Methodology Note: Identifying and Sampling Content That Resonates With Business Audiences

Our research analyzed the headlines of articles that resonated on LinkedIn. We specifically analyzed the headline phrases, words, numbers, structures and formats that gained the most LinkedIn shares. Our research is based on the assumption that the more LinkedIn shares an article receives, the more it resonates with a business audience or in a business context.

LinkedIn is a professional work network so it seems reasonable to assume that the majority of content shared on the network will be relevant to a business audience or at least to an audience interested in work based content whether it is career advice or industry news and trends. This approach allowed us to use LinkedIn as a proxy for a B2B audience.

We started with the same sample of over 100 million posts, published between March and May 2017, that we used for our previous headline research. From this sample we analyzed the top 1,000 phrases, words, formats and numbers that were the most shared on LinkedIn. We then calculated the average shares for each phrase, word or number ensuring that there were a minimum of 100 unique domains in each sample.

We thought initially that we could simply take the 10 million posts from this sample that had the most LinkedIn shares and use this as a test sample. However, only 7 million articles had at least one LinkedIn share. Thus 93% of the 100 million posts in our original sample were not business content or at least didn’t resonate enough in a business context for people to share it on LinkedIn. Therefore whilst we looked at 100 million posts overall, only 7 million had LinkedIn shares. This meant we needed a larger sample, so we looked at all articles published between January and May 2017 that had at least 1 LinkedIn share. This gave us a sample of over 10 million articles.

To analyze the average shares of different length headlines (words and characters) we decided to only include headline lengths where we had at least 30,000 articles and where every article had at least 1 LinkedIn share. Our broad assumption was that a post has to be shared at least once on LinkedIn to be of interest to a business audience, if an article received no LinkedIn shares, we didn’t include it in our sample. The final sample sizes for each headline length varied, for example, there were 495,000 posts with 9 words in the headline but only 34,000 posts in our with 19 words in the headline. For articles shared on LinkedIn, headline lengths of between 8 and 11 were the most commonly published in the period we analysed.

As you would expect as you increased the length of phrases analysed the number of headlines in each sample reduced. The samples for three-word phrases were the lowest, typically 700 to 800 articles. We excluded any three-word headline phrases where we had less than 500 articles.