LinkedIn Post Formats: Nine Options and One Rule to Choose

LinkedIn offers nine post formats: text, image (one or up to 20), video (one per post, up to 15 minutes), document (a PDF or slide file, up to 300 pages), poll (two to four options), celebration, event, article (125,000 characters) and newsletter. Pick one by the single action you want a reader to take in the feed: read, swipe, watch, vote or save. A reach ranking is the wrong reason.

The nine formats, with the limits LinkedIn documents

Every number below comes from LinkedIn's help pages, read on 12 September 2026. The action on each line is what the format asks of a reader who never leaves the feed.

• Text. Up to 3,000 characters, no native bold or italics, line breaks as the only layout tool. The feed hides everything after the first lines behind "see more", and the help page on posting gives no character count for that fold, so write the first line as a label for the whole post. The action is to read.
• Image. One photo, or up to 20 in one post, each under 5 MB, ratio between 3:1 and 4:5, not editable once posted. The crop rule is what most people learn after publishing; LinkedIn Image Post Dimensions: The Window, Not the Number covers it. The action is to look, then read the caption.
• Video. One video per post, 3 seconds (2 on mobile) to 15 minutes, any ratio from 1:2.4 to 2.4:1, optional captions and thumbnail. The action is to watch, and captions cover the reader on mute.
• Document. A PDF, PPT, PPTX, DOC or DOCX file, up to 100 MB and 300 pages, shown as pages to swipe. Viewers can download it as a PDF, and you cannot replace the file after posting, only its description. This is what creators call a carousel. The action is to swipe and, if the pages earn it, to save.
• Poll. A question of 140 characters at most, options of 30 characters each, two to four of them (five on iOS), running one day, three days, one week or two weeks. It cannot be edited once created, and you see who voted and how. The action is one tap.
• Celebration. A templated post for a milestone (a new position, a work anniversary), which LinkedIn's own guide lists as Celebrate an occasion. The action is to congratulate.
• Event. Creating an event ends in the share box, where you write a short post to promote it. The action is to join.
• Article. Long form, up to 125,000 characters, with its own URL. The action is to leave the feed and read a page.
• Newsletter. A series of articles that any member can create; after each edition, subscribers get push, in-app and email notifications. A company Page needs more than 150 followers and a record of original posts. The action is to subscribe once.

Two things that look like formats are not buttons. A pasted link becomes a preview card built from the destination page's tags, so a broken card gets fixed on your site and not in the composer, the whole point of LinkedIn Post Inspector: What It Fixes and What It Cannot. A repost, with or without your comment, is someone else's format shown again. The composer's job listing button belongs to hiring, not to content.

Why I would ignore every format ranking you find

The pages ranking for this query agree on the list and disagree on the verdict. A June 2024 guide on LinkedIn's publishing platform says video gets lower reach but more shares, that the ideal text post runs 1,800 to 2,100 characters and that a document should have about twelve slides. LinkedIn's nonprofit resource hub says videos between 30 and 60 seconds tend to perform better. Neither page shows the data behind its numbers. I read them as one author's habits, written in the imperative.

A ranking without a sample, a date and a definition of "performs" cannot be transferred to your account. Reach depends on who follows you, what you posted last month and what the feed is testing this quarter; LinkedIn's own page on the full-screen video feed says the feature "may not be available to all members at this time". A format that wins on one LinkedIn account is a container that happened to fit one author's material.

So name the action you want, pick the container built for it, respect its limits, and judge the post on whether that action happened: comments that quote a line, a poll that fills, a document that gets downloaded.

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A format that wins on one LinkedIn account is a container that happened to fit one author's material.

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The strongest case against my rule

Video is the one format LinkedIn is building a separate surface for. The same help page describes a full-screen vertical feed, a video tab and a video carousel that "features content based on the quality and relevance of existing videos on LinkedIn". That is distribution that does not start from your connections, and no other format has an equivalent shelf.

If your goal is reach beyond your network rather than an action from people who already follow you, and you can produce a vertical video that works with the sound off, I would change my advice and start with video. Two limits stay. The page says a video with a larger ratio "may be cropped on the sides as well as at the top and bottom" and a wider one "may be fitted to the screen", so only a vertical recording fills that surface as shot. And the page says "the video tab and carousel aren't currently available on the desktop site", so a desktop reader never sees that shelf.

One idea, three containers

Here is a fictional example. A one-person bookkeeping service wants to remind clients of the three receipts they forget every quarter: parking, software subscriptions and the meal on a client visit. The idea stays the same; the container decides what the reader does.

As a text post, the first line is the label: "The three receipts my clients forget every quarter." The three items follow on three short lines, so they sit above the fold on a phone, and what counts as proof for each comes after "see more". The whole post uses a few hundred of the 3,000 characters available. The action is to read, and the sign it worked is a comment naming a fourth receipt.

As a document post, page one carries the same label in large type, pages two to four take one receipt each with the proof to keep, and page five says where to send them. Export a PDF with every page the same size, since LinkedIn requires it, and remember that viewers can download the file. The action is to swipe and keep, and the check is that page one reads as a cover on a phone before anyone opens it.

As a poll, the question is "Which receipt do you forget most often?", 39 characters, the options are the three receipts, each under 30 characters, and the duration is one week. You will see who voted and how, which turns the poll into a list of people to write to. You cannot edit it once it runs, so read the options aloud before posting. Then be around when it goes live, the case made in Scheduled Post on LinkedIn: Be There When It Goes Live.

None of the three is the best format. They are three different asks, and the wrong one costs you the action you wanted.

What a tool must produce for each container

If something drafts or publishes for you, check which containers it can actually output: a same-size PDF for a document post, a question and options inside their caps for a poll, captions for a video. ReadyToPost is built to write and publish social posts, so evaluate it, or any tool, on the containers you use rather than on a demo of the text box.

Before your next post, write the reader's action in one word. If the word is "save", you are not writing a text post.

FAQ

Which LinkedIn post formats can be edited after publishing? The text of a post can be edited. A photo cannot be resized or edited after posting, a document file cannot be replaced (only its description can), and a poll cannot be edited once created. Publish a corrected post instead.