LinkedIn schedules posts natively, from the web and the app, so a tool is for the usual reasons: the post goes to other networks too, a client approves it first, or a team shares one calendar. What a tool can do on LinkedIn depends on which of two API products it was admitted to, and that is the part this page explains first, because it decides whether your Company Page can be scheduled at all.
Profile or Company Page
LinkedIn has two publishing products. "Share on LinkedIn" is self-serve and posts to the personal profile of the person who connected. "Community Management" is reviewed and posts to Company Pages, reads their analytics and comments. The review takes weeks and LinkedIn grants it to a narrowing list of tools.
Preflight posts to personal profiles today; Company Pages come after LinkedIn's review. Buffer, Hootsuite, Metricool, Publer and Kontentino post to Pages. If the Page is the account you need scheduled this month, that is the deciding fact; the rest of this page is about what either kind of post can hold. Agencies weighing tools on this point can read Kontentino alternatives.
What a post can hold
| Limit | |
|---|---|
| Text | 3,000 characters |
| Pictures | up to 20 per post, JPEG, PNG or GIF, up to 10 MB each, alt text on each |
| Video | one per post, MP4, 3 seconds to 30 minutes, up to 500 MB; not alongside pictures |
| Link | one, shown as a preview card with a title |
| First comment | posted right after the post |
| Visibility | public |
| Editing | not through the API; delete and post again |
| Analytics | none for personal profile posts; LinkedIn does not grant the scope |
A video is uploaded in 4 MB parts, each confirmed by LinkedIn, which is why a long one takes a while and why a dropped connection resumes rather than restarts in Preflight.
The markup rule nobody warns you about
LinkedIn's post text is "little text": parentheses, brackets, asterisks, underscores, tildes, pipes, the at sign and a few more are markup, and an unescaped one makes LinkedIn reject the post or silently eat part of it. A tool has to escape every one of them and keep hashtags in LinkedIn's own form so they stay clickable. Preflight does both; the symptom of a tool that does not is a post with a sentence missing after a stray bracket. One consequence: an @mention typed in the text is published as plain text, because mentioning a member through the API needs their internal id, which a scheduler is not given.
What no tool can do
- Polls, documents and events. The self-serve product has none of them; documents (the PDF carousel) are a Pages-only feature in any case.
- Edit a published post. Delete and repost.
- Read likes and comments on a profile post. The scope is not granted to schedulers, so no tool shows analytics for personal posts; Pages are different.
- Post as someone else. Each person connects their own profile; a token lasts 60 days and then that person reconnects.
Scheduling in Preflight
Tick LinkedIn among the targets and the composer counts 3,000 characters for it beside the other networks' limits, refuses a video with pictures, checks the file sizes and the video's length, and escapes the text at publish. Add a first comment for the link if you prefer the post without one, and alt text for each picture. The post goes to the queue or to a fixed minute, and a client who has to approve it gets a link. LinkedIn is one channel of the three on the free plan; plans are on the pricing page. The figures above for LinkedIn and eleven other networks are on the limits table, and a developer posting through the API will find the same rules in the documentation.
Questions people ask
- Can Preflight post to a LinkedIn Company Page?
- Not yet. It posts to personal profiles through LinkedIn's self-serve product; Company Pages need LinkedIn's Community Management review, which is in progress. Buffer, Hootsuite, Metricool and Kontentino post to Pages today.
- What is the LinkedIn post character limit?
- 3,000 characters for the text. Pictures are up to 20 per post at 10 MB each; a video is up to 30 minutes and 500 MB, and cannot share a post with pictures.
- Why does my scheduled LinkedIn post lose text after a bracket?
- LinkedIn treats brackets, parentheses, asterisks, underscores and the at sign as markup. A tool must escape them; one that does not gets a rejected post or a truncated one. Preflight escapes them and keeps hashtags clickable.
- Why does no tool show analytics for my LinkedIn profile posts?
- LinkedIn does not grant the scope that reads a member's post figures to schedulers. Page analytics are available to tools admitted to the Community Management product.