Structure your ideas as a short pdf presentation
Favor multi-slide breakdowns
Carousels increase dwell time and produce Saves (which arguably is a metric LinkedIn cares a lot about today). Also, it works like behavioral ranking signals on your website. The longer people stay, the more LinkedIn reads it as valuable and pushes the post back into circulation.
But only if you already have baseline engagement. The first slide earns the swipe, and each slide creates curiosity for the next.
Never one right way to grow
Different goals require different content mechanics. Most people fail with LinkedIn because they use one format (usually “thoughtful insights”) for everything: reach, authority, consistency. But the truth is, each outcome is driven by a different type of behavior. Remember that when you're planning a Founder Linkedin or Linkedin Employee Advocacy program.
Also, if you're curious how exactly we made our team post, including what direction we gave them, how we kept them posting, and what they got for that, don't hesitate to ask.
Picks from our team
Everything above, with the full data, all five profiles, and the specific posts. Worth reading if you want the complete picture before making any LinkedIn decisions for your employees.