LinkedIn is a powerful tool for content marketers looking to expand their reach and increase engagement with their audience. But there are a lot of B2B content creators on the platform all vying for attention. With so much competition, how do you ensure your LinkedIn posts get seen and, more importantly, engaged with? 

At Kapwing, we took a look at some of our own LinkedIn analytics and compared it with LinkedIn’s best practices and advice from other content marketers to understand the best times to post on the platform for optimal engagement. In this article, we share the results.

What Are The Best Days and Times to Post on LinkedIn?

The best times to post on LinkedIn depends on your audience and the people that you're trying to reach. Some things you might consider when scheduling a LinkedIn post:

• Target audience demographics
• Industry-specific trends
• Time zone

To inform the best time to post on LinkedIn, we decided to conduct our own informal experiment spanning 2023-2024. Kapwing's CEO, Julia Enthoven, has 6300 followers on LinkedIn, a medium-sized audience for a small business owner. She has posted 25 times on LinkedIn in the last 12 months.

Study: What's the best day of the week?

Our study found that Thursday is the best day of the week for impressions. Of the posts that we measured, the average Thursday post got more than 12,000 views. This may be because posts published on Thursday get both weekday and weekend traffic (when fewer professionals are posting) in the first few days that they've been posted. Monday was the second place day in terms of impressions.

Study: What's the best time to post?

The best time is a complicated question since LinkedIn users are logging on from different time zones around the world. According to a LinkedIn poll we conducted at Kapwing, more than half of respondents said they are most likely to be browsing LinkedIn in the morning. However, morning in California is mid-day in New York and evening in London.

Our data study was inconclusive on the best time to post. We found that the posts Julia published at night (7pm-11pm) performed better than posts published in the middle of the afternoon. This may be because there is less competition when other marketers are asleep or away from their desks, or because Julia's California timezone generally means that night-time posts hit European and eastern time zones early in the morning.

• Julia found that the time of her most successful post (measured by impressions) - a thought leadership piece with a link to the company blog - was posted in the afternoon, at 4:25 PM PT.
• Julia’s LinkedIn post with the second highest number of impressions went live at 11:32 PM PT and gained even more engagement than the one posted at 4:25 PM. Both of these posts were on a Wednesday.

Our findings are a bit outside the consensus according to LinkedIn’s Partner Marketing research. Hubspot, Sprinklr, and Buffer found that posting on LinkedIn between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM local time on weekdays is best for increasing engagement. 

Hubspot’s research found the best times are:

• Between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM.
• Mondays, Wednesdays, and Tuesdays, in that order.

Sprinklr’s research found the best times are:

• Mid-morning (10:00 to 11:00 AM) and lunchtime (12:00 to 1:00 PM) on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
• Overall, Tuesday is the most active day on LinkedIn.

Buffer's research found the best times are:

• Monday and Tuesday at 4:00 PM, Wednesday at 2:00 PM, Thursday at 4:00 PM, Friday at 1:00 PM, Saturday at 10:00 PM, and Sunday at 7:00 AM.
• Compared to other weekdays, Thursday and Friday see a slight uptick in engagement.

What Do Other Content Marketers Say?

Many content marketers and social media experts agree that the research on the best times to post on LinkedIn can be insightful. But it’s equally important to think about where the most people from your specific target audience are located, and what their media consumption habits are. 

For example, Gen Z has joined the workforce and they are more likely to check their LinkedIn feed (and their phones in general) on weekends. Many businesses shy away from posting on weekends, assuming that most people won’t be scrolling through LinkedIn on Saturday and Sunday. But if there are fewer companies posting on weekends, that means there are fewer posts to compete with, increasing the likelihood that your post will appear in your audience’s newsfeed. 

So while best practices are good to keep in mind, they’re not an absolute truth. It’s important to continually test and iterate to find what works for your audience. When it comes to achieving LinkedIn success, the best thing you can do is create content that is tailored specifically to your audience and LinkedIn’s platform. 

Content Optimization Tips from LinkedIn

In addition to posting at certain times of day, LinkedIn suggests maintaining a consistent posting schedule to keep your audience engaged and your content appearing in their feeds regularly. Make sure to use images, videos, and other visual content to increase engagement, and add captions and hashtags to improve visibility. 

One of Julia's top performing posts was a Bernie Sanders meme related to hiring engineers. This post got more than 100 engagements and a few reposts. For engagement, consider posting memes that your followers relate.

Posting videos is one of the best ways to increase your reach and engagement on LinkedIn because video posts get 5x the engagement of conventional posts on average. When creating LinkedIn videos, here are some tips to keep in mind: 

• Consider shooting it vertically so it’s formatted for mobile. Even on desktop, taller posts (9:16) take up more vertical space and likely perform better. Kapwing allows you to resize your video to fit LinkedIn's preferred dimensions.
• Include captions for sound-off viewing.
• Get to the meat of the content in the first 4 seconds to grab the audience’s attention.
• Use an eye-catching thumbnail that shows viewers exactly what they’ll see when they click on your video.

Kapwing helps creators make videos and images that are optimized for LinkedIn. You can enhance your video with additional elements to make it more engaging:

• Add text overlays to highlight key points.
• Include graphics and animations to make your video visually appealing.
• Use background music to set the tone of your video (make sure it’s not too distracting).

Again, no matter when the most optimal posting time is for your company, your content should cater to your audience’s specific desires and be customized to LinkedIn’s specifications. LinkedIn has over 700 million users who are actively seeking industry insights, networking opportunities, and business-related content. By posting on LinkedIn, content marketers can:

• Increase brand visibility. Our CEO Julia Enthoven doubled her LinkedIn following within a year of posting about twice a month, creating a bigger audience for product launch videos.
• Build professional credibility
• Drive traffic to the website
• Generate leads and potential business opportunities (the "dark social" impact)

Thanks for reading! Follow along for more tips and stories from our experience growing a business on LinkedIn.