Best time to post on LinkedIn

How to use the LinkedIn heatmap

LinkedIn is where this kind of grid earns its keep, because the audience is tied to a working week and the gap between Tuesday morning and Saturday night is not subtle.

1. 1Set the timezone control to wherever the bulk of your audience lives. If that is not where you live, resist the pull of your own clock: you are scheduling around their day, not yours.
2. 2Read the bands rather than the digits. The scale is relative, with the busiest cell of the week fixed at 100, so the gap between a 78 and an 81 is noise and the gap between a 78 and a 30 is not.
3. 3Shortlist two or three candidate slots out of the warm band instead of one. A single slot gives you nothing to compare itself against.
4. 4Sort your own feed by Recent rather than Top for a minute. It is a quick way to see how much is already being published into the slot you are considering, which is the competition your post has to beat.
5. 5Test in whole weeks, never in days. The weekday effect here is larger than the hour effect, so a candidate that only ever ran on Fridays has not been tested against one that only ever ran on Tuesdays.
6. 6Compare on the median post, not the best one. A single outlier proves nothing about a slot, and on LinkedIn it is the typical post that tells you whether the slot is working.

How LinkedIn actually distributes a new post

The LinkedIn feed is ranked, but the audience behind it behaves far more predictably than on any consumer platform: people are largely reading at work, on working days, between other tasks.

• The feed carries a visible sort control with Top and Recent options. Recent is genuinely chronological, so a real slice of your audience can read in posting order, though Top is what they get by default.
• Dwell time, meaning how long somebody stops on a post, is a signal LinkedIn has discussed publicly. That rewards posts worth reading slowly, and it is part of why a dense text post can outperform a bare link.
• The weekend collapse here is real in a way it is not elsewhere. A Saturday post is not reaching a different audience, it is reaching the same audience while they are not at work.
• LinkedIn does not hand you an hourly when-your-followers-are-online chart the way Instagram and TikTok do. You infer your pattern from the timestamps and impressions of posts you have already published, which makes a starting benchmark more useful here than anywhere else.

What this heatmap cannot tell you

Even on the platform where timing matters most, the confident hour-by-hour numbers quoted around the web are softer than they look.

• This grid is interpolated from published peak windows and weekday weights. It is a shape rather than 168 measurements, and the precision implied by an individual cell number is not real.
• Values are relative to the week’s strongest cell, which is fixed at 100. A 40 means comparatively quiet, not 40 per cent of anything.
• The benchmark assumes a conventional working week. If your audience is engineers on the American west coast, clinicians on shifts, or anyone at all outside a nine to five, the weekday weights are wrong for you in a way the grid cannot show.
• Everybody reads the same advice. The classic Tuesday-to-Thursday morning window is also the most crowded one, so the best-scoring cell is not automatically the best-performing cell.

What decides LinkedIn reach besides the hour

LinkedIn rewards posts that hold attention, which means the two lines above the see-more fold do more work for you than the slot ever will.

• Write for the fold. Those opening lines decide whether the post is expanded at all, and a post nobody expands earns no dwell time to be rewarded for.
• Answer your own comments in the first hour. Replies keep a post circulating, and that is a better use of the hour after publishing than picking a different hour to publish in.
• If your audience spans time zones, favour the earlier end of the window. A post that is live for the European morning is still there for the American one; the reverse does not hold.