<b>The dwell-time metric LinkedIn never confirmed</b>

<b>The dwell-time metric LinkedIn never confirmed</b>

Everyone says: "Long posts win because LinkedIn rewards dwell time — the seconds people spend reading."

The claim: pad your post to 1,300 characters, add line breaks, force a slow scroll, and the algorithm rewards the lingering.

What's actually true: LinkedIn has never named dwell time as a ranking input. What its engineering blog does describe is a relevance score built from explicit engagement and creator/viewer affinity. "Dwell" got smuggled in from a 2017 Facebook paper and never left.

The tell: short posts and single images routinely outperform 1,300-char walls in the same account. If dwell ran the show, that couldn't happen weekly.

Write the length the idea needs. Track saves and profile clicks, not character count.

It's not how long they stared. It's whether the first line earned the second.