On LinkedIn, timing is everything. Outside of LinkedIn, sometimes arriving late to a social event could gain you more attention. For some people, this is how they make an impact. However, if you try this same approach with your LinkedIn posts, you are going to miss out on valuable engagement. Of course, there are many factors that could affect the best times to post on LinkedIn. By the end of this article, you will have the tools to find these times for your posts.
While there are times that work better overall, they will not apply to everyone. It’s mostly up to you to find out when your audience is more likely to engage. That might sound like empty advice but there are ways to help you figure this out quickly and give you an idea of where to start.
The Content You Are Posting
It probably comes as no surprise that the content you are posting is an extremely important factor. Knowing what type of content your audience responds to is half of the battle when it comes to increasing engagement on LinkedIn. You might see people in your professional network post in the early morning and get high levels of engagement while your posts are continually overlooked. That is because when you are posting is only part of the equation. Without educational, relatable and entertaining content, your audience is going to get pretty bored of your posts pretty quick, no matter when you are posting.
The Workday
Even if you are figuring out when it is best to post for your audience, there are some analytics to help give you a starting point. Currently, the days of the week that see the most engagement on LinkedIn are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. When you think about it, it does make sense. Mondays, we are making sure we have all our ducks in a row for the rest of the week and Friday, we are mostly focused on getting through the day so we can enjoy the weekend. For this reason, Wednesday seems to be the number one favourite on LinkedIn at the moment.
Natural breaks in the day are also something you want to be paying attention to. People who use LinkedIn frequently are likely to check their feeds first thing in the morning before diving into their work for the day. So, posting in the early morning will make it much more likely that your posts will receive high engagement. As well as this, generally, most of us take our lunch breaks between 12 pm and 2 pm so that is a prime window in the day to post on LinkedIn. If you follow the same formula then I am sure you can already guess that from 5 pm onwards on any day is when engagement begins to drop drastically. Posting on the weekend is likely to be a waste of your time and content so it’s best to keep things to weekdays for now.
Time Zones
The factor of time zones is when the rules start to differ depending on individual businesses. If you are considered a regional, national or global business then you will need to take time zones into consideration. This is a good time to remind you that you are not always posting in time with your business hours. You are posting when you know your audience is going to be the most active and more likely to engage with your content.
Some people try posting multiple times throughout the day so that they have a better chance of hitting their audience during their prime activity time. The LinkedIn algorithm is going to swallow your posts if you do this. The platform likes to make sure that people have a varied selection of content to view. So, posting multiple times a day is only going to work against you. LinkedIn will not push your posts out to your audience and it will destroy any engagement your initial post of the day was building.
Post Frequency
So, how many times a day should you be posting? What is the magic number that guarantees your content will appear in your audience’s LinkedIn feed? Ideally, you should be aiming to post on LinkedIn once a day from Monday to Friday. At the very least, you should be posting at least twice during the workweek but sharing one post a day makes it much more likely that you will increase your engagement.
At the end of the day, the most important factor you need to be considering is your specific audience. Once you understand them, you will know exactly what time of day you need to post to achieve maximum engagement. Use the points in this article as a starting point for when you should post on LinkedIn. Analyse the levels of engagement you are receiving and then adjust for your specific audience.
In Summary…
- Avoid posting multiple times a day
- Keep your posts to Monday through Friday
- Try to post once a day during this time
- Early mornings or lunchtime are prime times to post
- Pay attention to your audience
Maverrik has loads of great articles filled with vital tips on how to increase your engagement on LinkedIn. So, once you feel confident knowing when to post, check out those articles to get a better idea of what you should be posting.
