Unlike Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn is one of the biggest online platforms for employment search. Launched in 2003, the platform serves as an easy way for corporate professionals to connect. This has helped millions of freshers and professionals to build a community and interact with each other.
However, building a community with like-minded users is rather difficult. Thus, one should understand how to post on LinkedIn and when to make your account get noticed.
Now, why should you care?
- Recruiters post on the platform to find freshers and experienced professionals to join their companies.
- It is a great way to grow your business and grow as a thought leader in your own niche.
- You can sell your services as a freelancer or on a part-time basis like a content writer, or social media manager, and there will be many users looking for such services.
Hence, increasing your visibility and reach becomes extremely important. The quality of the content and the best time to post on LinkedIn becomes crucial when getting started.
However, posting something and immediately expecting engagement can be an unreal scenario. Scheduling posts on LinkedIn is not enough if it is not helping you to gain followers. Good content needs to be paired with strategies that will make the best out of all the energy you spend on it.
Read on to understand how to gain followers, increase engagement, and make a community by changing one simple thing – the quality and best time to post on LinkedIn.
How to Find the Best Time to Post on LinkedIn?
There is no one ideal time to post on LinkedIn to get likes and comments. One has to understand the analytics behind the platform to increase their chances. If you simply Google the best time to post on LinkedIn, you will not find just one answer. Every post on Google will suggest something different altogether.
A number of things go into consideration when you should and should not post on LinkedIn. This is based on your community pool, the type of creator you are, and the people who are connected with you on the platform.
Thus, before finalizing a specific or best time to post on LinkedIn, here are some things you should consider doing on your own:
List of Aspects to Consider Before Posting on LinkedIn
1. Experiment with the Target Audience
Let’s say you are a creator with a new account, ready to engage and build a community on LinkedIn. You need to have a plan to make the most out of the post, and get people to leave likes and comments.
You write it down and post it, but sadly there is only 1 like in the past hour.
The next step is to analyze rather than get disheartened.
Look at your followers and see the mix of audience. You need to cater your content and timing to this group. There will be tens of posts before you find the ideal time and the right target audience.
But do not lose hope. Eventually, you are going to figure out your ideal audience, when they are most active which will eventually lead to your golden hours. Then it is your time to shine!
2. Different Times for Different Niches
While LinkedIn may feel like just another social media platform, it is much more. Unlike Facebook, LinkedIn caters to people who are professionals looking to build and increase their community. In that pool, you will find the consumer sector and the conglomerates. Therefore, if you want to understand how to post on LinkedIn, there are two key niches that you can target your posts.
- The first one is the B2B sector where your niche will be other enterprises. These connections include Founders/CEOs, and executive management – basically the people who will be making the decisions. As per research and analytics, these people are mostly available during the weekdays and are the most active from Tuesdays to Thursdays. The best time to post on LinkedIn for such an audience would be just during lunch hours, early in the morning, or during travel time hours.
- The next niche is the B2C sector, which caters to consumers. They can include freshers, job seekers, part-time workers, or freelancers. This niche of users is usually active during the weekends, especially early noon. Therefore, for them 11 am on a Saturday would be a great time to set your LinkedIn post schedule.
3. Curate Quality Posts
One of the main reasons why you may not get a lot of traction in your posts may be because of the quality of posts. Thus you should always understand what to post on LinkedIn before you hit share. Certain steps are to be considered when you are curating a post for LinkedIn, especially for an audience as a professional.
One key aspect you should remember when you post on LinkedIn is to understand what the post is offering. It should hold up to its purpose, your business or personal values, and embrace the brand or personal identity. Moreover, think of what the post is offering to your audience. If you do not allow quality posts from your feed, then the best time to post on LinkedIn rarely matters.
More likes and shares will allow you to increase your community and horizon to more like-minded people. Thus, when you post next in the ideal times catering to your audience, you will get more engagement and traction on your profile. However, that will only help you if there is value in your content.
Things To Keep in Mind When Posting on LinkedIn
In layman’s terms, LinkedIn is essentially a social media platform for business professionals. That means that posts and pictures are shared on the platform however, it is dedicated from professionals to the professional pool. This is where conglomerates post their requirements and their accomplishments altogether.
However, just as everyone wants the most likes on their photos, LinkedIn users are more interested in increasing their community and pool of connections. For that, one has to understand when to post on LinkedIn. This entails more people joining the community and thus having more users join the pool help professionals in growing their network.
Making good posts is not enough to gain more connections. There is multiple analytics on LinkedIn that determine a post to gain the maximum reach. While you cannot completely control a post’s visibility, here are some things to consider when you are making a post on LinkedIn:
1. Time Zones
Note that your posts on LinkedIn will be professional and cater to a global audience. This happens when you are a part of a bigger conglomerate with global outreach. In such cases, you also need to consider the different time zones.
That said, it is important to find the middle ground between all the time zones that your audience is in. The best time to post on LinkedIn is considering the time zones with the biggest chunk of your audience.
You can determine this by using social media analytic tools. Once you understand those analytics, you can use the time zones to your advantage by posting in the middle ground. Hence, it is important to experiment and understand what kind of users are attracted to your posts in what time zones, thereby making the best out of it.
2. Days of the Week
Another important aspect of when to post on LinkedIn is understanding the audience and how they function. If your priority audience is freshers and job seekers looking for a change, your posting time would be vastly different from conglomerates.
Ideally, professionals are used to checking their LinkedIn accounts from Tuesday through Thursday. The best time to post on LinkedIn would be during commute hours and lunch times addition to early mornings.
On the other hand, if you are catering to the former audience, the ideal time to post would be from Wednesday to Friday morning. Next, you can try posting on Saturday mornings and Sunday nights. Different analytic tools have different times that one should post on LinkedIn. Some of them you will find below:
Hubspot: Wednesday mornings between 10 am and 12 pm
Quintly: Timings between 7 am to 8 am, 12 pm, and 5 pm to 6 pm
Sprout Social: Tuesdays to Thursdays between 9 am to 12 pm.
3. Quality of Content
The most important factor that will drive traction and engagement to your posts is not the best time to post on LinkedIn. It is the quality of content. LinkedIn is a platform for professionals constantly looking for ways to improve their everyday life and add value to their productivity.
For example, one of the biggest pioneers in the LinkedIn community is actor and entrepreneur, Sunil Shetty. His posts usually talk about how to increase productivity and make the best out of the day. As an individual, he has managed to inspire hundreds of people.
That said, you need to understand your source of information if you are posting as an individual or a company. If the latter, then you should provide value to your posts that would benefit other companies and employees.
All things considered, while posts with value, gauge people to read, you have to strategically post your content at a certain timeframe so as to increase visibility. Thus, understanding what to post on LinkedIn means you must also have a sense of timing using LinkedIn analytics.
4. Frequency
When you have the content in place, all you have to understand is when to post and analyze the best time to post on LinkedIn. While all the areas for the same have been covered above, the ultimate purpose is to get more engagement.
This is when you have to understand how many times you should post on LinkedIn. Logically the more you post, the more noticed you are. While that is true for most social media platforms, LinkedIn works slightly differently.
Unlike Facebook, Youtube and Instagram, the LinkedIn algorithm is made so that an individual user would see posts from varied creators and not just one. Thus, you can post as many posts per month according to your work schedule and time to get noticed. One of the easiest ways to understand the timeline and frequency is by scheduling posts on LinkedIn so that you do not miss out on posting when you are preoccupied with other things.
Benefits of Posting on LinkedIn
While many social media platforms offer audiences a medium to share professional posts, LinkedIn may be the most authentic. Facebook and Instagram have a wider reach however professional networking are minimal as compared to LinkedIn.
For example, you may post thoughts about productivity or how to optimize daily work-life balance. To the Facebook audience, the post will be an amalgamation of lifestyle stories and pictures of a party one may visit. With LinkedIn, the audience becomes narrow and more concentrated on working professionals. To elaborate more, find the benefits of LinkedIn as a platform below:
1. Better to Build Credibility for your Profile
So far we have already established that LinkedIn is a site for working professionals to connect, communicate and help each other grow. If you have a LinkedIn account, you are looking for either a job or an employee in a company. However, none of that would be achieved if you do not use our profile for good.
Only applying to jobs and attending skill tests will only take you so far. You must understand what to post on LinkedIn. Once you understand how to make posts on LinkedIn, you can strategize your timings and post accordingly. This will get you more visibility through recruiters and have a positive outlook on your credibility.
2. Ideal Reach for your Posts
One of the best tools of LinkedIn is that everyone in your profile will be notified whenever you post. That means when you have created a compelling network pool, your connections will know that you have shared a post.
Thus, you can use this to your benefit when you build a pool of like-minded people. Your audience will be exposed to your great content when you know what to post on LinkedIn. When you have connections who are interested in similar things as you are, and are notified of the same, then the engagement gets concentrated.
3. LinkedIn Pulse Feature
LinkedIn Pulse is an aggregated platform that was integrated into LinkedIn in 2015. This platform is ideal for blog posts and articles that connect hundreds of like-minded people to your post.
There may be no one definite way to be featured on the LinkedIn pulse. Many have been featured by engaging the community. The posts that get a high number of likes and shares according to their audience are shared by the platform connecting more users who are most likely to be interested in it.
Conclusion
LinkedIn originated in America in 2003 that aims to bring together working professionals willing to connect mutually beneficial to each other. LinkedIn has its own analytics that allows people to engage with users by posting content.
As LinkedIn is the one powerhouse of a social media platform to enhance and grow in your career, it’s important to learn the skills and it’s an algorithm to upscale the game!
If you would like to learn about Social Media, Digital Marketing, and how it works to scale up your business or as a professional, taking an online digital marketing course is an ideal option that you can learn at your own pace.
The best time to post on LinkedIn is by understanding how the users are functioning. However, to truly understand what works best for your account and audience, one must experiment and figure out what truly works best for you!
