PipeflowWhy you should schedule LinkedIn posts
A good LinkedIn post needs a clear thought and a few quiet minutes to write. You rarely have both exactly when you actually wanted to post. If you post spontaneously, you often write under time pressure or skip it altogether.
When you schedule posts, you write them when you have time and ideas, for example on Sunday evening or in a quiet hour on Friday. LinkedIn then publishes them at the set time. That way your profile stays active regularly, even in stressful weeks.
How to schedule directly in LinkedIn
LinkedIn has its own scheduling feature, for personal profiles and for company pages. It costs nothing and is quite enough for many small businesses:
- Create a post: Click „Start a post“ as usual and write your text. Add an image or a document if needed.
- Choose the clock icon: Next to the button for posting you will find a small clock icon. Use it to set the date and time.
- Confirm scheduling: The button then says „Schedule“ instead of „Post“. One click, and the post is scheduled.
- View scheduled posts: Via the same clock icon in the post window you will find the list of your scheduled posts. There you can view, move or delete them.
When a scheduling tool is worth it
The feature in LinkedIn is practical but kept simple. An additional tool can make sense if one of these points applies to you:
- Several channels: You plan Instagram and LinkedIn and want to see both in one calendar.
- Approvals in a team: An employee writes drafts, you approve them.
- No time to write: You want to get suggestions for texts and images instead of writing every post yourself.
- Overview: You want to see at a glance which topics you covered in recent weeks.
What to prepare before scheduling
Scheduling itself takes seconds. The real work lies in the preparation. These three things help:
A list of topics. Collect questions customers ask you, experiences from projects and thoughts on your industry in a note on your phone. When you sit down, you don't have to start from scratch. You will find inspiration in the guide LinkedIn topics for business owners.
Your own photos. Take photos on the side while you work: the team in a meeting, a detail from a project, the workshop in the morning. Real images work better on LinkedIn than stock photos.
A fixed slot. Create a recurring appointment in your calendar, for example every Friday from 2 to 3 pm. Things that have a fixed place are more likely to happen.
A simple weekly routine
This is what the week of a tax advisor who posts on LinkedIn twice a week could look like:
- Friday, 30 minutes: pick two topics from the list of notes and write both posts. One explains a common question, one tells of an experience from the firm, without client data.
- Friday, 5 minutes: schedule both posts for Tuesday and Thursday morning.
- Tuesday and Thursday, 10 minutes each: after they appear, reply to comments and comment on two or three contacts' posts yourself.
- Once a month, 15 minutes: check in the statistics which posts did well and learn from them.
Setting the right time
LinkedIn is a professional network, and many people look in around their working hours. Weekday mornings or around lunchtime are therefore a good starting point. Whether that is true for your audience you can only find out by trying. How to go about it is covered in the guide on the best time for LinkedIn.
Be there when the post appears
On LinkedIn, posts live on conversations. If someone comments in the first few hours and you reply, an exchange develops, and LinkedIn is more likely to show the post to more people. So schedule your posts for times when you can check in briefly. A post that appears at eight while you are on a building site until noon has a harder time.
You can read more about how posts reach more people in the guide Increase your LinkedIn reach.
Typical scheduling mistakes
Scheduling saves a lot of time, but there are a few traps:
- Schedule and forget: Look over it once more before it appears. Does the post still fit the current situation?
- Copying Instagram text one to one: On LinkedIn the text can be more factual and longer, with few emojis and hashtags. More in the guide One topic, two channels.
- Too much at once: Better two weeks planned well than two months half heartedly.
- Only scheduling via the company page: For small businesses, the personal profile usually reaches more.
Scheduling LinkedIn posts automatically
Scheduling takes care of publishing on time, but you still have to write the posts yourself. If that is exactly what keeps slipping, you can go one step further and have your posts planned automatically. Pipeflow, for example, reads your website and plans ready LinkedIn posts with text, an image and a time every week. You read through them, change what does not fit and approve. Posts are published on your personal profile; a company page is not possible yet. How this works in detail and when it pays off is explained on the page Automate LinkedIn posts. Replying to comments stays your job, because that is what LinkedIn lives on.