Short answer: send your LinkedIn messages on weekdays, during the person's office hours, and forget the magic hour. Timing affects the chance of being seen, not the urge to reply, and a good message sent on Tuesday at 2 pm beats an empty one sent at "the ideal time". Measure on your own list before trusting a chart found online.
Does the time of sending really change anything?
The time of sending decides one thing: where your message sits in the inbox when the person opens it. A message sent on Friday at 7 pm will be buried on Monday under everything that arrived over the weekend. The same message sent on Tuesday at 10 am has a fair chance of being on top when she looks.
That is all timing does. It does not make an ask lighter, nor a message more personal. The charts that promise a doubled reply rate by hour come from tool vendors and measure their own customers, not yours. We quote none of them here, because we could not verify their method.
Timing matters, then, but after the target list and the text. If your messages get no reply, look elsewhere first: we listed the causes in LinkedIn messages with no reply: why?.
Which days of the week should you send?
Monday to Friday, and preferably Tuesday to Thursday. Monday morning is crowded: the person deals with what piled up, and a message from someone she does not know comes last. On Friday afternoon she often has her mind elsewhere, and your message ages all weekend.
That preference is a light one. A good message sent on a Monday gets a reply, and a message sent on a Wednesday does not rescue a bad target list. What is safer is avoiding the weekend: most people do not check LinkedIn on Saturday, and a message sent that day leaves their field of view before entering it.
The limit: your target may live on another rhythm. A restaurant owner, a real estate agent or a doctor does not have a sales director's week. For them, the "Tuesday to Thursday" rule is worth nothing until you have checked it.
What time of day?
Between 9 am and 6 pm, in the person's time zone, with a slight edge to mid-morning and early afternoon. Those are the moments when people glance at LinkedIn between two tasks, outside the rush of the start of the day.
The most common mistake is the time zone. A message sent at 10 am from Paris lands at 4 am in Montreal, and at 5 pm in Dubai. If your list spans several countries, split it by time zone before choosing an hour.
The other mistake is the message sent at night by a tool. The person gets a notification at 3 am, and she knows no human wrote it at that hour. Even if she reads it the next day, the timestamp stays visible in the conversation.
How should a tool space out the sends?
A tool that sends twenty messages at exactly 9:00 is easy to spot. A real person's sends spread through the day, with gaps that vary. That is the rhythm a tool has to reproduce, and it is also what protects your account.
Sales Farmer sends by default Monday to Friday, between 9 am and 6 pm, with a random gap between two sends and never a burst at the start of the window. The extension only works while your browser is open on the logged-in profile, so nothing goes out at 3 am while you sleep. That window belongs to the automatic mode, and it is not made for the night.
This has a consequence: if you close your computer at 3 pm, the sends planned after that do not go out that day. That is a choice, not an oversight. A send that goes out without you looks like a robot, and we prefer one send fewer to a restricted account.
How do you measure the right time on your own list?
Change one variable, the day or the hour, and keep everything else identical: the target, the text, the follow-up. Send the same message to two batches of at least twenty comparable people, one on Tuesday morning, the other on Thursday afternoon. Count replies after a week.
Twenty people per batch is a minimum, not a guarantee. With a reply rate around 10%, a batch of twenty yields two replies, and one reply more or less changes everything. If the gap between the two batches is one or two replies, you have learned nothing, and that is an honest conclusion.
Timing is measured last. Test the opening line first, then the ask, then only the day and hour. In Sales Farmer, the "What works for you" card compares first-message angles and shows no percentage under twenty invitations per angle. To read results without fooling yourself, see our page on campaign analytics.
FAQ
Should invitations and messages go out at the same time?
No, and it is not necessary. The invitation can leave at any time during the working day; the message after acceptance goes out when the acceptance arrives, usually within hours or days. What matters is that both stay within the person's office hours.
Can you send a LinkedIn message on the weekend?
You can, but it will be read on Monday, under a pile of others. If you write on Sunday, prepare the message and send it on Monday late morning, once the first wave has passed.
Is the best time the same for a follow-up?
Yes, same rule: weekdays, daytime. What changes in a follow-up is the gap from the previous message, three to seven days in general. The rhythm and the follow-up texts are in our guide to LinkedIn follow-up messages.
How long after acceptance should the first message go out?
Within 24 hours, while the person still remembers accepting. After a few days, your name means nothing to her anymore, and the message starts from zero.