How to Schedule Posts on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the best platform to connect with (and market to) most professionals.

Over the past five years, LinkedIn has launched features to help people build an audience on the platform — posts with polls and images, a dedicated creator mode, follow-functionality, newsletters, and long-form articles.

One thing is still missing from LinkedIn: the ability to schedule posts in advance.

You’re busy. As much as you’d like to set a calendar reminder to post to LinkedIn at 9:30 AM on a Tuesday, you’ve got better stuff to do — like an exec presentation, sales call, or demo. 

Let’s dive into how to schedule posts on LinkedIn.

Can I Schedule a Post Natively on LinkedIn?

No. You can’t schedule a post natively on LinkedIn. But you can schedule a post using third-party tools.

Can I Schedule a Post on LinkedIn with Third-Party Tools?

Yes. You can schedule a post on LinkedIn using a third-party tool like Letterdrop, HootSuite, and SproutSocial, to name a few. The right tool for you depends on your goals.

What's the Best Tool to Schedule Posts on Linkedin?

Each tool has its focus.

If you’re a content marketer at a B2B company focused on content distribution, Letterdrop is likely the best LinkedIn scheduling tool for you. Other tools are a better fit if you’re looking for a social CRM, chatbots, social listening, or general social media management features.

Letterdrop’s LinkedIn integration is focused on helping you work collaboratively with your team to distribute content, build an audience on LinkedIn, and turn them into leads.

Letterdrop is the best LinkedIn scheduler for businesses that want to:

1. Follow best practices for LinkedIn audience-building
2. Automatically add links to LinkedIn comments
3. Automatically distribute blog posts to LinkedIn with one click
4. Get drafts of LinkedIn posts reviewed and approved by team members
5. View and plan all LinkedIn posts on a content calendar
6. Schedule LinkedIn posts 5 mins, 30 mins, an hour, or 24 hours after publishing a blog post (or at a specific time in the future)
7. Use @mentions and #hashtags in LinkedIn posts

Six Simple Steps for Scheduling Posts on LinkedIn Using Letterdrop

1. Connect One or More LinkedIn Accounts to Letterdrop

‎Each team member can connect their LinkedIn account to Letterdrop. If they're admins of LinkedIn pages, you can schedule posts to those LinkedIn pages too.

As a content marketing manager, you can connect your personal and company accounts.

We also recommend linking the accounts of your CEO, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, SDRs, and AEs. Anybody involved in sales and marketing should be building an audience to leverage your content.

Your customers trust other people, not company pages. Most people on LinkedIn are connected with and follow other individuals, not companies. Many companies post only to their company page and not through their employees' accounts.

This is a mistake. Audiences care about people, not brands.

2. Draft and Schedule Your Posts in Advance‎

You can start drafting LinkedIn posts in Letterdrop’s LinkedIn editor. It has support for:

1. @mentions and #hashtags
2. images and video
3. embedded articles‎

Publish your LinkedIn post right away or schedule it for later.

If you’re putting a blog post on LinkedIn, you can either:

• Publish your LinkedIn post and your blog post at the same time, or
• Delay the LinkedIn post by 10 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or a day after the blog post

3. Figure Out When to Post to LinkedIn From Your Content Calendar

Look at your content calendar to decide what date to post to Linkedin.

Don’t double post on the same day. Your posts will cannibalize each other’s impressions and engagement. You also want to fill any gaps and publish to LinkedIn consistently.‎

4. Request a Review for Your LinkedIn Post

You can request a review if you need a second pair of eyes to look at your LinkedIn post.

Your teammates will get an email notification telling them to take a look. They can then edit the LinkedIn post and approve it. If a review is requested, the post will only go out at the scheduled time once it is approved.

5. Automatically Distribute Blog Posts and Post The Link in the Comments

GrowthRocks conducted an experiment comparing two formats of blog post links that marketers use — Link in Post and Link in Comments.

The results showed that posting a blog post link in the comment is opened 2.7x more than when a link is in the main body of the post.

LinkedIn doesn’t like people linking out of their platform. It doesn't promote your posts to as many people when there are external links in the body. To get around this and maximize your distribution, you should include links in the comments instead.

Letterdrop lets you create blog posts and automatically distribute them on LinkedIn.

Letterdrop takes care of distribution best practices for you.

1. It automatically generates the final URL to link to your blog post
2. It attaches a unique tracking parameter to your blog post link so you can track the traffic it generates
3. It automatically inserts the generated link into the comments of your LinkedIn post

These automations ensure that you:

1. Don’t forget to distribute your blog post via LinkedIn
2. Don’t forget to include the final link with UTM tracking in your LinkedIn post
3. Automatically follow best practices by having the link to your LinkedIn blog post in the first comment

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6. Follow up and View Stats Later On

If you’re curious about how your LinkedIn posts are doing, you can see the number of engagements and comments across posts in your content calendar.‎

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Why Post on LinkedIn Frequently?

To build an audience on LinkedIn, post frequently — at least three times per week. Educate your audience about this to maintain engagement.

LinkedIn Has 800M Users and Is Growing

LinkedIn statistics show that it has more than 800 million users (as of April 2022) and is growing rapidly — with 20 million new users in Q1 of 2022 alone.

20% of Linkedin Members Are Decision-Makers

More than 20% of LinkedIn users are decision-makers at their companies. You can connect and build relationships with senior members of companies who control the budget. These are people at companies who decide whether to buy your product.

Leave a good impression on decision-makers with your content. They'll be more likely to engage with you when you reach out to sell them your product.

LinkedIn Generates 4x More Leads than Other Platforms for B2B Sales

LinkedIn has a 2.74% visitor-to-lead conversion rate for B2B buyers. That's higher than any other social platform. That's nearly four times the conversion rate of Twitter (0.69%) and Facebook (0.77%).‎

Why Schedule Posts on LinkedIn?

To build an audience on LinkedIn, post frequently. You probably don’t have the time to stay pressed to your computer and post to LinkedIn at the right time.

Consistency Helps You Build an Audience on LinkedIn

Ad-hoc content creation is hard.

You'll slip up if you don't plan your content creation process. Not having a plan leads to long droughts on your LinkedIn feed.

Content marketing is a long-term customer acquisition strategy. You don't know when a piece of content will do well or not, so consistency is the best strategy. It at least gives you a chance at getting lucky and staying top of mind with your LinkedIn audience.

Here's how we usually see content marketers gradually go off track:

1. They forget to post
2. They’re too busy to post
3. They’re sick or otherwise unable to post
4. They're blocked by review/approvals from their teammates or manager
5. They run out of ideas and don’t know what to post

Content Planning Helps You Stay Consistent

You can avoid such pitfalls with content planning. We recommend that most content marketers plan their LinkedIn social media calendar in advance. Align with your team to understand your top-level goals.

Ask yourself questions like:

1. Who is your target audience? What is important to them? What do they need help with?
2. Do we have any customers we can feature in a case study?
3. Are there blog posts that need to be distributed?
4. Do we have old content that we can repurpose?

Figure out your monthly priorities, and then decide what/how often you want to post. For example, if you post three times a week, you'll have 12 posts a month.

Letterdrop reduces complexity by having certain types of content that go out on certain days:

1. Mondays — we feature our customers and discuss industry trends and new learnings
2. Wednesdays — we distribute a long-form blog post on LinkedIn
3. Fridays — we showcase a new product feature

When you know what you want to post, it's often easier to sit down and write your content all at once in a focused block. If your teammates need to review your content, you can give them enough time to take a look and make edits, so they don't block you later.

If you use LinkedIn's native features, you'll have to wait until you want to publish your posts to write them. With Letterdrop, you can write your LinkedIn posts now, get them reviewed, and schedule them on your calendar. You can have all your LinkedIn content planned and scheduled for the rest of the month, so you no longer have to worry. You're all set.

If you're a B2B content marketer wanting to build an audience on LinkedIn to bring in more leads, try Letterdrop.