What social media content gets businesses the most engagement?

By Chris Norton, Managing Director and Founder. The UK’s Number 1 Marketing Podcaster. Published 9 October 2026.

Your team posted every week last quarter on LinkedIn and Instagram, and the monthly report shows the same handful of likes, mostly from colleagues. Before the next budget round you have to decide whether to pay for team training to improve engagement or keep posting as now.

Short-form video, carousels and expert posts from named people earn businesses the most engagement right now. Sprout Social’s 2026 report puts the preferred length for short-form video at under 60 seconds. Sprinklr’s 2026 guide calls LinkedIn one of the strongest-performing platforms for B2B engagement and thought leadership. Getting those formats posted by the right people and answered well is a team skill, and our community management and engagement training teaches it in a half-day session.

Social media engagement for businesses means the actions people take on a post, such as comments, shares, saves, clicks and replies, as distinct from how many people simply saw it. This guide is for UK heads of marketing who hold a team training budget and want to know what to post before deciding whether training is worth paying for. We sell social media and community management training, so we have an interest in that decision, and we say below where training will not help.

We trained key senior personnel at Huthwaite International, a sales training business, in strategic social media management and thought leadership content marketing. The Huthwaite International social media case study reports 55 Tier 1 leads generated through stakeholder profiling and £100,000+ in business lead conversions. Those results came from senior people writing about what they know, for buyers they had named before they wrote a word.

Which content formats get the most engagement for UK businesses in 2026?

According to Sprout Social’s 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report, the preferred length for short-form video is under 60 seconds, with creator-style footage favoured over polished production. The same research (September 2025) finds carousels, or multi-image posts, especially popular in construction (34%) and real estate (31%). For business-to-business accounts, Sprinklr’s 2026 engagement guide says LinkedIn remains one of the strongest-performing platforms for B2B engagement and thought leadership. If you are still deciding what your content should do for the business, start with our guide to what content marketing is and what works for UK businesses.

UK platform audiences (Ofcom, December 2025) and the format the evidence favours on each

Ofcom’s From apps to AI search report (December 2025) found adults spend an average of four and a half hours online a day, up by 10 minutes on the previous year. Knowing where your own buyers spend that time tells you more than any global league table of formats.

Platform behaviour shifts faster than most content plans get reviewed, so check any format rule against your own results every quarter. Kian Scott-Loach, Head of Digital at Terrence Higgins Trust, said of Social Media Training: “We were impressed by their depth of knowledge in a rapidly changing environment.” Treat any format league table, including Sprout Social’s and Sprinklr’s, as a starting hypothesis for the people who post and reply to test.

Pick the two platforms where your buyers spend most time and run one format on each for a month.

Do posts from named experts beat posts from the brand account?

Posts from named experts can lift an organisation’s online influence, according to our Northumbria University case study, in which we trained 71 academics from six Research Peaks of Excellence to post as trusted voices between September 2023 and April 2024. The Northumbria University case study page reports average online influence up 59%, 43% of the academics improving how they use social media, and the biggest rise by peak at 148%, in Energy Materials and Systems. The page reports influence as a group average, with no per-post figures and no comparison with a brand account, so read it as evidence that trained experts gained standing online, which is the base engagement grows from.

Ofcom’s Online Nation report (December 2025) found LinkedIn users in the UK spend about 2 minutes a day there, so an expert post has to make one specific point fast. Sprinklr’s 2026 guide still names LinkedIn as one of the strongest platforms for B2B thought leadership, which makes a sharp expert post worth that brief window.

Name three to five people whose expertise buyers would follow, and plan each one’s first post around an opinion a competitor would not voice. If you work in a university, see our social media training for universities.

Can engagement-led content produce B2B leads as well as likes?

Thought leadership from senior staff can turn engagement into pipeline, according to our case studies for Huthwaite International and ENGIE UK, where we trained key senior personnel at Huthwaite and senior stakeholders from across ENGIE UK in strategic social media and thought leadership content. The Huthwaite International case study page reports 55 Tier 1 leads generated through stakeholder profiling and £100,000+ in business lead conversions. Our ENGIE UK case study page reports share of voice on social media increasing by 7.9%, and it gives no period or starting figure for that rise.

Stakeholder profiling, which the Huthwaite page names, means identifying the specific people you want to reach before you write anything for them. My view is that it did the heavy lifting because every post had a named reader, and a post with fifteen reactions, two of them from target accounts, does more for you than a viral one.

List twenty named target accounts before your next LinkedIn campaign, decide which senior person speaks to each, and track enquiries from those accounts. When you move from posts to direct outreach, read our guide on how to get B2B leads from LinkedIn messages without spam. If your sales cycle runs for months, look at our B2B social media training for long sales cycles.

How should you score which posts deserve more of your team’s time?

Score each post on six lines, from who posted it to whether it produced a business signal, using the engagement content scorecard below. Sprout Social’s 2026 report favours short-form video under 60 seconds, yet format research cannot tell you whether your own buyers responded. The scorecard gives each post nought, one or two points per line, to a maximum of twelve, so the totals show which people and formats deserve more effort.

Engagement content scorecard: six criteria, nought to two points each

A total of nine to twelve means do more of it, five to eight means fix the lowest-scoring line, and four or under means stop. Two of the six lines cover what happens after publishing, where many teams lose engagement they have already earned. Score the last quarter’s posts this week and share the top and bottom five with your director.

What should your team change over the next four weeks?

Build posting confidence before adding volume, which is the lesson from our seven-course programme for LSL Estate Agency Franchising, the business behind Your Move and Reeds Rains, delivered to UK branch teams from November 2023 to March 2024. The LSL case study page records 881 attendances, with about a quarter of attendees more confident posting and about one in five posting more, according to our Your Move case study. Because confidence and posting rose together in that programme, I would give any marketing team the skills and permission to post first, and only then ask for more posts.

In week one, run the scorecard over the last quarter’s posts on each main platform, list the top and bottom five, and name the experts whose opinions your buyers would follow. Leave frequency targets out, since asking staff to post more before they feel able tends to produce bland posts and then silence.

In week two, pick two formats per main platform, bearing in mind that Sprout Social’s 2026 report puts the preferred length for short-form video under 60 seconds. Ask each named expert to draft two posts, which marketing edits lightly while keeping the expert’s voice.

In week three, publish the drafts and name one person who owns comments on each platform, with an agreed response time and escalation route. Hold a short clinic for anyone not yet confident, using our free half-day social media course plan if you want to run it in house.

In week four, score the new posts against week one and keep anything scoring nine or more. Write down the lines where the team still scores low, because that list is your training brief. As a yardstick, the Department for Education’s Employer Skills Survey (July 2025) counts a skills gap where an employer judges an employee to lack full proficiency.

What does engagement training cost, and what does doing nothing cost?

From £1,200 for half a day is what Prohibition charges for community management and engagement training, for up to six people at your office or online, excluding VAT, according to the course page. The same course page lists a full day at £1,800 and works the half day out at £200 per head for a team of six. To compare that with the wider market, see our guide to what B2B marketing training courses cost per seat. Keeping posting as now adds nothing to the budget line, yet it keeps spending staff hours on posts that fall in the bottom band of the engagement content scorecard.

The Department for Education’s Employer Skills Survey (July 2025) found 59% of employers had provided training for staff in the last 12 months, down from 66% in 2017. The survey also found 63% of employees received training in 2024, up from 60% in 2022. Among PR practitioners, the CIPR‘s State of the Profession 2026 report found that AI usage has raced ahead of governance and training.

If replies are the weakest line on your scorecard, buy reply skills before content skills, and see what our half-day community management training for teams covers.

Where we are not the right fit

If you want someone to run your channels and post for you, a training day will not replace that headcount. If you need a guaranteed engagement rate, no trainer can promise one, and our case studies report outcomes with no guarantee attached.

Training also fades when nobody will own replies or measurement after the session. If you are a sole trader with one account and no team, the free half-day course plan will probably serve you better than a paid session. If you are unsure which side of the line you sit on, contact our training team for a straight answer.

Frequently asked questions

Does video get more engagement than images on LinkedIn?

None of our sources compares the two head to head, so test a short video from a named expert first, because short video has the strongest evidence behind it. Sprout Social’s 2026 report puts the preferred length for short-form video at under 60 seconds. Sprinklr’s 2026 guide calls LinkedIn one of the strongest-performing platforms for B2B thought leadership, so run the expert’s image post alongside and keep whichever scores higher.

How can a UK business increase social media engagement quickly?

Start with the replies, since they need no new content: name one person who owns comments and agree a response time. Then move effort from the brand account to two or three named experts with views your buyers want to hear. Ofcom’s From apps to AI search report (December 2025) found adults spend an average of four and a half hours online a day.

What B2B social media content ideas get the most engagement?

Expert opinion posts from senior people, written for named target buyers, are the strongest B2B idea in our evidence. Sprinklr’s 2026 guide names LinkedIn as one of the strongest-performing platforms for B2B engagement and thought leadership. The Huthwaite International case study page reports 55 Tier 1 leads generated through stakeholder profiling after senior staff were trained in thought leadership content.

Which social media platform has the biggest audience in the UK?

Ofcom’s From apps to AI search report (December 2025) found YouTube is used by 94% of adults. The same Ofcom report found Facebook and Messenger together reach 93% of adults, with WhatsApp at 90%. Audience size is only one input, so choose the platforms where your own buyers spend their time and test one format on each.

Is social media engagement training worth it for a marketing team?

Engagement training is worth paying for when the scorecard shows a skills gap, and wasted when nobody will own the work afterwards. In LSL Estate Agency Franchising’s programme, the case study page reports about a quarter of attendees more confident posting and about one in five posting more. Our community management and engagement training costs from £1,200 for half a day.

The posts your team writes next month

In LSL Estate Agency Franchising’s seven-course programme for Your Move and Reeds Rains branch teams, the case study records 881 attendances and about one in five attendees going on to post more. If next month’s calendar looks like last month’s, the scorecard will show whether the gap lies in the content or in the skills of the people posting it. Our resources page lists every guide we have published if you want more to read first. Talk to us about engagement training for your team before the next budget round.

Sources

• Sprout Social, 9 popular types of social media content to grow your brand, September 2025. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/types-of-social-media-content/. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
• Sprinklr, Social Media Engagement in 2026, February 2025. https://www.sprinklr.com/blog/social-media-engagement/. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
• Ofcom, Online Nation Report 2025, December 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/research-and-data/online-research/online-nation/2025/online-nations-report-2025.pdf?v=409837. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
• Ofcom, From apps to AI search, December 2025. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/media-use-and-attitudes/online-habits/from-apps-to-ai-search-how-the-uk-goes-online-in-2025. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
• Department for Education and Skills England, Employer Skills Survey, July 2025. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/employer-skills-survey/2024. Retrieved 9 October 2026.
• Chartered Institute of Public Relations, with Chalkstream, CIPR State of the Profession 2026, September 2026. https://cipr.co.uk/common/Uploaded%20files/Policy/State%20of%20Prof/CIPR_State_of_the_Profession_2026_ACCESSIBLE.pdf. Retrieved 9 October 2026.