Using LinkedIn with Buffer
Aside from the amazing professional network it provides, LinkedIn is the number one platform for business-to-business (B2B) lead generation, with 80% of B2B leads coming from LinkedIn vs. 13% on X/Twitter and 7% on Facebook. That probably means we should get straight into how to use LinkedIn Pages and profiles with Buffer!
In this article:
- Connecting and refreshing your LinkedIn Page and profile
- Scheduling posts to LinkedIn Pages and profiles
- Image, video, GIF, and document (PDF) specifications for LinkedIn
- Engaging with LinkedIn posts
- LinkedIn analytics
- LinkedIn error library
- Best practices for avoiding suspension when sharing to multiple profiles
These features are available for LinkedIn
| Publishing | Analytics | Engagement |
| ✓ (Pages + profiles) | ✓ (Pages) |
Connecting and refreshing your LinkedIn Page and profile
Head to your Channels area to connect your LinkedIn Page or profile: https://account.buffer.com/channels
You can connect multiple LinkedIn accounts to Buffer. To make sure Buffer knows which one you want to connect, log in to that LinkedIn account in another browser tab before trying to connect it to Buffer.
If your connected LinkedIn channel requires a refresh, check out the article Refreshing a channel in Buffer.
These are some LinkedIn channel considerations:
| Type of account | Buffer integration | Notes |
| LinkedIn Company Pages | ✓ |
Authenticate via a LinkedIn profile that has Super Admin access for the Page. |
| LinkedIn Showcase Pages | ✓ |
Authenticate via a LinkedIn profile that has Super Admin access for the Page. |
| LinkedIn profiles | ✓ |
As long as the content you're sharing across profiles is unique, there should be no issue with connecting a large number of LinkedIn profiles to Buffer. |
| LinkedIn groups | LinkedIn groups are not accessible for third-parties via LinkedIn's API. |
Troubleshooting tip: If your LinkedIn Page is not showing when you try to connect it to Buffer, verify that:
- you have Super Admin access of the page you're trying to connect to Buffer.
- you are logged into LinkedIn.com with the account that has Super Admin access before trying to connect the Page to Buffer.
Scheduling posts to LinkedIn Pages and profiles
The features available for LinkedIn pages and profiles differs slightly, so check out the table below to find out which features you can use while scheduling posts.
📝 Notes
- Best time to post: The "best time to post" feature in Analyze does not support LinkedIn. To create an optimal posting schedule, check out our article: The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn.
- Need posting inspiration? Checkout 30 Days of LinkedIn Post Prompts.
| Features & good-to-knows | Notes |
| Scheduling posts | Checkout our step-by-step guide to scheduling posts on any social channel, or peruse LinkedIn-specific details here in this table. |
| Scheduling first comments | If you are on our paid plans, you'll have the option to schedule a first comment with your LinkedIn posts.
|
| Scheduling Documents | We support scheduling PDF documents (1 PDF per post and the file size cannot exceed 100MB and 300 pages). |
| Tagging / mentions | To mention a LinkedIn Page, copy and paste the LinkedIn URL for that Page into the composer (eg: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bufferapp/).
Note: It is not possible to mention LinkedIn profiles at this time. Learn more about adding mentions (tags) in posts here. |
| Hashtags | While your hashtags won't hyperlink in the composer, they'll hyperlink once published to LinkedIn. Learn more about how hashtags work in Buffer here. |
| Daily posting limit | 50 posts per 24 hours. Learn more about Daily posting limits here. |
| Character limit | 3,000 characters per post. 1,248 characters per first comment. Learn more about character limits for each social network here. |
| Post attribution | The name that shows on the top of your LinkedIn Page posts as "Posted by [Name]" will be the name of the LinkedIn Admin who connected the LinkedIn Page to Buffer. No worries, though; your followers don't see this sentence at all. |
At this time, we do not support the creation of LinkedIn polls through Buffer. If you'd like to see us support them in the future, you can upvote this suggestion on our feature request board.
Image, video, GIF, and document specifications for LinkedIn
LinkedIn supports images, videos, GIFs, and documents (PDF).
| Videos | Images | GIFs | Documents (PDF Carousels) | |
| Number allowed per post | 1 |
9 | 1 | 1 |
| Video length | 3 seconds - 30 minutes | - | 3-60 seconds | - |
| File size | 1GB | up to 10MB | up to 10MB | up to 100MB and 300 pages |
| Dimensions / Aspect ratio | 1280 x 720 pixels | 1200 x 627 pixels (optimal for LinkedIn) Square (best for sharing across social networks) |
- | - |
| File types supported | MP4, MOV, AVI, M4V, link | JPG, PNG, HEIC, WebP | GIF | |
| Custom thumbnail support | Not for video uploads, Yes for video links |
- | Not supported | - |
| Autoplay | Yes, if MP4 and between 75KB and 200MB |
- | Yes | - |
| Alt text | - | Yes | - | - |
Engaging with LinkedIn posts
Buffer's engagement features are available only for Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn is not supported within Buffer's engagement features at this time.
LinkedIn analytics
Publishing posts is one part of the equation, but how do we know if our strategy is resonating with our followers? That’s where your analytics come in.
There are two places to look for LinkedIn analytics in your Buffer account:
- To get a quick view of your post metrics for your LinkedIn Pages and profiles, go to the Publish tab and then the Sent tab.
For LinkedIn profiles, you can access the following basic analytics:
- On both our Free and paid plans, you can access likes and comments.
For LinkedIn Pages, you can access the following basic analytics:
- On our Free plan, you can access likes, comments, and impressions.
On our paid plans, you can access likes, comments, impressions, shares, and engagement rate.
To see more advanced analytics for your LinkedIn Pages (advanced analytics are not available for LinkedIn profiles), the Analyze tab at the top of your dashboard is available on the Essentials and Team plans. Checkout the LinkedIn metric descriptions we have available.
- Overview: gives insight into your overall engagement levels for your profile over time. Learn more about the Performance overview on your analytics dashboard.
- Posts: provides a history of all of your published posts and how they are performing. Learn more about Analyzing your posts within your analytics dashboard.
- Answers: shares answers to questions such as the best day, type, and frequency to post. Learn more about Answering questions about your social media strategy.
📝 Notes:
- While you will see analytics for LinkedIn posts you created via LinkedIn natively, analytics for PDF carousel posts are not available.
- When you first connect your LinkedIn Page, we will backfill data for up to 6 months or 500 posts. Learn more about Why your data in Buffer might differ from your native analytics here.
- Analytics refresh for the last 500 LinkedIn Page posts daily. Once your post becomes the 501st newest post, we stop refreshing its data.
- We are able to pull in metrics for LinkedIn sponsored posts.
LinkedIn error library
We don't currently have an error library for LinkedIn, but feel free to reach out to our Customer Advocates at hello@buffer.com if you're hitting any errors.
Best practices for avoiding suspension when sharing to multiple profiles
While it is technically possible to connect a large number of LinkedIn profiles to Buffer, this is not recommended and can result in issues like account suspension (on LinkedIn’s side).
Social networks in general, but particularly LinkedIn and Facebook, have started to actively discourage personal profiles from being used for business and advertising purposes. They intend for personal profiles to be approached and treated as independent, personal accounts, where the content shared is authentic and created/shared by the owner of the profile.
If the LinkedIn team notices that duplicate content is being shared to profiles, they will often suspend those accounts. Suspensions are usually temporary, but will happen over and over again if the behavior continues.
📝Do you have a LinkedIn feature suggestion? We’d love for you to submit or upvote it here on our feature suggestions board.