The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn for Maximum Engagement | WordStream

LinkedIn is a massive platform that keeps on growing year after year. As the user base expands, there are more opportunities for industry niches, rising star influencers, and must-follow business accounts.

But that also means more engaging content competes for attention from users and LinkedIn’s algorithm. Of course, you’ll need to be on top of things like content quality and publishing frequency. But there’s another logistical concern to consider: What’s the best time to post on LinkedIn to be maximally competitive?

Here, we’re covering everything you need to know about when to post on LinkedIn. Plus, we’ll walk you through how to check your analytics. That way, you can keep refining your schedule once you know the best and worst times to engage your own audience on LinkedIn.

Contents

Why does it matter when you post on LinkedIn?

The time you post on LinkedIn impacts how your post is sorted, coded, and amplified by the platform’s algorithm. So, posting at the right times means a better chance your content gets in front of more people.

When you sign into your LinkedIn page, your feed is automatically sorted by “top” posts, as opposed to a chronological order of the most recent.

LinkedIn users can switch manually to the most recent if they choose to do that. But they’d have to do it every single time they log in. That’s because the platform wants to serve the posts identified as “top” by the algorithm first. Since most people won’t go through that trouble, “top” posts are seen the most.

Here’s my view, as an example.

The top post is liked by Allen Finn, a marketer who previously wrote for the WordStream blog and regularly posts on LinkedIn (also relevant here is the fact that I’m married to him).

The actual content is shared by Emily Kramer, who runs the educational newsletter and advising program for marketers MKT1. She also has nearly 35,000 followers on LinkedIn, where she regularly shares this type of deep-diving, insightful content.

My experience with LinkedIn here tells us a lot about how the algorithm works. For example, the LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes:

• Accounts that you regularly interact with or are closely connected with: This includes accounts you engage with and follow.
• Accounts that other profiles comparable to yours interact with: Profiles comparable to yours may have the same industry experience, similar companies, close job titles, or even matching keywords in your bios.
• Posts with high engagement, especially in the form of substantive comments: The key word here is substantive. Those posts asking for a single emoji “vote”? LinkedIn is ruling these out.
• Posts with high-quality content: This means no spam or spam-like text or images, no clickbait with a million lines of only one or two words to entice a “see more” click.

If you’re wondering what spam is, here’s how LinkedIn detects it.

According to LinkedIn, this is the model for spam detection.

So what does this have to do with the timing of your LinkedIn posts, you might be wondering?

The answer is all about engagement. The faster you can get engagement on a post, the more likely the algorithm will prioritize your post for more users. Then, the flywheel kicks in because more people will engage with your post, and the algorithm will show it to even more people.

So, timing your post for the most early engagement is key to getting more overall engagement. Here’s how to do it.

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What’s the best time to post on LinkedIn overall?

Buffer analyzed 1 million posts sent through its social media scheduling platform to determine the best time to post on LinkedIn. According to the data, it’s best to post on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. in your local time zone. And it’s slightly better to post between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Buffer data shows that the best time to post on LinkedIn is 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays

One thing to keep in mind here is that Buffer’s data only accounts for pre-scheduled posts through the platform, which doesn’t allow you to tag other LinkedIn accounts. Tagging other users can be a big source of engagement.

Still, Buffer’s data is an excellent starting place for guidance on the best time to post on LinkedIn if you have no other data. When you get started, prioritize posting on LinkedIn on weekdays during typical work hours, focusing on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when possible.

What is the best time to post on LinkedIn for your industry?

The most important thing to keep in mind when posting on LinkedIn is when your audience is online. You want to share your content at the moment it’s most likely to elicit engagement—meaning lots of quality comments, reshares, and reactions.

Whether you’re growing a business account or your own personal brand, the industry you’re targeting matters. Social Pilot analyzed the engagement for more than 50,000 LinkedIn accounts to determine the best times to post on LinkedIn to reach people in your sector.

According to the data, here are the best times to post on LinkedIn for your industry:

Data from Social Pilot’s study of LinkedIn habits.

Overall, these ideal times align with the general advice to post during typical office hours on weekdays, prioritizing Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. But there are some specifics to pay attention to. For instance, manufacturing skews slightly earlier, perhaps due to the influence of early job site hours. And marketing has a bigger window, three days with morning hours. The bottom line is to check the top times to post for your industry and try these out.

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What are the best days to post on LinkedIn?

Now, there isn’t a general consensus here.

According to Buffer, Thursday is the best day to post on LinkedIn because it yields the most engagement. This is closely followed by Wednesday and Tuesday, which isn’t a surprise if you take a look at the best days by industry. Many of them include one or both days.

In mid-2024, the social media management platform Hootsuite analyzed 1 million social media posts and determined that posts on Tuesday received the most engagement. This tracks with the data from multiple studies that point toward Tuesday as a peak day for most industries. At the same time, Thursday appears regularly, too.

Our take: Keep prioritizing posts on both Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you’re able to share quality content multiple times a week, that will be better for growing your following and generating engagement, anyway.

What are the worst days to post on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn has over 1 billion users, with more than 250 million of these individuals in the United States. The top industries on the platform include technology, financial services, and higher education. These are industries with Monday-to-Friday job schedules, most often with typical office hours.

With this majority in mind, it’s no wonder that the slow days on LinkedIn are Saturday and Sunday. Buffer’s research backs that up, noting a considerable drop in engagement for any posts on those days.

While some influencers on the platform maintain their activity level every day, the data suggests that it isn’t moving the needle for brand accounts. So feel free to avoid posting on the weekend and save your best material for mid-week.

How do you find the best and worst times to post on LinkedIn for your audience?

The guidance above is valuable for setting your schedule and cadence for posting on LinkedIn. But to keep growing your account, you need to get more specific with the better, more accurate data you have access to.

That means reviewing your posts’ performance and your audience’s behaviors to determine the best and worst times to post on LinkedIn. Here’s how.

1. First, on your company page, click on the analytics tab from the left-hand menu.
2. Then, select “Content” from the Analytics menu. You should also set a date range, whether it’s by month, quarter, or a look at the last year.
3. On the Content page, you will see a drop-down option to look at impressions, members reached, clicks, comments, reactions, reposts, and engagement rates. Once you select a metric to focus on, you’ll see a visualization. If you scroll down, you’ll also be able to look at the performance metrics for each individual post.
4. Take a look at patterns with days of the week. Unfortunately, LinkedIn won’t add in the time for each post. But you can export the data and add this yourself to identify patterns (specifically, the times that posts tend to perform well and the times when they don’t).
5. Use this data to inform your posting schedule, and keep checking on it to refine your plan and grow your account.

TL;DR: When to post on LinkedIn

Overall, the best times to post on LinkedIn are Tuesdays and Thursdays between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. in your local time zone. The worst times are over the weekends when the professional platform is a bit of a dead zone.

But the best time to post on LinkedIn is really the one that yields the most impactful engagement from your audience. So, once you have some data to look into, follow the steps to check your work and find trends. Then, you can keep posting on LinkedIn and growing your platform even more strategically…and watching that engagement skyrocket!

There’s lots to learn about marketing on LinkedIn, these resources will help: