GLOSSARY · LINKEDIN MECHANICS
Dwell time
Dwell time is the amount of time a member spends with a piece of content on screen, measured both as time the post is visible in the feed and as time spent after clicking to expand or open it. LinkedIn's engineering team has described dwell time publicly as one of the signals its feed ranking uses, because it reflects whether people actually read something rather than scrolled past it. For creators, dwell time is a reminder that a post which holds attention for twenty seconds is treated differently from one that earns a reflex like and nothing else.
How it works in practice
LinkedIn wrote about dwell time in a 2020 engineering blog post, explaining that clicks and reactions alone are noisy signals of whether content was valuable, and that time spent viewing a post adds useful information. The company has not published the exact weighting, and the feed has changed since then, so treat dwell time as one known input among several rather than a lever with a known effect. Two things follow for anyone writing on LinkedIn. First, posts that reward reading tend to do better than posts that are skimmed in a second. That favours substance, clear structure and a hook that leads into something worth staying for.
Second, format matters. Document posts, where readers swipe through slides, and longer text posts that people read to the end both tend to hold attention; a one-line post with a stock image usually does not. Dwell time also explains why bait hooks backfire. A reader who expands a post, sees it is thin, and leaves in two seconds generates a short dwell even though they clicked. Write for the reader who will stay, and the signal looks after itself. Do not chase it with tricks such as artificially long posts or slow reveals; readers abandon those and the measure falls.
Example
Two posts get the same number of impressions. One is a four-line opinion with a stock photo; the other is a twelve-slide document post explaining a pricing decision. Readers swipe through the second for half a minute. That difference in attention is what dwell time captures.
Common mistake
Padding posts to make them longer. Length is not dwell. A long post people abandon after the third line has worse dwell than a tight post they read to the end.