LinkedIn’s new feature lets you schedule posts for later

LinkedIn is rolling out a new feature that allows users to schedule posts to send at a later time.

The Microsoft-owned social network has seemingly been testing the new feature internally for several months already, according to at least one online report back in August from web developer and app researcher Nima Owji, but it seems that LinkedIn is now readying things for prime time, according to a growing number of reports across social media.

Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and renowned tipster, confirmed yesterday that he was now seeing the post-scheduling feature inside the Android app and on the LinkedIn website itself. Internally at TechCrunch, it’s a bit of a mixed bag with some of us seeing the feature and others not, and we have managed to independently confirm the feature on the web.

Those that do have the feature will see a little clock icon beside the “post” button within the message compose box.

When the user clicks on the clock icon, they’re presented with an option to choose a specific date and half-hourly slot that they want to schedule their post for.

Marketers rejoice

While millions of marketers, influencers, and “thought leaders” the world over will no doubt rejoice at this new feature, it is worth noting that similar functionality has been available for a while already through third-party platforms such as Hootsuite and Buffer. However, not everyone is happy giving third-party platforms access to their LinkedIn accounts for data-privacy reasons — plus, native functionality is nearly always more convenient, particularly for those who only want to share a specific piece of content to their LinkedIn followers.

In truth, native post-scheduling has always been a fairly notable absence from such a widely-used social network as LinkedIn which claims some 875 million members globally. The likes of Twitter (via TweetDeck) and Facebook have offered scheduling for a while already, not to mention email clients such as Gmail which allow you to send messages while you’re fast asleep.

TechCrunch has reached out to LinkedIn for more information on the new post-scheduling feature, including when everyone can expect to have access. We’ll update here when, or if, we hear back.