Long-form posts are the worst format for growing dev audience on LinkedIn

A staff engineer with 15 years of experience told me something I hear across developer circles all the time:

"When I put out long-form content that's complete, with nuance, and covers every single edge case, it doesn't perform. So what's the point?"

And that's understandable. Content creation is a time-consuming process with all the writing, recording, and diagramming.

After all, in a sea of AI slop, you'd expect original thoughts and detailed content to stand out.

An AI agent can't replicate the context and the edge cases that only you know as an engineer. This is what LinkedIn says it wants as well, but it seems like it asks for one thing and then rewards another.

But after analyzing more than 2,000 posts that we've done for developers, here is what the data tells us: long-form explainer posts are the worst format for growing your audience on LinkedIn.

What I mean by long-form

• Include every edge case. They're written for completeness, not attention. Think about the content you'd read in a textbook, not social media.
• Paragraphs are long and chunky. Each paragraph is four sentences or more, with no clear separation of thoughts.
• Technical accuracy is the only goal. The content is technically accurate, and that's about it.

What the data shows

We compared explainer posts against what we call breakout formats: formats that consistently reached more than 30% of a page's audience. The data comes from a page with about 100K followers.

They start off the same

The first hours decide a lot, and hour 1 matters most. For the first three hours, explainers and breakout formats look almost identical in terms of acceleration and reach.

Hour 3 is the cliff

Around hour 3, LinkedIn shifts distribution from your followers to new audiences. Breakout formats keep accelerating. Explainers fall off sharply. By the end, breakout formats had a median of about 38K members reached, and explainers about 17K.

And those additional 21K members almost always came from a colder audience.

They fail with a cold audience

If you're looking at this and thinking, "17K isn't really that bad of a reach," you'd be right. Especially for a brand page, many companies would be more than happy with 17K members reached per post.

But the vast majority of those members are current followers of the page, not new people. Your followers will put up with long-form. A cold audience that owes you nothing won't, and out-of-network reach is what grows your following.

They never recover

Some posts fall off after 3 hours and pick up again 24 hours later. In our testing, explainers never did. Even when the post was shown to a new slice of cold audience, it didn't resonate.

The Bottom Line

If your goal is to grow your audience, I recommend leaning more toward resources, listicles, and infographics. These are native to LinkedIn and perform significantly better than long-form posts for out-of-network reach.

In the next few posts, I will be going over the formats to use to optimize your content for growth.

This finding comes from our "State of Developer Marketing on LinkedIn" report. I will be going over the rest of the findings in the next few posts.