Timing is everything.
Think about all the special times in your life.
What would have happened if you were an hour late or 30 minutes too early?
Doing outreach, posting, or even just lurking on LinkedIn requires proper timing.
This allows people to see you first on their feeds and makes your content more effective.
There is a best time to post on LinkedIn.
Here’s what.
You can engineer your posts to appear in front of your prospects at the right time.
In today’s guide, I’ll show you how you can engineer perfect timing.
So, let’s not waste anymore time and get right down to it!
Consider The Timezones
The first thing you’ve got to keep in mind is the timezone that you’re working with.
Now, posting usually serves three purposes:
- It keeps people updated and maintains brand recognition for your organization
- It’s used as a lead magnet to attract people to your profile page as a passive lead generation tool
- And lastly, It serves as a lead nurturing tool
If you’re using it for lead generation or nurturing, then you should adapt your posting habits to the timezone of your target audience.
This means that if this month you’re targeting people on the East Coast, you better switch your social media scheduling app from PST to EST.
It doesn’t matter if you’re both in the United States, you always put the timezones first.
These subtle changes in the hours when you’re posting, are critical to ensuring that your post arrives
But, wait.
How about if I have an international audience?
Okay, now this is where it gets tricky.
The first solution is to focus on the timezone that is yielding you the most engagements, and the way to do this is to experiment with your posting scheduling a little bit more.
Be warned.
This is a time-consuming task, but it’s worth it in the end.
The other solution is to combine the prior solution and the use of your LinkedIn groups and company pages. Now LinkedIn groups come with their own notifications, so you want to build up those groups.
Find out how to growth hack with LinkedIn Groups!
Engage with people and encourage them to promote your posts.
If you’re already harnessing the power of LinkedIn groups, then you’re pretty much in a good place,
Finally, you can choose to cater to different niches and post more frequently – which can kind of break the 3-a-week rule that we will discuss in detail in a bit.
Want to know what some people do?
They just post whenever they’re most comfortable. Don’t fall into this trap, use a content scheduler if you have to, there are plenty out there.
The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn
So, after considering the timezones.
It’s time to check the actual post times.
According to SproutSocial.
So, if you really wanted to maximize your engagements, the best time to post on LinkedIn would be anywhere between 8 am to 3 pm.
However, based on research the maximum number of engagements that you can get is on Wednesdays from 9-10 am, and the lunch hour at noon.
Here’s what.
When in doubt, post a little bit before your prospects head out for lunch or the mid-mornings.
This is after you take into consideration the time zones of your prospects.
The Best Day to Post on LinkedIn
According to the internal data that we have and gathered from several of our partners, here is the ranking of the best days to post on LinkedIn:
- Wednesday
- Tuesday
- Thursday – Friday
- Monday
- Weekends
It’s surprising to see that Mondays just rank fourth, and that’s because people are usually preoccupied during the first day of the week.
Based on the heat map in the previous section, there’s a spike in engagements only towards lunch breaks as compared to Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Why Wednesday?
Wednesday marks the middle of the week and it’s also the day that we’ve found that most people are engaged.
The middle of the week signifies the peak of pressure to get deliverables done before EOW Friday.
But, here’s what.
It’s also a time where people want to relieve themselves of that pressure and decide to browse LinkedIn for that relief.
This is the reason we see a spike in activity on Monday that mellows down on Tuesday but then picks up again on Wednesday.
Thursdays and Fridays are less hectic – in some industries – so people tend to spread their tasks more evenly.
How About the Weekends?
LinkedIn is a professional social networking platform by design so it won’t be receiving a lot of engagement during the weekends.
People tend to gravitate towards more casual social platforms like Facebook, during these times.
Unless, it’s a personal post or something that necessitates urgency – and even then – we strongly advise that you wait until Monday to achieve maximum engagement.
If you’re itching to post for engagement, it’s advised that you switch to a different platform.
This also applies to prospecting, outreach, etc.
We’ve got a list of the best outreach templates that you can use today!
How Often Should You Be Posting on LinkedIn?
At BAMF, I encourage everyone to be active on LinkedIn, but this doesn’t mean that you should be consistently posting on the platform.
You know that relative who’s always posting stuff on Facebook?
You don’t want to be that person on the largest professional social media platform in the world.
I find that it’s best to post three times a week, with an occasional post in the weekend for prospects that happen to check out their accounts.
Why three?
Simple really.
Say you’re running an outreach campaign that’s based on LinkedIn and you send them a message on Monday, you don’t want to do a follow-up until the next week because it will be too pushy.
By scheduling posts three times during that week, you’ll be sure to reach them at least once without over saturating their news feeds.
3 seems to be the magic number on LinkedIn. Compared to more frequent rates on other mediums such as Twitter or Facebook.
You appear often enough to create brand recognition, but you don’t oversaturate anyone’s headspace.
Also, it takes about 24 hours for a post to go viral on LinkedIn, you can monitor your post and tweak it during this time while giving it enough time to blossom if it really is a share-worthy piece of content.
If you’re running an outreach campaign, it gives you enough leeway to get prospects to see your material a couple of times before you hit them up with a follow-up message.
It’s Not the Frequency, It’s The Type
If you want to up your posting frequency that’s perfectly alright.
But, you can’t limit it to just one type of post.
Say you decide to post five times a week from Monday to Friday during the mid-morning, you can’t just post text-based types.
It’s time to switch it up.
You need to make sure that you’re posting a variety of content so that your prospects won’t feel too saturated with your content.
A good mix of lead magnets, personal posts, slides, pictures and video is always a good idea.
When Shouldn’t I Post
People who are new to the platform and growth hacking are always eager to be active, engage, and try out new things.
But, on LinkedIn, it’s a whole different story.
Here’s why.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, LinkedIn is the largest professional social media platform in the world. The key for to look at is “professional”.
And, most professionals – except growth hackers ? – want to take a break after “professional working times.”
If you’re trying to engage with people past their 8 or 10-hour grinds, they’re not going to be the most receptive to you.
So, if you’re looking at the best times to post or engage, don’t do it after work or in the wee hours of the night.
Not only is it a waste of effort if they don’t notice it, but it’s can turn people off.
Well, this is unless you’re from a different timezone, but you can always use a tool to help facilitate conversations over different time zones.
Stick to the limits we set here, then as you grow bigger and connect with other people, start experimenting and trying to bend the best practices.
Plus, don’t post during the weekends, this isn’t the best time to post on LinkedIn.
You have to stay disciplined when it comes to posting.
Using LinkedIn Pods Also Requires Timing
We’ve covered LinkedIn pods in the past, and we all know that it’s an effective way to generate buzz for the posts that you out.
However, here’s something that you have to understand about pods.
They involve people, and there will be times where the members of your pod are or less active than usual.
Here’s what.
Try to figure the time zone that most of the pod members are in. This influences what time you should post the link of the content that you want to drive engagement to.
You can’t expect your content to gain traction if it’s 3 a.m. for most people in the pod.
How do you find if they’re awake?
Two ways, you can ask them or you could simply pay attention to when people are most active.
Here’s another great thing about posting your link when they’re active, you get to see their links and help them out with their engagement as well.
Use a Tool to Help You Schedule Your Posts Out
Getting a social media scheduling tool is one of the best things that you can do to get the best time to post on Linkedin.
Schedulers allow you to make sure that your posts go out on time, get posts ready in advance, and track the statistics for the posts that you have.
And, we can think of many that can help out.
Hootsuite is a popular choice, and so are Buffer and SproutSocial.
It doesn’t matter which one you pick – although we’ll have a guide for this coming soon – what matters is that you’re using and implementing one today.
Takeaways
There is such thing as perfect timing.
And, the good news is, you can engineer for it to work in your favor.
Timing everything that you do on LinkedIn is critical because it helps maximize the reach of what you do on the platform.
Posting takes up resources, time, creativity, effort, etc.
You want to make sure that you’re getting the most out of whatever you put in.
Why?
Because growth hackers should be efficient.
Setting up publishing times correctly doesn’t take too much effort, but it helps you maximize the effort that you’ve already put in.
