How to keep a LinkedIn conversation going

Questions get answers. Full stops get read.

Once a prospect replies, everything rides on your answer. In real conversations, prospects wrote back to 52% of answers with a question in them. Answers without one: 29%.

It held for almost everyone answering. In 13 of the 14 inboxes with enough of both, answers with a question got written back to more.

And it isn’t only the obvious question. Leave out every answer that proposed a time, and it’s still 53% against 28%.

Conversations that stay open are the ones that book. Across every answer, 10.8% of those with a question ended in a meeting, against 3.9% of the rest.

Why answers end on a full stop

78% of answers asked nothing. They asked about pricing, you answered about pricing. Job done. It feels thorough. It feels polite. The ball’s in their court.

But a statement asks nothing of them. To write back, they’d have to invent the next move, and nobody does extra work for a stranger on LinkedIn. A question hands them the next move. And leaving a question hanging feels rude, so most people answer it.

A full stop is a very polite way to end a conversation you wanted to keep.

What to do today

• Answer, then ask. Give them what they asked for, then hand them the next move.
• One question is enough. Two did no better than one: 53% against 52%.
• Make it easy to answer. Pick a question they can answer in one line.
• Ask even after a “thanks”. When the reply was just thanks, 55% wrote back to a question, against 31% without one. More in how to reply when a prospect just says thanks.