Is publishing on LinkedIn in 2023 one of your priorities? So much the better! Here’s the latest on when to post on LinkedIn in 2023.
If LinkedIn is part of your social media strategy, it will be useful to collect some information on the best times to post on LinkedIn. B2B social network par excellence, LinkedIn has become essential for developing your personal brand (or personal branding) and finding new customers. For this, some clarification is needed on the good trends on LinkedIn in 2023.
What time to post on LinkedIn?
This is THE question that everyone is asking and from the outset, we are going to invite you to take a step back: there is no supreme schedule that will guarantee you to make tens of thousands of views, and we in this article, we will show examples of posts published at seemingly counterproductive times, but which worked very well.
But if you really post once or twice a week and want to maximize your chances, there are nevertheless underlying trends. The top LinkedIn influencers in 2022 tend to post in the morning between 9am and 10am. On the other hand, we see that posts around 5 p.m. continue to work well, even if their engagement can sometimes drop quite quickly. In summary, here are two times to post on LinkedIn:
- In the morning between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.
- Afternoon between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
Attention! This is not an absolute truth and must be played down. Just because you’re posting at 2 p.m. doesn’t mean your LinkedIn post will be a total flop. In fact, rather than wondering what time to post on LinkedIn, it’s better to start by wondering what time NOT to post on LinkedIn.
Should you post on LinkedIn at the same time as everyone else?
If we stick to what we have just said in the previous paragraph, you are certainly thinking that the smartest thing is to publish between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., since that is the time that seems to walk. But remember one thing: if you post with everyone else on LinkedIn, you’ll face huge competition.
The LinkedIn algorithm will first highlight the LinkedIn posts that have the highest engagement rate, and these are usually high-profile influencers. Do you really have the weapons so that your LinkedIn post ends up at the top of your subscribers’ newsfeed, ahead of the LinkedIn posts of influencers who have 20 or 30,000 subscribers? Not sure… So, even if it may seem relevant to publish around 10 a.m., we tend to keep a certain reserve: before definitively fixing your publication time, it is better to test as many options as possible.
What time not to post on LinkedIn?
If you have read our article where we explained why it is so important to understand how the LinkedIn algorithm works, here we are entering into the same logic. To make a successful LinkedIn post, it depends not only on the time of publication, but also on the engagement it will generate, and therefore on the promotion it will benefit from thanks to the LinkedIn algorithm. If you post at a time when absolutely no one is online, it’s clear that you will have no likes, no comments, and your LinkedIn post will instantly be forgotten.
In other words, if you post at 11 p.m. or 6:30 a.m., there will be hardly anyone on LinkedIn, you will have no interaction in the first two hours of your LinkedIn Post, and you are likely to flop. Here is a list of times that we advise against from experience:
- After 6 p.m., it gets a bit trickier because your audience is done working and tends to move on.
- At night, there is no one, you will flop.
- Very early in the morning, before 8 am, we never saw any interesting results.
In general, it can be said that the recommended times for posting on LinkedIn are between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m., which makes for a wide range of hours. Let’s do an analysis using a counterexample, a post published on the LinkedIn account of Thomas, our co-founder, at 9:38 p.m.
The best way to find out if it works is to try. So, by posting at 9:38 p.m., we were able to gather objective information. Verdict? In the first hours of publication, the engagement on the post was almost zero. We only got two or three likes. How is this a problem? The first hour of a LinkedIn post’s life is crucial: if it gets a lot of likes and comments when it starts, the LinkedIn post will get a lot of views. If it only has a very low engagement rate, the LinkedIn algorithm will limit its reach.
In the end, this LinkedIn post published around 10 p.m. still has 1435 views, which is a score that we can qualify as correct on behalf of Thomas. But by posting it at a more relevant time, it would have definitely made 3 or 4000 views. In conclusion, even if you are not yet sure of when to post on LinkedIn, keep in mind that late-night or very early hours do not work, because you will have a very bad start to the visibility of your LinkedIn post.
Vary LinkedIn posting times based on your posting frequency
If you only want to post once a week (which is a bare minimum), we would advise you to post on a set day and a set time to create a kind of appointment with your audience. But the ideal for success on LinkedIn in 2023 is to adopt a publication frequency of several times a week: two to three times a week will allow you to properly maintain your personal or institutional brand, and up to once a day. .
If you post several times a week, then we can consider posting on different days and times. At SEO BRISK, we have seen from experience that there is no exact science and that a post published on Sunday can make 10,000 views, that a post published on December 25 can record very good numbers when d he other publications from which we were expecting good results recorded more modest scores, even though they were published on Tuesdays at a time deemed ideal. This is proof that there are no certainties in this matter and that the quality of your LinkedIn post will be much more important than the publication schedule.
Should you publish your LinkedIn post on the weekend?
Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday are often considered off-peak periods on LinkedIn, and as such, one might think that it is not useful, and even inadvisable, to post on LinkedIn on weekends. Really? We are going to deconstruct this received idea:
In the example below, we’re displaying stats for the top 7 LinkedIn posts Thomas made in 2022. The top post has achieved over 9,000 views to date. And this post was published on a Sunday at 2:47 p.m. In other words, at a day and time that are rarely recommended to post on LinkedIn. How do we explain this? First, the quality of the LinkedIn post has an inevitable impact. Then, even if the number of active users on LinkedIn declines on Saturday or Sunday that does not mean that there is nobody! There are always people on LinkedIn, don’t think that everyone leaves LinkedIn on Friday as we leave the office and only come back on Monday morning. The engagement rate on this post having been quite good, this post therefore experienced strong activity during the two to three days that followed, allowing it to reach almost 10,000 views and trigger two solicitations from potential prospects for SEO BRISK by through Thomas’ LinkedIn account.
You should therefore not hesitate to publish on LinkedIn on Saturday or Sunday under the pretext that “it’s the weekend, so there is no one on LinkedIn”. This is not true, and it is even appropriate to take advantage of these periods when the number of published content is lower. You won’t get 10,000 views each time, you should even expect to get a little less views than on weekdays, but you will definitely have an interesting impact. Moreover, if you want to know what explains the drop in the number of views on your posts, you can consult our article on the drop in LinkedIn visibility and you will see that Sunday is not really an excuse.
What times to post on LinkedIn
At SEO BRISK, we produced and published more than 250 LinkedIn posts in 2022. This daily practice allowed us to detect some trends on the publication schedules to be favored on LinkedIn. Here’s how we might summarize behaviors on LinkedIn based on the time you post:
- From 9 a.m. to 11 a.m.: a lot of commitment, but a lot of competition
- Between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m.: less engagement, but more attention, therefore a potentially higher dwell time
- 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.: behavior broadly similar to that of the morning, with perhaps a little less competition from LinkedIn influencers
- From 5 p.m. to 6 p.m.: little competition on publications. Slightly lower commitment.
- From 9 p.m. to 9 a.m.: The desert. Hours not conducive to publications on LinkedIn.
- The weekend: less audience, but very little competition. Very timely to generate visibility on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Posting Hours: Don’t Hold Back Too Much
As you have certainly understood by reading us and observing the examples taken from the account of Thomas, our co-founder, we must not lock ourselves into certainties when it comes to choosing a publication time or a frequency of posting on LinkedIn. If you don’t know where to start, you can get support from an agency like SEO BRISK which helps with the SEO for Locksmiths. Our role is precisely to advise you so that you obtain the best possible results in this area according to your expectations and your constraints. LinkedIn is evolving very quickly and it remains essential to continue to innovate, to try to think outside the box in order to succeed in developing its visibility on LinkedIn. The time slots on which you can publish are much larger than you might imagine and by thinking outside the box, you could have some good surprises.
