For most companies, LinkedIn is the most important social channel for their overall awareness and lead generation efforts. Yet so many organizations (we’re even guilty sometimes) just blindly post without knowing when they can best reach their audience. “When is the best day to post on LinkedIn to ensure my audience sees and engages with my awesome content?” is an age-old question and has layers to it.

But the good news is, we now have access to data that can help us answer that question. So, when is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

Well, the TLDR version of the answer is – it varies based on your audience. However, we at &Marketing don’t particularly love that answer. We also like to dig a little bit deeper and have some fun by leaning into data and building fun dashboards. So when we were posed this question, we decided to create something new that could give us an answer and potentially add to our Business Intelligence services. Here’s what we did and learned.

While you might generate some leads and back into your business goals with this approach, you’ll likely just be wasting time and money when you could be working smarter, not harder.

However, with all of the tools and data out there, it can be overwhelming or down right impossible to even know where to begin and how to leverage all of these glorious resources. Therefore, we’re going to help you find the elusive needle in the hay sack and show you three tools &Marketing leverages to save time, stop guessing, and still generate big results for our clients (and ourselves).

Business Questions to Answer:

1. When is the best day to post on Linkedin for audience engagement?
2. What days drive the most users to our website?
3. Which days generate the most goal completions on our website?
4. What type of posts generate the most engagement?
5. What days have the best goal conversion rate?

Data Used:

We gathered three years of LinkedIn data from a combination of sources.

1. We used a combination of Supermetrics post data (posts, post date, images, outbound URLs, likes, comments, shares, etc.) (Sidebar: Supermetrics is a tool that aggregates data from multiple sources and brings it to your go-to reporting, analytics, or storage platform.)
2. We took our own LinkedIn acquisition source data from Google Analytics (LinkedIn traffic, pages, goal completions, users, etc.)
3. We used LinkedIn data from LinkedIn itself (Post content, engagement, etc.) to gather information about our audiences (unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t break down post data by audience demographics which would’ve been super cool. Get on that LinkedIn)

Methodology:

Taking all of this data, we built several dashboards via Microsoft Power B.I. to help us mine through the 500+ LinkedIn posts and the thousands of website sessions from LinkedIn. These dashboards helped us easily uncover insights that could apply to our business questions.

Pro Tip: Do NOT use Bitly links with your LinkedIn posts. It makes it harder to match up the data with your Analytics.

What We Uncovered

After sifting through 500+ posts and all of our LinkedIn analytics data, here is what we uncovered:

• When is the best day to post on LinkedIn for audience engagement?
  For us, it is Wednesday. 38% of our most engaged posts occur on Wednesdays, encompassing roughly 33% of all our LinkedIn engagement. Interestingly enough, only 16% of all of our posts are released on Wednesdays. The day we post the most? Tuesday, closely followed by Thursday. Our least engaged day? Sunday. However, we don’t post a lot on the weekends, as both Saturday and Sunday only make up about 8% of our LinkedIn posts. The weekday with the least engagement is Friday.
• What days drive the most users to our website?
  Since 2019, LinkedIn has driven about 5% of all our website traffic. Based on the above, one would assume it would be Wednesday. However, Tuesdays barely eked out Thursdays and Wednesdays for the most traffic to our site. Even though our Wednesday posts generate more clicks, it’s the type of post that is driving those clicks (more on that in a second). Tuesdays are generating 20% of all of our LinkedIn traffic, which means posts on Monday and Tuesday are driving the most people to our site. The post that received the most traffic was our work culture post. However, the most engaged users are users who come to our site from LinkedIn on Wednesdays, as they have the lowest bounce rate, visit the most pages, and have the longest time on site.
• Which days generate the most goal completions on our website?
  Since 2019, LinkedIn is responsible for 9% of all our website goal completions. The day that drives the most overall goal completions is Tuesday, followed closely by Monday, which shows that the information we’re posting on Mondays and Tuesdays is more geared towards our audience taking an action on our site. 67% of all the goals generated from LinkedIn on our site are job submissions, which means our audience is highly engaged with our company and is passing along our open positions. Tuesday is also the day most responsible for non job related goal completions, think downloads or contact us.
• What type of posts generate the most engagement on LinkedIn?
  As we stated before, Wednesday drives the most engagement, but not necessarily the most users to our site or overall goal completions. This is due to the type of posts we’ve generally posted on Wednesdays. Our most engaged LinkedIn posts are cultural posts. Our post on Women’s History Month generated almost 3 times as many clicks as the next post, which was also cultural and focused on Martin Luther King Day and our volunteer efforts. Our three most engaged posts on Tuesdays deal with inviting people to our webinars or a webinar recap, which serves to drive people back to our site.
• What days have the best goal conversion rate?
  Though only making up 14% of all goal completions, Saturday posts have the best overall goal conversion rate of 8%. But these users only make up 8% of our LinkedIn traffic. Sunday is around 7%, but again, users only make up 7% of our LinkedIn traffic. What does this mean? We simply just don’t post enough on the weekends. Mondays make up 16% of our LinkedIn traffic and have a 6% goal conversion rate, which is the highest conversion rate for a weekday.

What Does All This Mean About the Best Day to Post on LinkedIn?

We’d be silly to look at all of this data and just say, “we’re doing great!” We now have actionable insights that will help us optimize our organic LinkedIn strategy. What can we do based on the above is:

• Take advantage of high engagement days. Post more content that drives people back to our site on Wednesdays, Tuesdays, and Mondays, as these are the days that:

1. Our audience is most engaged with our LinkedIn content and engagement with our site.
2. Have the best conversion rates on our site.

• Shift our cultural posts to lower engaged days like Friday and make sure we’re driving people back to our site via a blog post or video.
• Experiment posting on the weekends more often to take advantage of high conversion rates. Though there is not a lot of traffic from LinkedIn on these days, the quality of traffic is clearly strong and engaged. Our assumption: those who are getting on LinkedIn during the weekend have the spare time to actually explore and engage a little.

As we mentioned in the beginning, everyone’s audience and social presence is different, so this data may be vastly different than what you uncover. The important takeaway is that all of this data is FREE and available to you via LinkedIn and your Google Analytics. When thinking about and crafting your organic social strategy, don’t neglect these valuable insights. Lean on them to make your LinkedIn presence felt by the most people. Don’t waste your valuable time just posting randomly without actually figuring out what works.

Want &Marketing to perform a free analysis of your LinkedIn? Contact us today!