The practical answers · Part 1 of 2
What to post, how often, and when.
Three questions every creator asks, answered with 1,941,394 posts we collected ourselves. Post images and documents, and write long. Publish early in your own morning. Post less often than you think, unless you're already big.
September 2026 · 7 min read
Images beat text, creator by creator
We compared each creator's image posts with their own text posts. The typical creator does 3.27 times better with images. 92.4% of creators do.
Long beats short
A post over 2,200 characters earns 3.5× what a post under 300 earns, for the typical creator. True for 90.1% of creators who write both.
The week, at three to five posts
Above 50,000 followers, the weekly total goes from 200.1 to 691.2. Each post shrinks from 206 to 92. The week more than triples.
The three best hours
Posts published at 5:00, 6:00 and 7:00 local time beat their author's usual post 50.8%, 50.4% and 49.6% of the time. No other hour gets above 48.1%.
01 · What to post
Documents win. One-liners lose.
Ask what to post and you get a confident answer with nothing behind it. So we counted: 1,941,394 posts by 9,882 creators, every one collected by us. Line up every post by engagement, take the middle one for each type, and the order is clear.
Two words come up a lot. Engagement is likes, comments and reposts added together. A median is the one in the middle when you line them all up. One giant post can drag an average anywhere, so we use the median. When we say a typical post, we mean the median.
Median engagement by format
1,941,394 posts · 9,882 creators · likes + comments + reposts
A document earns six and a half times what a plain text post earns. A document is a PDF you flip through page by page. An article is LinkedIn’s own tool for long pieces. A breakout is a post that does three times what its author usually gets: images break out 9.79% of the time, documents only 4.69%. Documents are your steady post. Images are your lottery ticket.
Maybe documents only look good because big accounts make them. So we checked every creator against themselves.
Images beat text for 92.4% of creators. The typical creator does 3.27× better with an image. Documents beat text for 86.9%. That is almost everyone, so a few big accounts cannot be the reason.
Documents are your steady post. Images are your lottery ticket.
02 · How long
The cheapest post to make is the one that does least
Length matters as much as type. A post over 2,200 characters, letters and spaces included, earns 3.5× what a post under 300 earns. That is true for 90.1% of the 2,063 creators who have written both.
Median engagement, one-line posts
The post that takes ten seconds to write.
Median engagement, ten lines or more
Ten or more lines beats a single line by 3.5×, for 90.9% of creators.
Three things do badly. People still recommend all three.
Polls. A median of 6. They break out 1.1% of the time. Above 50,000 followers, not one poll broke out.
Articles. A median of 5 across 405,228 of them. The weakest thing on the platform.
Video for reach. Compared with the same creator’s images, video does 0.93× as well, which is a little worse. Only 38.6% of creators do better on video. Make it because you want to, not for reach.
One more. Opening with a question does nothing. It lands at 1×, meaning exactly the same as not asking one. Only 42.1% of creators do better with a question.
03 · How often
Each extra post shrinks the typical post. The week grows anyway.
Two things are true at once, and most advice hides one. We grouped creators by posts per week and by follower count, so big and small accounts don't get mixed up. Then we took each creator's own typical post and typical week.
1,000 to 5,000 followers
from under once a week to three to five
Wrong trade · keep to one or two
10,000 to 20,000 followers
from one or two a week to three to five
Costs nothing · post more
Above 50,000 followers
from under once a week to three to five
Right trade · post more
Post more and your typical post shrinks. Take accounts with more than 50,000 followers. Post less than once a week and the typical post gets 206. Post once or twice and it gets 147. Post three to five times and it gets 92. At 1,000 to 5,000 followers the same steps go 10, then 3, then 2.
Post more and your week grows anyway. Take the same accounts with more than 50,000 followers. The weekly total goes 200.1, then 475.2, then 691.2. Each post is less than half the size, but the week adds up to more than three times as much.
Under 10,000 followers, post once or twice a week. At 1,000 to 5,000 followers the typical post drops from 10 to 2 and the week only moves from 4 to 17.2. Not enough readers yet for the extra posts to reach.
Above 10,000 followers, post three to five times a week. At 10,000 to 20,000 the typical post holds at 26 either way, and the week goes from 74.2 to 180. Posting more costs almost nothing there.
Posting more makes the week bigger and each post smaller. The right trade above 10,000 followers. The wrong one below it.
04 · When
Early, in your own morning, before the crowd
Timing needs a different test, because how big a post gets depends mostly on whose post it is. So for every post we asked one question: did it beat its own author's typical post? Half of anyone's posts do, so a normal hour sits at 50%. Any hour above that is a good hour.
Share of posts that beat their own author’s typical post, by local hour
1,882,669 timed posts · local time from the country on the profile
The day has one good window, and it is over before most people start. 5:00, 6:00 and 7:00 return 50.8%, 50.4% and 49.6%. From 21:00 to 23:00 the figure sits at 43.3%, 43.1% and 43.3%. People post too late: 8.1% to 8.6% of everything goes out between 9:00 and 11:00, and by then the share has already fallen to 47.5%, 47% and 46.8%.
Best slot of the week: Monday 5:00
Sunday 5:00 is next at 52.9%. Every top slot is an early morning.
Worst slot of the week: Friday 23:00
All the bottom slots are late nights and small hours.
Monday, the best weekday
Sunday is second at 47.0%, though only 6.3% of posts go out on a Sunday. Saturday is last at 45.1%.
Points between best and worst weekday
Monday to Friday all land between 46.1% and 47.4%. Sunday sits inside that range.
The weekday barely matters. The gap from best to worst is 2.3 percentage points. That is smaller than the jump from 4:00 to 5:00 in the morning.
Publish early, in your own time zone, before the mid-morning crowd arrives. Late night is the only clearly bad time. Even that only costs about eight points compared with the best hour.
Keep it in proportion. The weekday is worth 2.3 points. The hour is worth about eight. Swapping text for an image gets the typical creator 3.27× more. Timing is free, so get it right, but type and length are where the real gains are.
05 · What to do
Four simple rules
- 1
Post images and documents, and write long.
Skip polls and articles. Make video only when you want to.
- 2
Match how often you post to how big you are.
Under 10,000 followers, once or twice a week. Above it, three to five.
- 3
Publish between 5:00 and 7:00 in your own time zone.
Avoid 21:00 to midnight. Stop worrying about the weekday.
- 4
Don't open with a question.
It does nothing. Put the point in the first line instead.
Sources · show
- our corpus check, September 2026: 8,301,657 posts by 13,262 accounts, cleaned to 1,941,394 posts by 9,882 creators. 3,380 accounts dropped as job feeds, automation, hiring feeds or low-volume; each remaining author capped at 400 posts. Post dates read from each post's activity id.
- Timing and frequency pass, September 2026: the same cleaned set, restricted to creators with at least 20 posts and a usable country, leaving 1,882,669 timed posts. Hour and weekday are local to the creator. Every slot named on this page has at least 200 posts behind it.
- Within-author comparisons use creators with at least 5 posts on each side. One median is divided by the other with 1 added to each; the figure reported is the median ratio across creators.
- Creators posting six to nine times a week are too few to quote and are left out. No cleaned creator posts 10 or more times a week, because that rate was one of the cut-offs for automated accounts.
- Sensitivity check, the same pass with no per-author cap: 2,732,130 posts kept. Six of the eight within-author ratios are unchanged to two decimal places; document versus text moves from 2.5× to 2.59× and comment-gating on reactions from 1.21× to 1.23×. Nothing quoted here changes. The capped figures give each creator about equal weight.
- Photographs: Pexels, free licence.