Dwell time
Dwell time is the number of seconds a reader spends on a single post before scrolling away, and it is one of the strongest quality signals social platforms use to decide whether to show that post to more people.
Dwell time is useful to a ranking system precisely because it is hard to fake. A like costs one tap and people give them out of politeness. Attention costs time, and nobody spends thirty seconds on something out of obligation. LinkedIn has referenced dwell time in its own engineering write-ups as a signal that captures value a click cannot — a post someone reads fully and does not react to is often better content than a post someone reflexively likes in half a second.
The mechanics of earning it are less about tricks than structure. The 'see more' cut on LinkedIn appears after roughly the first two or three lines, so the opening either buys the expand or it does not. After the expand, dwell time comes from short paragraphs, line breaks that keep the eye moving, a concrete story rather than a summary, and a payoff placed near the end instead of the top. Carousels and native video have a built-in advantage here because swiping and watching both consume time.
The misconception worth killing is that longer automatically means better dwell time. It does not — an eleven-hundred-word post that loses people at line four produces a worse signal than a tight two-hundred-word post read to the end, because abandonment is measured too. The goal is completion, not length. If you cannot defend a paragraph's presence, cutting it usually raises your average dwell time rather than lowering it.
Frequently asked questions
What is dwell time on LinkedIn?
How do I increase dwell time on my posts?
Is dwell time more important than likes?
Hook Generator — Write first lines that earn the 'see more' expand instead of getting scrolled past. Open the free tool →