Image courtesy of Unsplash
LinkedIn Lesson Number 2: When – and How Often – to Post?
Does it really matter when you post to LinkedIn? Well, yes, it turns out.
The data scientists at Sprout Social, the Chicago-based social-media management company, recently analyzed their client engagement rates and determined that some days and times are, indeed, better than others.
And the Winner is…Wednesday
Sprout Social pointed to Wednesday, as the very best day to garner engagement for LinkedIn posts.
In general, the report said, any day during the workweek really is just fine–except Monday. No surprises there. And, when all the days of the week are taken into account, Sunday turns out to be the day of least engagement on the social platform.
Sprout Social
As for time of day, Sprout Social deemed 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. as the “safest times to post” for the most engagement on LinkedIn. It didn’t address time zones, but Hannah Williams, a former Meltwater senior marketing exec, advises social media organizations with constituents in different parts of the world to consider posting “more frequently” on social platforms to ensure that all “time zones see your content.”
How Frequent is Frequent on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn’s own enterprise playbook advises organizations to post every day to “establish a trusted voice.” But social-media experts warn that posting for the sake of frequency is a bad idea. Think quality over quantity, they advise.
Furthermore, posting even quality content too often in any one day can cause problems. According to HubSpot, more than once a day may cause engagement to drop significantly.
“LinkedIn doesn’t want users’ feeds to be overwhelmed by posts by the same company,” explains HubSpot Product Group Leader Daria Marmer, “So the second post in a day that a marketer publishes can cannibalize the performance of the first.”
Now that you know, roughly, how many posts your organization needs — and when to post — to be noticed on LinkedIn, you’ll need to plan ahead. The LinkedIn playbook suggests gathering your list of pieces at least a week in advance.
Here at Martell, for example, we compile a “creative brief” for clients to review and approve what will be posted on their social feeds during the following week. Then, we schedule the posts for days and times with a tool like Hootsuite or Sprinklr.
Of course, planning ahead assumes you already have the right content for the LinkedIn platform. In our next LinkedIn lesson, we’ll tackle WHAT to post so that people will read and follow your feed.
Meanwhile, tell us if YOU notice more or less engagement based on when you post on LinkedIn.
Related Posts:
Clients ask us questions about LinkedIn all the time. Questions like ‘How do we get more engagement? What’s the right posting schedule? How do we improve our company page?’
So, we decided to create a series of LinkedIn lessons. Our hope is that these will guide you toward better a better LinkedIn presence. We hope you’ll follow along.
Here’s the lineup of lessons: