LinkedIn 2024 Study: Best Days, Times, and Post Formats

Formats, hashtags, posting times: Metricool’s latest study reveals the best practices to adopt on the professional social network LinkedIn 2024.

Metricool, a company specializing in social media analysis and management, unveiled its latest study on the professional social network LinkedIn on Tuesday, February 20. The study aims to “provide answers to frequently asked questions by business accounts, content creators, and social media managers,” said the solutions provider, particularly regarding posting frequencies, formats, or preferred schedules.

To compile this report, Metricool analyzed over 41,000 business pages and 1.5 million posts of all types (carousels, posts with images or image galleries, posts with videos, and exclusively textual posts that may contain polls or links) over a period of 122 days, from October 2023 to January 2024. To simplify the analysis, the studied pages were grouped into several categories based on the number of followers:

• Tiny (24 928 pages) : entre 0 et 500 followers,
• Small (10 196 pages) : entre 500 et 2 000 followers,
• Medium (5 880 pages) : entre 2 000 et 10 000 followers,
• Big (1 777 pages) : entre 10 000 et 50 000 followers,
• Huge (490 pages) : entre 50 000 et 55 millions de followers.

Which format should be preferred on LinkedIn?

The Carousel: The King Format

While it seemed more complex to establish a direct link between the number of impressions and the posting frequency, Metricool easily identified the most popular format on the platform. As anticipated, it is the carousel format, which generates an average of 1387 impressions in the analyzed sample. It surpasses posts including images (703), videos (672), and exclusively textual content (589).

Moreover, it is the format that generates, on average, the most engagement (32%), clicks (427), shares (1.79), likes (14.5), and comments (0.49) on LinkedIn in 2024. On the other end of the spectrum, purely textual posts generate the least engagement, with an average of 7.6 likes, 16.9 clicks, and 0.2 comments per post.

But how can we explain this enthusiasm for carousels? Less common on the platform, they have the advantage of offering the possibility “to tell the content (…) in addition to their visual appeal,” decrypts Metricool. Benefiting from more resources allocated to social media, accounts classified in the Huge category (between 50,000 and 55 million followers) rely more regularly on this content format, with an average of 3.88 carousels per month. However, Metricool observes that carousel distribution is a widespread strategy on LinkedIn, regardless of page size.

Should hashtags be added to LinkedIn 2024 posts?

Within the examined sample of posts, Metricool identified over 7.3 million hashtags and, above all, observed a trend: it is recommended to associate between 1 and 3 hashtags with your posts, rather than choosing none. But it is also strongly advised against saturating your posts with hashtags, as this will significantly affect the average clicks, impressions, likes, or shares.

For example: on average, a post incorporating between 1 and 3 hashtags obtains 927 impressions, 76.7 clicks, or 14.7 “Likes”, whereas a post containing 7 hashtags only generates 408 impressions, 41 clicks, and 8.4 likes. However, engagement on the post is higher with 7 hashtags (12.4% engagement versus 10.1%).

When is the best time to post on LinkedIn 2024?

Regarding the day of publication, Metricool notes, “considering both the total number of impressions and the day when the most posts are observed,” that it is preferable to publish content during the week on LinkedIn. On average, more impressions are generated by posts published – in order – on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. As shown in the graph below, impression statistics are significantly less favorable on Saturday and Sunday.