Wondering how to make the most of the time you spend on LinkedIn? Here's our general hints and tips on how to best use your time when creating content for LinkedIn.
Why should I post on LinkedIn?
No longer just for job hunting, networking and professional development, LinkedIn has become a key platform for content marketing where businesses can meaningfully build their brand and turn connections into leads.
With 303 million monthly active users and a bunch of new features and updates, LinkedIn is a social media platform that you shouldn’t overlook, especially if you are a Business to Business (B2B) company.
When should I post on LinkedIn?
Building an audience on LinkedIn requires you to create compelling and engaging content at the right time, otherwise most of your followers will not see your updates.
While there is no perfect time to post on LinkedIn per se, by understanding your business goals, industry, competitors and audience behaviour, you can make some pretty good assumptions.
At Eastop-Scopes Virtual Assistants, we recommend creating a customer persona based on market research so you are always focused with your LinkedIn strategy. You can use our free Defining Your Target Market download by clicking here to help.
For example, a B2B professional might not have time to check their social media feeds during work hours, but may have time at the beginning of their day or when taking their lunch break.
Based on marketer research the following times are recommended for engaging on the platform:
For general LinkedIn consumption, Tuesday to Thursday between 8 am and 2 pm, depending on the time zone. A challenging time for engagement is on weekends or outside of business hours, however key commuting times (between 5-7pm) seems to be more and more popular as everyone checks their phones on the commute home.
For Business to Customer (B2C) businesses, between 11 am to 2 pm is advisable during breaks and lunch hours, or before they start working and during commutes.
B2Bs and software/IT companies should aim for outside of 9 am to 5 pm or during lunch breaks or in the morning. They're likely to find success posting in the morning between Monday-Friday.
Similarly media companies should post outside of working hours, between 8 to 10 am is advisable.
It sounds obvious but always think ‘audience first’ when planning your posts for the best engagement.
You can also use your insights to see when your audience are mostly online. Read our blog on the importance of using social media insights here.
How often should I post on LinkedIn?
According to online research, you should be posting between two to five times a week, depending on your industry, customer, and the type of content you're sharing.
Quality over quantity is the winning strategy on LinkedIn. Posting thoughtful and topical content that adds value to your audience will boost your engagement metrics, much more than bombarding your audience with meaningless posts. Consider what types of content you’d like to share at different times in the week. Perhaps you share a long hand thought piece on Tuesday, an engaging status to encourage interaction on Wednesday and a video post on Thursday?
You can adopt a trial and error approach at the beginning of your LinkedIn marketing journey to see what content is working well (and not so well) and adapt accordingly. This is certainly an approach we use at Eastop-Scopes Virtual Assistants as we recognise that not all companies are the same, and so in order to utilise your social media channels efficiently, we need to trial different approaches, strategies and content.
Experiment with formats, interact with your audience authentically and be visible at relevant times in the week.
Eastop-Scopes Virtual Assistants can support you with all aspects of social media; from research through to ideation, content planning and scheduling. Get in touch to find out more.
Why not check out our recent blog post about Medium as a marketing platform for more social media insights, or find out how insights can benefit your use of social media here.