Are you wondering the best time to post on LinkedIn? You’ve come to the right place.
What was once a platform dedicated solely to job-hunting has now become a hub for tips and tricks, professional networking, personal brand growth, and even storytelling – although we’re still not sure what proposing to your GF has to do with B2B sales (iykyk).
Like on any other social media platform, traffic plays a huge role in engagement, so figuring out the best time to post to LinkedIn could be the catalyst for your success. While we can’t hand you a prescription for exactly when to post to skyrocket your social media success, there are a few best practice rules to be aware of.
Why posting time matters on LinkedIn
Posting time has a bigger bearing on LinkedIn post performance than you might think. The aim of creating content is for it to be seen by people who will take a specific action, and there’s no point chasing them down if they aren’t online.
Here’s why you need to consider the best times to post on LinkedIn:
Benefit 1. Get more eyes on your content
By posting during high-traffic times, you’ll increase your chances of being seen by a broad audience and attracting new people. If your content isn’t bang-on, it might reduce your engagement rate, as you’ll be reaching more people who are less likely to interact. However, if you’re consistently creating high-quality content, you’ll open yourself up to more eyes and more engagement.
Whether you’re just starting out, or have 150,000 followers like LinkedIn copywriter Matt Barker, knowing the best time to post on LinkedIn is invaluable for encouraging engagement.
Benefit 2. Put your content in front of the right people
Want to hit your audience where it counts on LinkedIn? Post great content, and better yet, do it when they’re online! This tip is pretty straightforward – if people are online when new content is posted, they’re more likely to interact with it, as it will appear in their feeds.
Benefit 3. Be favored by LinkedIn’s algorithm
User activity is a key component of LinkedIn’s algorithm. LinkedIn determines how much it will push out your post to new users through its ‘Suggested posts’ feature by monitoring the engagement it receives within the first few hours of it being posted.
If your followers interact with it, LinkedIn gives it an invisible tick and seeds it out to new users based on their profile data, interests, and behavior. By posting when your followers are online, you’re feeding LinkedIn’s algorithm and increasing your chances of being seen.
When is the best time to post on LinkedIn?
While there’s no exact time of day that will prove effective for every creator, on LinkedIn, some windows are more likely to result in engagement than others. Above all, LinkedIn is a professional platform, so the best days and times to post to LinkedIn are influenced by the traditional 9 to 5, Monday to Friday work week.
Looking for advice on when to post on other social media channels? Dive into our complete platform-by-platform guide to the best times to post on social media.
Best times to post on LinkedIn
Looking for the best time of day to post on LinkedIn?
Because of the nature of LinkedIn content, it’s probably no surprise that the most popular times are around work hours – specifically, they’re well-timed with before work, lunch break, and after work scroll times.
- 9am-10am: This is a good time to post on LinkedIn as you’ll capture people as they start work for the day. They might be scrolling to get some inspiration for the day, see what people in their network are up to, or amplify their company’s content.
- 12pm-1pm: Whether they’re eating at their desk or checking LinkedIn on their phone as they take their break, lunch is another great time slot for LinkedIn engagement.
- 4pm-5pm: As the day winds down, people are logging onto LinkedIn – perhaps for one last scroll before their commute home, or to catch up with what they’ve missed during the day.
Best days to post on LinkedIn
Wondering the best days and times to post on LinkedIn?
Weekdays are undoubtedly the best days to post on LinkedIn, as once again, that’s when your audience will be most active. Between Monday to Friday, people are at their office jobs and have more reason (and perhaps some spare time on their coffee breaks!) to scroll through a business-driven platform like LinkedIn.
Within this five-day span, some days indicate better engagement than others. According to data collected by LinkedIn, the middle of the week (Tuesdays to Thursdays) performs better than Mondays and Fridays.
There are a few reasons this might be the case:
- Four-day work week trends: Many businesses are joining the growing movement towards a four-day work week, where 36+ hours of work are compressed into four days for better work-life balance and increased in-office productivity. Mondays and Fridays are popular days off as they permit a 3-day weekend, so it makes sense that some users may be less active on LinkedIn on these days.
- Busy Monday schedules: Whether you work a traditional week or not, Mondays are always manic! This means less time to flick through the latest job updates and think pieces on LinkedIn, and more time stuck in meetings or frantically replying to emails.
- Less focus on work by Friday: By the time Friday rolls around, most of us are exhausted and ready for the weekend – which often means focusing on anything but work. So, it’s only natural that engagement starts to drop off by Friday, especially as LinkedIn is so centered around professional content.
Weekends tend to be dry on LinkedIn, as it’s mainly used for networking, job searching, and professional brand-building. We don’t know about you, but we can certainly think of better things to do with our weekends than scrolling LinkedIn! This doesn’t mean your strategy has to be devoid of weekend posts, but we recommend monitoring the performance of your uploads and adjusting your content calendar accordingly.
What affects the best time to post on LinkedIn?
Although we can give you insight into the most popular times to visit LinkedIn, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Your best time to post will be affected by several variables.
- Your industry or niche: If you post content about a specific industry or niche, that might entail user behavior that could affect your best times to post. For instance, someone whose content is about being a working mom might attract other parents, and these people could be more likely to scroll the platform during bathtime or when they’re up for a middle-of-the-night feed. Early riser industries like construction often have earlier lunchtimes, so this might mean you need to schedule content for earlier in the day to capture people when they’re active.
Content about parenting, like this post from Jess Ringgenberg, might demand a different LinkedIn posting time to content about construction.
- Your unique audience’s behavior: One of the most accurate ways to predict your best time to post to LinkedIn is using actual audience data. This way, you can figure out how people who are interested in your content use the platform, and tailor your posting times around their activity.
How to find the best time to post on LinkedIn
The only surefire way to find the perfect posting times for your personal or business account is to explore your analytics. This will give you a clearer picture of when your followers are online, and when they are most likely to engage with your posts.
Finding your best time to post with LinkedIn Analytics
LinkedIn’s inbuilt Analytics tool can give you preliminary insights into your audience’s behavior, but you’ll need to synthesize that data to find the best times to post. There’s no button in the back-end of LinkedIn that simply shows when your followers are online – you’re going to have to work for it.
The most useful information you can glean from LinkedIn Analytics is your followers’ locations. This will help you navigate time zones and, if your audience is international, find sweet spots when the highest number of users will be online.
You can use LinkedIn’s built-in analytics to find out where your users are located, and configure the best times to post on LinkedIn from there.
Follow these steps to find where your followers are located from a business profile:
1. Navigate to your business page on LinkedIn by clicking your profile picture and then selecting your company from the drop-down.
2. In the sidebar of your page, click ‘Analytics.’
3. You’ll see sections like ‘Content’, ‘Visitors’, and ‘Followers’. Click on ‘Followers’ (or ‘Follower highlights’ in the LinkedIn app). You can also select ‘Visitors’ if you want to see when your page viewers (not just the users who follow you) are online.
4. Scroll down to the ‘Follower demographics’ selection and click on the drop-down menu. Select ‘Location’.
5. You’ll be presented with a list of your followers’ locations in descending order with the most popular location first.
Follow these simple steps to figure out where your followers are located for your business page – and use this info to influence your best time to post on LinkedIn.
If you want to see engagement on your personal profile, do the following:
1. Click your profile picture and then ‘View profile’.
2. Scroll to the ‘Analytics’ section and select ‘Show all analytics’.
3. Click on your followers.
4. Scroll down to ‘Top demographics’ and click the drop-down to filter by location.
Want to determine the best time to post to LinkedIn from your personal profile? These steps lay it all out.
Plann Tip: We recommend collecting the top 3-4 time zones and seeing if there are any overlapping ‘hotspots’ throughout the day. Then, go ham with the testing to figure out what suits your audience best. Be sure to trial each time zone for a few weeks so other variables, like day of the week and content type, are as controlled as possible.
Finding your best time to post using Plann
Enjoy more data, better trend reporting, and advanced metrics in one easy-to-use interface with Plann’s LinkedIn analytics tools. Plann has a built-in best time to post feature that analyzes your post performance and uses this to generate accurate recommendations. And, that’s not all – there are tonnes of different metrics to explore within Plann that will help you refine your content strategy, get to know your audience, and accelerate your engagement.
Schedule your LinkedIn content at the perfect time with Plann
Plann’s intuitive social media scheduling and analysis tools mean you can spend less time worrying about the nitty-gritty – like the best time to post – and focus more on creating authentic, engaging content. Other features like hashtag analysis, AI-generated captions, cross-posting, and easy grid previews will make refining your presence on LinkedIn (and your other channels!) a simple task.
Go on, and redeem your 7-day free trial of Plann Plus. If you don’t like it, keep using Plann for free!
