Torn between posting an image, a video, or a carousel? The data settles it — and it isn't close.
In short
→ For reach: the carousel crushes everything. 1,410 median impressions, vs. 569–622 for every other format. That's 2.3× more people reached than with a text-only post. → For direct engagement (likes, comments): video and carousel lead, text-only trails far behind. → Across every metric: visual beats text. Text-only is the lowest-performing format.
Reach: carousel is king
Across the subset of posts where impression data is available (438,413 posts analyzed):
| Format | Median impressions | |---|---| | Carousel | 1,410 | | Text-only | 622 | | Image | 569 | | Video | 551 |
The carousel is the only format with a median reach above 1,000. Why? It combines two scarce resources: it keeps readers engaged through the swipe (dwell time) and triggers the save reflex — two signals the algorithm actively rewards. The tradeoff is production time, which is exactly what deters most creators from making them. That's your edge.
Direct engagement: video and carousel out front
On a fresher dataset (359,000 posts, June 2026), here are the median likes per format:
| Format | Median likes | Average comments | |---|---|---| | Video | 26 | 27 | | Carousel | 24 | 28 | | Image | 20 | 26 | | Text-only | 11 | 14 |
The verdict is consistent: text-only posts get 2× fewer median likes than video. The carousel combines strong engagement and the best reach — it's the most complete format when you want to maximize your odds.
Note: video has the highest average likes, but that gap narrows sharply once you remove the few viral outliers. At the median, video and carousel are neck and neck.
What this means for your content calendar
- You want reach (awareness, new audience) → prioritize the carousel.
- You want conversation → carousel or video (both strong on comments).
- You're posting text-only → make it long and well-structured to compensate (longer posts have a higher median — see ideal post length on LinkedIn).
- Don't bet everything on a "pretty quote" image: it's middle-of-the-pack — not bad, not remarkable.
If you're posting carousels, AI Visuals in LinkPost generates them from your text in seconds. Before you publish anything, the free post analyzer tells you whether your format and structure hit the right signals. Full methodology breakdown is in the study.
Data: median impressions from the 438,413-post study; median likes measured in June 2026 on 359,000 posts. Observational correlations — correlation ≠ causation, sample bias may apply. Differences between the two datasets reflect different windows and metrics (reach vs. likes), not a contradiction.
About the author
Yannis Haismann
Co-founder of LinkPost
Yannis writes about LinkedIn content creation, virality prediction and the algorithm. He builds LinkPost, calibrated on more than a million analyzed posts.
See the algorithm studyFree to start · predict virality before you publish
