A 5-step playbook to audit your own dwell time

A 5-step playbook to audit your own dwell time

The question: which of your posts actually hold attention, versus just collect a reflexive scroll-past like?

Dwell time — the seconds a reader spends on a post before scrolling on — is a ranking input LinkedIn confirmed weighting in 2017 and never walked back. You can reverse-engineer it without their dashboard.

The playbook, run over your last 30 posts:
— Pull each post's impressions and members reached into a sheet.
— Tag format: text-only, document, image, video, poll.
— Compute (reactions + comments) / impressions as a crude engagement floor.
— Flag posts where reach exceeds impressions by 1.4x or more — that gap signals re-surfacing, a dwell proxy.
— Sort by format. The format clustering at the top is where your attention lives.

Limitations: this is inference, not the real metric — LinkedIn doesn't expose per-post dwell. Small sample, treat as directional. Re-surfacing also reflects comment recency, not only dwell.

What it means for B2B: long-form documents and 'see more' text posts consistently top these audits because they force a tap. Build the next month around your two winning formats.

Bottom line: you can't optimize a metric you never estimate — this gives you a usable proxy in an afternoon.