Does Video Content Perform Better Than Text on LinkedIn? Here's What Happens

The short version: Video on LinkedIn gets more impressions than text, often two to three times more, but text posts still drive more comments, saves, and inbound leads for most small business owners, because video rewards production polish while text rewards ideas and specificity. If you've got one hour a week to spend on LinkedIn, text will make you more money faster. If you've got a team and a story that needs a face, video wins. It's not one or the other, it's knowing which job each one is doing for you.

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What the LinkedIn algorithm rewards

LinkedIn has said publicly, more than once, that it favours "dwell time", meaning how long someone sits on a post before scrolling past. Video naturally wins that metric because a fifteen second clip forces fifteen seconds of dwell time whether the viewer likes it or not. A text post has to earn that same fifteen seconds through the first two lines alone. That's the entire reason video shows up in feeds more often. It's not because video is better content. It's because it's a better fit for a metric.

I've been posting daily-ish on LinkedIn since around 2011, back when it was still mostly CVs and connection requests nobody accepted. I've watched the platform shift from pure text, to native documents (carousels), to video being pushed hard from about 2022 onwards when LinkedIn started competing for attention against TikTok and Reels. Every platform push is temporary. What's not temporary is what your specific audience stops for.

The numbers, from my own posts

Here's a concrete comparison I ran last year, not a study I read somewhere, my own account. I posted a 45 second talking-head video about a mistake I see clients make with their AI tools, and three days later posted a text post making almost the same point, no video, just 180 words and a short list.

• The video got 11,400 impressions and 340 reactions, 22 comments, 3 shares
• The text post got 4,900 impressions and 210 reactions, 61 comments, 9 shares

Less than half the reach on the text post. But more than double the comments, and the comments were the kind that turned into actual conversations, two of which became paid discovery calls. The video comments were mostly "great point" and emojis. Nobody messaged me off the back of the video. Three people messaged me off the back of the text post.

That's the pattern I've seen repeat for two years running. Video wins on reach. Text wins on depth of engagement and, for me at least, on pipeline. Reach is a vanity number if it doesn't turn into anything. I'd rather have 4,900 people who read carefully than 11,400 who watched while scrolling to something else.

The uncomfortable bit nobody selling video courses wants you to hear

Video works brilliantly for people who already have an audience, a recognisable face, or a big enough team that someone else edits the thing. If you're a solo consultant or a small business owner filming yourself on a phone in a spare room, most of your video content is competing against creators with ring lights, editors, and hooks written by people whose actual job is writing hooks. You are not just competing with other LinkedIn posts, you're competing with the production values of every TikTok your audience watched an hour before opening LinkedIn. Text has no such arms race. A brilliantly observed 150 word post beats a mediocre video every single time, and it costs you fifteen minutes instead of the hour and a half most people spend filming, re-filming, and editing a "quick" video. I've watched clients burn entire afternoons on a 60 second clip that got 800 views. That same afternoon could have produced five sharp text posts. Nobody talks about the time cost of video because it's less exciting to say "it took me ages and got mediocre reach" than "video is the future, get on it."

The other thing rarely said out loud: LinkedIn's own reporting shows video consumption on the platform grew by more than 34% year on year around 2023 to 2024, which sounds like proof you must do video. What it proves is that supply grew, meaning more people posting video means more competition for the same attention, not that each individual video performs better than it did before. More players in the game, same size pitch.

When video wins

I'm not anti-video. It has a real job. Video wins when:

• You're building personal brand recognition and need people to recognise your face and voice before a sales call, so the cold-to-warm gap shrinks
• You're explaining something visual, a demo, a process, a before-and-after, something words struggle to convey
• You have a strong hook in the first three seconds and can hold attention without needing perfect production, think unpolished and honest rather than corporate
• You're repurposing, taking a 20 minute talk or webinar and cutting it into three 90 second clips, because the heavy lifting was already done

That last point matters more than most people realise. The best video content I've posted was never made for LinkedIn first. It was a clip from a podcast I recorded or a talk I gave at an event, cut down afterwards. Making video specifically for a LinkedIn feed, from a standing start, is the expensive and inefficient way to do it.

When text wins, and it's more often than people admit

Text wins when you have a specific opinion, a number, or a mistake to share and you want people to stop and think, not just watch and scroll. It also wins on cost. A text post costs you fifteen to thirty minutes. A halfway decent video costs an hour minimum once you include filming, watching it back, re-filming because you said "um" nine times, and captioning it (because most people watch with sound off, so captions aren't optional). If you're running a small business and weighing up where your limited content hours go, that maths matters. This is the same calculation I talk through with clients when we're planning out content pillars for their LinkedIn strategy, work out what format fits your hours before you commit to a weekly video habit you'll abandon by March.

I've also answered if you search a name on LinkedIn, will the person know.

A simple test you can run in two weeks

Don't take my numbers as gospel. Your audience is not my audience. Here's the test I'd run if I were you:

• Week one: post three text posts, each 100 to 250 words, one clear point per post, posted at the same time of day (mid-morning UK time tends to work well for B2B audiences)
• Week two: post three videos, 30 to 60 seconds each, same topics, same posting time, captions turned on
• Track impressions, but also track comments that aren't just emojis, and track any DMs or profile visits that follow within 48 hours
• Look at which format got you a reply worth having, not which one got the bigger number

Two weeks isn't a scientific sample, but it's enough to see your own pattern, and your pattern is the only one that matters to your business.

The format that quietly beats both

Before I finish, I have to mention the one format that outperformed both text and video on my own account for most of 2024 and 2025, and that's the native document, the PDF-style carousel. It gets the dwell time benefit of video (people swipe through slide by slide) with the substance of text (you can pack in a real framework or checklist). My highest performing post of the last two years was a 9-slide carousel breaking down an AI workflow, 38,000 impressions, 400+ reactions, and it's still bringing me profile visits now. Nobody frames the debate as "text versus video versus documents" but the honest picture on LinkedIn right now includes all three, and documents are the one most small businesses under-use.

Whichever format you pick, the content still needs a point

Format is only ever the wrapper. I've seen gorgeous video with nothing to say get 200 views, and I've seen an ugly, unedited phone video with one sharp insight outperform everything else that month. The same is true in reverse for text. This is the bit that gets lost when people ask "does video perform better than text", because the honest answer depends entirely on whether you had something worth posting in the first place. If you're not sure what your actual point is post to post, that's usually a content strategy problem, not a format problem, and it's worth working out your content pillars before you decide whether to film or type. It's also worth asking whether you even need someone dedicated to this, some businesses benefit from bringing in a content maker rather than trying to do it all founder-first, especially once video enters the mix and editing time starts eating into billable hours.

If you're weighing up whether format decisions like this are something you can work through alone or whether it's worth getting outside eyes on your whole LinkedIn approach, that's a fair question to ask before you sink another quarter into content that isn't moving the needle, and it's exactly the kind of thing I cover when I work with businesses as an AI consultant for small business, because content strategy and AI-assisted production now sit side by side for most of my clients.

Repurposing instead of starting from zero

One more practical point before the FAQ. You don't need to choose a lane and stick to it forever. Some of my best-performing weeks came from taking one solid piece of long-form thinking, an old blog post, a talk, a client story, and turning it into a text post on Monday, a carousel on Wednesday, and a 45 second video clip on Friday. Same idea, three formats, three different audience segments reached. If you've got a backlog of blog content sitting there doing nothing, it's worth going through which old content is worth republishing before you assume you need to create everything from scratch. Half the video ideas people struggle to find are sitting in a blog post they wrote two years ago.

And if you're weighing up formats beyond LinkedIn too, whether your time is better spent writing or filming full-time, the same logic in this post applies almost exactly to the blogger versus vlogger decision. It's the same question wearing a different coat: what does your specific audience stop scrolling for, and what can you sustain without burning out by month three.

See also 6 Tips to Produce Professional Video Content for Your Side Hustle, which picks up where this leaves off.

Frequently asked questions

Does LinkedIn video get more reach than text posts?

Generally yes, video tends to get roughly two to three times the impressions of a comparable text post because it holds attention longer, which is what the algorithm measures as engagement. But more impressions doesn't automatically mean more comments, saves, or business enquiries, in my own testing text posts often outperform video on those deeper engagement metrics even with a smaller audience.

How long should a LinkedIn video be for the best performance?

Between 30 and 90 seconds tends to perform best for native LinkedIn video, long enough to make one clear point but short enough that people watch to the end. Always add captions, since most people scroll LinkedIn with sound off, and a video with no captions loses a huge chunk of its potential audience in the first three seconds.

Is it worth paying for professional video editing for LinkedIn posts?

For a solo consultant or small business posting once or twice a week, professional editing is rarely worth the cost, a well-lit phone video with clean captions performs just as well as a polished edit for most B2B audiences on LinkedIn. It becomes worth paying for once you're posting daily, repurposing from events or podcasts, or building a personal brand where consistent visual quality affects trust.

What performs better on LinkedIn, video or a carousel document?

Native document posts (carousels) often outperform both plain video and plain text for information-heavy content, because they combine the swipe-through dwell time benefit of video with the substance and skimmability of text. If you have a framework, checklist, or step-by-step to share, a carousel is usually the highest-return format for the least production effort.

Useful references

• LinkedIn's Help Centre