The best time to post on LinkedIn is the time you can keep

Search for the best time to post on LinkedIn and you will find a different answer on every page, usually with a chart attached. Tuesday at ten. Wednesday at eight. Thursday at noon. The charts are built from different audiences, different years and different methods, and none of them is built from your audience.

There is a more useful way to think about it. The best time to post is a time that is reasonable for the people you want to reach and that you can hit every time without thinking.

What is worth knowing about timing

• Your readers have working days. A post that goes out while they are asleep sits under hours of newer posts by the time they wake up.
• Weekday mornings in your audience's timezone are a sensible default for most business content. People check LinkedIn around the start of the working day.
• Weekends are quieter for most work topics. That can mean fewer readers, or less competition. Test it before you rule it in or out.
• The difference between two reasonable times on the same morning is usually small compared with the difference between a good post and a weak one.

Post in your audience's timezone

If you live in Amsterdam and your clients are in New York, a 09:00 post in Amsterdam lands at three in the morning for them. Decide where most of your readers are and schedule for their morning.

• Mostly one region: pick a morning slot in their timezone.
• Split across Europe and the US east coast: late morning in Europe lands at the start of the day in New York.
• Spread worldwide: pick the region where your paying clients sit, and accept that others will see it later.

Why one fixed time works

A fixed slot removes a decision from every day. You never wonder whether now is a good moment, and you never delay a finished post while waiting for a better one. Regular readers also start to expect you. If your posts appear at the same time every weekday, some people will look for them.

A fixed time also makes gaps visible. When the slot is empty you notice at once, instead of realising at the end of the month that you posted four times.

Batching makes the schedule possible

Nobody keeps a daily slot by writing each post that morning. The schedule works when the writing happens in batches and the posting happens on its own.

1. Choose one writing session a week, at a time you protect like a client meeting.
2. Write or approve enough posts to fill every slot in the following week, plus one spare.
3. Schedule each post into its slot as soon as it is ready.
4. Keep a short list of evergreen posts for weeks when the session gets cancelled.
5. Check the queue once midweek so an empty day never comes as a surprise.

An example weekly schedule

Here is how this looks for a founder posting four times a week to a mostly European audience:

• Friday, 15:00 to 16:30: writing session for next week.
• Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 09:00 Amsterdam time: posts go out.
• Each posting day, 09:00 to 09:30 and again at lunch: reply to comments.
• Wednesday: no post. Used for commenting on other people's posts instead.

When to break the schedule

Some posts are tied to a moment: a launch, a talk you gave today, news in your field. Post those when they matter. Everything else goes in the slot. If a timely post takes the day's slot, move the planned post to the next free day instead of posting both.

Daylight saving deserves a mention. When clocks change in one region and not another, a slot set in the wrong timezone shifts by an hour. Schedule in the timezone of the audience so the post stays at nine in their morning all year.

Holidays are the other exception. On days when most of your readers are off work, such as the week between Christmas and New Year, you can pause the schedule or post something lighter. Decide that in advance, when you plan the month, so the pause is planned.

How GoodSocials handles this

Every GoodSocials board publishes at 09:00 in the board's timezone, taken from your browser and changeable in settings. The calendar shows one post per day, and you drag a ready card onto a day to schedule it.