I Accidentally Ran a Posting-Frequency Experiment

There's a piece of advice you'll hear constantly if you spend any time thinking about LinkedIn: don't post more than once a day. And if you do post multiple times, space them out by at least a few hours, or you'll cannibalize your own reach.

It's repeated so often it's basically treated as gospel.

A while back, I accidentally tested it.

One morning, around 6:30am, I posted twice within minutes of each other. One was scheduled in advance (I'd forgotten about it), and the other was something I wrote fresh when I woke up, without checking what was already queued.

By the conventional wisdom, this should have been close to a disaster: two posts competing for the same audience at the same time, both getting cannibalized, both underperforming.

The results were almost identical. Not "both did okay." Nearly the same numbers, on both posts, at the same time.

I want to be careful not to overclaim from a single data point. This is one accidental experiment, not a controlled study, and LinkedIn's algorithm changes constantly. But it was enough to make me question how much of "the rules" around posting are based on actual evidence versus repeated folklore that nobody's bothered to test.

A lot of platform advice falls into this category, repeated so often, by so many people, that it starts to feel like established fact, when really it's an assumption nobody's checked in a while (or maybe ever).

Worth remembering, the next time "everyone knows" something about how a platform works: has anyone actually tested that recently, or is it just something everyone keeps repeating?

Originally posted on Linkedin. Join the conversation here.

Hi5,

LD 🌶️