Since it’s launch in 2002, LinkedIn has evolved from being — just a job searching, resume flaunting platform to a brand-building haven.
It is a great place for B2B and B2C marketers to promote their content and build strong connections.
Now with the latest linkedIn features like native video feed, robust targeting tools, and the new stories feature — nothing like corporate stories — small businesses and agencies have good resources for engagement with the audience on LinkedIn.
Statistics say, 91 percent of executives rate LinkedIn as their first choice for professionally relevant content.
But with over 300 million monthly active users, it is also true that traffic on the platform can keep your content out of the spotlight from your audience.
So, one of the factors that can help you to get maximum engagement is finding out the best time to post on LinkedIn.
To drive conversation and earn better engagement, it is important to post while your audience is online.
But finding the best time to post on LinkedIn can be a bit tricky business. So we have gathered some data-backed facts and tips to help you in your quest.
When is the average best time to post on LinkedIn?
In our recent studies on:
We have found that it is rather more suitable to test and find your own data than sticking to a fixed template of best times.
But the general guidelines can be a good start in the course of testing for your personal best time to post. There are fair chances that these fixed times can work wonders for your brand on LinkedIn.
So before we move on to find your personal best time to post on LinkedIn. Let’s check out these stats from popular social media marketing companies suggesting when brands should post on LinkedIn.
- Oberlo suggests the time frame between 10 AM — 11 AM on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday as the best choice.
- Quintly favors posting between multiple time frames; 7–8 AM, 12 PM, and 5–6 PM.
- Hubspot favors the time between 10 a.m. to noon and Wednesday as the best day to Post.
- SproutSocial claims that Wednesday from 8–10 AM and noon, Thursday at 9 AM. and 1–2 PM, and Friday at 9 AM are the best times for LinkedIn.
- thebalancesmb put its bets on 7–8 AM and 5–6 PM time frame.
- Buffer suggests the time frame between 7–8:30 AM and 5–6 PM on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
What are the best and worst times to post on LinkedIn?
In a nutshell, based on all the data collected by multiple social media management companies we can say that It is always safe to post on LinkedIn during:
- Work-Hours, 10 A.M to 6 P.M. — Interaction with LinkedIn has been seen in the first half of the office hours when people cruise through the network to look for new research, opinions, inspiration, before indulging in their own work.
- Office Commute hour, 7 A.M to 9 A.M and 6 P.M to 8 P.M — Well, that’s not surprising, people turn to see their LinkedIn feed while traveling to work in the early morning or winding up their workday and coming back home.
Also, the worst times to post on LinkedIn are:
- Weekends are the worst days to post on LinkedIn. The majority of your audience will be out, socializing with the real world, or spending time with their families. So it is important to schedule your posts for weekdays mostly.
- Monday showed very little engagement as compared to other weekdays. It makes sense that due to catch-up and weekly-plan meetings on Monday, people would hardly get the time to check their feeds.
- Outside of business hours. Most of the people tend to switch from professional social media platforms to more personal ones after work hours.
These time frames are a great jumping-off point for any Business or brand profile to post on LinkedIn. Use them yourself to find out if you can get any meaningful engagement.
How to find your best time to post on LinkedIn?
So now that we are all equipped with the average best times to post on LinkedIn that you can use to strengthen your LinkedIn marketing strategy, it is time to find the best time to post specifically for your LinkedIn profile.
The best way to find your personal best time, as we are saying from the start, is to analyze your personal data. This is true for any social media platform. Just like Facebook analytics and Twitter Analytics, there is LinkedIn analytics too.
LinkedIn analytics helps you monitor deeper insights about your LinkedIn profile, but apart from knowing what it does, it is also crucial to know how we can really use this amazing feature effectively.
So we have planned a 4 Step experiment that you can carry out to find the best time to post on LinkedIn.
Don’t worry. The following steps will also inform you about the working of every feature in LinkedIn analytics.
Let’s get started.
Step 1: Select multiple time-frames to post on LinkedIn
To make a strong policy around posting on LinkedIn, we have to first test every possibility of the best time slots throughout the day across the whole month.
First thing first, breakdown your experiments over a period of one month. Each day of this month, post your content in the morning, noon, and evening at a specific set of times.
It might as well be a good time to use the above mentioned average best times.
Say, we breakdown our time slots, for LinkedIn, in 4 four parts:
- 7–8 A.M.
- 10–12 A.M.
- 5–6 P.M.
- And any evening slot after working hours — to see if your brand can burst out the old LinkedIn myths.
Now, posting on this many time slots seems to be a tedious job and that is where a scheduling tool such as SocialPilot comes to your aid.
Step 2: Use a LinkedIn Scheduling tool to post on selected time-frames
SocialPilot is a social media scheduling and management tool that lets you schedule your posts way ahead and automatically posts them on the time and date that you have chosen without any error.
So this automatic scheduling and posting tool will help you in experimenting with different time slots without any hassle. All you have to do is select multiple time slots for every day of a month in its content planner and your created posts will be published on LinkedIn automatically.
After a month of experimenting with different time slots, you can go back and check your data to see which time and day generated you the most engagement. That is where the third, and the most significant step comes in.
Step 3: Dig into your LinkedIn analytics page to assess the performance
The analytics section gives insight into the performance of your LinkedIn Page with rich analytics that displays trends across metrics and time periods.
LinkedIn analytics also provides rich insights on audiences’ demographics with the filter of job function, seniority, and company size.
But for this blog, we will only cover the “Update” section of the LinkedIn analytics Page, which will help you recognize the impression, click-rates, and other engagement metrics received on your posts.
You will see the “Analytics” button on the top of your LinkedIn profile page. Clicking on it will open up a drop-down showing you three broad categories: Visitors; Update; and followers. Clicking on “Updates” will lead you to the dashboard showing an overview of LinkedIn Update analytics.
Now the LinkedIn analytics Update page is divided further into 3 parts.
First, you will see the update highlight section that shows you general data of the previous 30 days of likes, comments, and reactions you have received on your experiment.
Second, Under the Update metrics section, you can get aggregated engagement metrics over the period of time. In the top bar, you can choose how far back you want to see the activity data of your posts.
Also, you can select the type of engagement metric, and based on that metric the data will be represented.
After selecting the time period and the metrics, hover above the graphical representation to see the exact percentage of engagement you have got on the organic and sponsored post on a particular day.
So using the Update metrics will give you fair information to help you choose the best days to post on LinkedIn.
The third section, Update engagement, gives you a plethora of engagement metrics information in a tabular form, for each individual post.
You also get the “Time range” filter here to choose how far back you want to see the activity data of your individual posts.
With the help of this section, you can find out the best times to post for your brand.
Step 4: Jot down the data in the spreadsheet
Now you have the means to find out the best time and day to post. But here’s one catch. The “Update engagement” section does not show you a fixed time of posted content.
So how would you get the best time to post?
I’d suggest organizing down your data, time, and day, in a spreadsheet and later going back to it to compare what day and time brought you the most engagement.
Since you would already have the best day information with you, it won’t take much effort to just probe the times of the posts done on that day.
By organizing your data this way, you will be able to compare the average engagement gotten by the morning, noon, and evening posts. There may be multiple times that bring you good engagement.
After that keep using the scheduling tool regularly to post on your best times.
Wrapping it up
So now you know, with LinkedIn’s ever-growing possibilities how important it is to post your content when your audience connects maximum with your profile.
Also, don’t forget that posting on the best times is just one factor to get you in the spotlight. Consider it more as a chance, a chance to show the high-quality content you have tailored. In the end, it all comes to that — creating quality content for your audience.
Don’t forget to use social media management tools like SocialPilot to schedule your social media posts. Not only LinkedIn, but it will also help you simplify your marketing efforts on every social media platform that you can count.
Happy posting!
Originally published at https://www.socialpilot.co.
