The hidden rules of LinkedIn formatting (and why they matter for reach)

Something I've been curious about: how many of you have noticed your LinkedIn posts performing differently based purely on how they're formatted — not the content itself?

I've been digging into this while building a social scheduling tool, and the formatting layer on LinkedIn turns out to have a much bigger effect on reach than I expected.

A few things that surprised me:

Posts with external links in the body consistently underperform the same post with the link moved to the first comment. The algorithm appears to treat outbound links as an exit signal. Line breaks that look correct in the editor often collapse on mobile — not a display glitch, just how LinkedIn renders them on different clients. The "see more" cutoff is shorter on mobile (~210 chars) than desktop, so hooks that work on one don't always land on the other.

I wrote up the full breakdown here: https://xreplyai.com/blog/how-to-format-text-in-linkedin-posts?utm_source=producthunt&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=blog-2026-05-01

Curious whether others who post on LinkedIn consistently have noticed the link suppression pattern — or found a workaround that doesn't involve putting everything in comments.

How do you handle formatting when you're cross-posting content from other platforms to LinkedIn?