Comparing Twitter and LinkedIn for sharing personal content

Since the beginning of the year, I have been sharing more content on Twitter and LinkedIn. In many cases, I posted nearly the same content on both platforms, so I thought it’s a good idea to see how the performance differs. As of today, I have 1,086 followers on Twitter and 1,932 contacts/followers on LinkedIn. I chose the end of January to the end of February as the analysis period to make sure most of the engagement already happened.

Here is the data set that I put together in Google Sheets. Note, that for Twitter I only took into account the retweets, replies, and likes in order to have a fair comparison with the LinkedIn numbers, where only comments and likes are available. I know that the data set is not big enough for statistical analysis, but at least it gives a first impression of how the platforms perform against each other. I only included content that I posted on both platforms, knowing that this doesn’t cover the full picture.

Findings

These are the points that are recognizable:

1. I’m getting more impressions on Twitter although I have fewer followers
2. The engagement rate (engagement/impressions) is twice as high on LinkedIn
3. More discussion (comments) happened on LinkedIn

Takeaways

What the numbers show is that Twitter is a more established platform where it’s easier to appear in people’s feed. On LinkedIn it’s still pretty early for publishing to the news feed, so I can get a higher engagement rate. It doesn’t mean that one platform is better than the other, but it shows that the use cases are slightly different. I will definitely use both of them going forward, so if you want to follow what I write, you can find my profiles here and here.

What are your thoughts regarding these results? What do you think are the advantages of each platform?