The Best (Surprising!) Times to Post on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a professional Network so we should just post in the middle of the workday right yes and no we're going to talk about the best dates and times to post according to the research but I need to warn you and almost no one else is warning about this and they should you're hurting your business if you only post during these best days and times I'm going to explain why and I'm also going to show you how to be way more strategic with the timing of your posts so more people see your posts and more people get to know you and your brand because your business deserves it now LinkedIn favors recency and what that means is a post from an hour ago is more likely to show up in your audience's news feed than a post from a couple days ago so the basic idea here is that you want to post when your audience is more likely to be online but one Nuance that is rarely mentioned is that the Earth is round and there are time zones so let's just say you're targeting your business in your local area you're probably in the same time zone is your audience so you can be very specific with the timing of your LinkedIn posts easy enough but now let's say you're targeting business throughout your country now many countries have a single time zone but other kind countries like the us we have a few time zones or Russia which has 11 time zones we have to think more importance of a time zone window now let's take a table why then one would think and get along just thinking too that it doesn't matter when you post because the time zones are all over the place but it turns out that's not quite true for instance I accept clients all around the world but if you look at my LinkedIn personal profile analytics the book of my audience is in Eastern time which is also where I live so despite being International I should still time my posts for my time zone and you might find the same thing too okay so now let's look at the best days and times according to the research understanding this is just one part of the picture and we want to look at the whole picture let's start with the best days and I scoured a ton of studies the results were all over the place but the general consensus was that the best days tend to be in the middle of the week Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays especially more Tuesdays and Wednesdays and apparently the worst times to post which I'm going to show you actually have a lot of opportunity or on the weekends and as for the best times again I'm just showing you one part of the picture right now the results were all over the place but the general consensus seemed to hover around 9 A. M to noon-ish so why am I being all doomsday and warning you about these best days and times one would think it's quite straightforward let me show you with this one example and there's so many examples out there like this and it's research and a Blog article by Sprout social now this particular heat map shows the best days and times to post on LinkedIn company pages in general and below the heat map and this is where I have the problem it says the best times to post are Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a. m to noon but what about all these other times I mean sure Sprout social acknowledges that Thursdays are good too but doesn't recommend any specific times on Thursdays and it completely ignores all the other LinkedIn users who happen to engage with the platform on all these other times so let's just step back so we can look at the bigger problem it's so easy to fall into black and white thinking in life in general this good this bad and believe me sometimes I think in black and white because it's so much easier to put the world into nice neat little categories because it feels so much safer but then I have to kick myself because the world isn't really like that and it's the same thing with LinkedIn if we only post during these times because we're told this is the best then we miss all the people on LinkedIn during these times who are also really really good now let's talk about weekends now one can look at the heat map and easily conclude that weekends are the worst time to post in fact Sprout social says that too but again here's another Nuance most businesses shy away from posting on the weekends therefore there are way fewer posts in the news feed for our posts to compete with so there's a higher chance that our posts will show up in the news feed so that's why I do sometimes post on the weekends and sure enough I get likes and comments and reposts it's not as many as during the week but it's enough that I've tapped into a weekend audience to make it worthwhile and by the way if you're getting a lot of value out of this video so far it would really mean a lot to me if you would hit the like button because that really does tell YouTube to deliver this video to even more people thank you so much now another thing that's rarely factored in is that our LinkedIn audience is made up of humans and not robots Okay so what do I mean by that when we see advice that tells us to post at 10 AM or 2 p.

m or any time that's exactly on the hour that doesn't match how humans work people aren't like it is exactly 10 a. m I must log into LinkedIn no people log in at weird times like 10 21 or 2 47 but most businesses posting on LinkedIn especially if they're scheduling a post in advance they're usually scheduling their posts exactly on the hour especially if they've gone advice to post exactly a 10 or exactly a two that creates a flood of posts exactly on the hour which is more competition and we want to avoid this competition as much as we can so I'm going to urge you not to post on the hour but between the hour I don't know if between the hours the correct phrasing but you know what I mean just like post-aware times now before I give you a solid plan of when to post on LinkedIn I do want to just quickly acknowledge I've been busting on Sprout social and other organizations like it but really they're the ones who have done all this meticulous research and I want to thank them for that my main point is that I disagree with some of the advice that they're giving based on the data okay so here's your plan it's not black and white it Embraces all the shades first publish thirty percent of your posts during the best times according to the research Tuesdays and Wednesdays 10 a. m to noon then you're gonna publish 60 of your posts any other times during the work week Monday through Friday 7 A.

M to 5 p. m then you're gonna publish 10 of your posts on the weekends 8 AM to 2 p.