Dwell Time

What it actually means

Dwell time is how long someone's eyes (or at least their scroll position) stay on your content before they move on. LinkedIn can measure this without you doing anything: no click, no like, no comment required. Waalaxy describes it plainly as the time spent viewing a publication on LinkedIn, without necessarily interacting with it.

This is different from engagement metrics you can see on your own post. Likes and comments are visible and countable. Dwell time is invisible to you as the poster, but it's still being tracked on the platform side.

Why it matters for B2B selling

If you sell on LinkedIn, you probably obsess over comment counts because that's the number you can watch tick up in real time. But a post that gets read for 8 seconds by 500 people and gets zero comments is doing something a post that gets 10 comments in 20 seconds might not be doing: it's holding attention.

For sellers, this matters because the goal usually isn't the like, it's the read. A prospect who spends real time on your post is absorbing your point of view, your framing, your name. A prospect who fires off a reflexive "Great post!" comment and moves on might be doing less actual absorption than someone who silently reads the whole thing.

The misconception

The common belief is that likes and comments are the main thing the algorithm cares about, and that dwell time is a minor, secondary signal. That gets it backwards in practice. Surface reactions are easy to fake, easy to farm, and easy to give without reading past the first line. Dwell time is harder to game. Someone has to actually stay on the post. That's part of why platforms lean on it: it's a cleaner read on whether content is actually landing versus just getting a reflexive tap.

How it's measured

On the ads side, Databox notes dwell time is tracked as the average time viewers spend on an ad before scrolling or clicking away, pulled from platform data rather than self-reported. Organic dwell time works on the same logic: time on screen, not time spent typing a reply. If you're optimizing a post, write the first two lines to earn the stop, not the tap.