Understanding When to Post On Social Media, and How to Use This to Your Advantage
When it comes to running a business, virtually all businesses who use Social Media Marketing as a part of their business plan will at one point or another have to tackle the obstacle of WHEN to post on social media as a whole and on their individual platforms. Properly posting your content at the optimal times will boost your engagement, which helps boost your page and in turn your business. In fact, this topic has become so relevant in the online community that everyone from Forbes to Huffington Post has done research and compiled data intended to help us all better understand the world we are so intensely immersed in.
These are all good reasons to want to tackle this mystery. Unfortunately, between the various social media platforms and how they all differ significantly combined with how vastly research differs on this subject, it may just come off that it may not be that easy to figure out. Realistically, like all things regarding social media marketing, there are formulas and the formulas lay the path to figuring it all out. From understanding your statistical demographic to comparing that with your target audience, as well as taking into consideration your business niche and which platforms best suit your needs, everything has its place in using marketing to your advantage. By taking all of these factors into consideration we are able to easily understand the best times to post on social media and why.
1. What does your analytics say? Data speaks volumes.
Once you've gotten started on your social media platform and have begun to post and see activity on your page you are able to evaluate your page's statistics. Facebook and Twitter especially have phenomenal tools to help you look at and analyze your page's statistics and directly see who you're reaching and when. Facebook goes in depth with its insights, showing you everything from who your most active users are in gender, age, and location in the world. As well, Facebook has a feature called "when your fans are online," which clearly streamlines this understanding for users wanting to capitalize with their businesses. Utilizing insights is one of the most imperative decisions you need to make when running a social media page. Analyzing your results is the definitive best way to understand how you are doing. Through this information, you are able to understand when your page is already most active and use it to your advantage. You can choose your target audience, look at when that demographic is most active, and boost your posts and online interactions during this time. If you're consistently reaching the wrong demographics, you can easily look back at what you've been posting at that time to get to the bottom of why you're reaching those individuals. Analyzing your statistics is truly an irreplaceable valuable tool that should never be overlooked for its usefulness.
Of course, this is not all there is to posting the right content at the right times. It may be one of the most important factors in understanding how to optimize your reach but it's certainly not the only one.
2. Who is your target audience and what platform are you using?
Each social media platform interacts with their users uniquely. If you're savvy, you'll use these to your benefit. For example, Twitter can be a constant stream of information, especially because it uses quick blurbs to get a point across and has character limits to ensure it stays that way. If your target audience is the business world, Twitter is a great platform for posting motivating quotes, quick updates, and what users can look forward to with your company. As well, understanding how Twitter specifically benefits that niche of yours helps prevent you from wasting time elsewhere. Posting quick blurbs on Tumblr, for example, would likely be a massive waste of time for anyone in the business world.
We know that professionally oriented businesses such as lawyers and real estate agents are best suited to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn while social and artistic oriented businesses who thrive on visuals such as photographers and jewelry or clothing shops are best suited to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
3. Taking region into consideration
Let's take for example a nationwide company in the United States. Around 80% of the entire population of the United States reside in the Eastern and Central time zones. So, theoretically, for a nationwide company in the United States, choosing to post content (or schedule content using Postblazer) to the time zones of Eastern and Central may be the best way to reach the most of your target audiences. Basing your best posts to your highest (or target) demographic's time zone could easily be both beneficial and worthwhile. Of course, if you're a locally based company such as a family and lifestyle photographer or a small and local bakery intending to reach primarily your local community, you would likely stick to your local timezone.
Many blossoming entrepreneurs selling everything from home-made and personalized crafts to their graphic design and illustrations are utilizing social media marketing to reach a broad audience. So, unless your business is something you can't offer outside your local community it would likely be prudent to consider how many people you want to reach and where and then look directly at time zones before choosing to post and schedule your content.
4. So, let's get right to it. When is the BEST time to post to social media?
Surprisingly, each platform varies in best practices regarding optimal times to post. As well, different types of content on platforms such as Facebook may do better at different times or yield different results at different times (both would be ideal results, of course.) Although, I suppose if you've been keeping up lately then you probably don't find it all that surprising that such vastly different social media platforms have different optimal times and unique best practices. By now, it may be expected.
Twitter users are a whopping 181% more likely to be on Twitter during their commute. As well during their commute, Twitter users are more active during work and/or school as well. This means Twitter is best used Monday through Friday in most cases. It's usually optimal to post approximately four times per day. This could be adjusted slightly higher or lower, depending on the activity of the account – more activity favors more posts. If old tweets are still relevant or become relevant again to coincide with current events, it may be beneficial to re-tweet older tweets. Typically, an individual tweet has a "shelf life" of around 8 hours, depending on your followers. A tweet may only spend a matter of seconds in a user's feed as well. The best times of day, specifically, to send your best tweets are between noon and 1pm. Other great times that may do as well or at least nearly as well are 5 am to 7am and 5pm to 6pm.
The consequences of posting images with your tweets between noon and 1pm have statistical benefits including, but not limited to:
- Up to 31% increase in visits to your account
- Up to 41% increase in re-tweets
- Up to 36% increase in click rates
- Up to 48% increase in favorites
- Up to 33% increase in conversations
Facebook users may seem perpetually online and active, and this will probably continue to be mostly true but there are peak times that you can take advantage of to see maximum benefits of posting. Research across the board has shown that Monday through Wednesday are statistically the worst times to post on Facebook in general. In fact, Facebook sees a 10% surge in activity and usage on Friday alone. This is not to say you shouldn't post on Facebook Monday through Wednesday. Contrary to that, you should always have consistent posts going on your Facebook pages to maintain and continue to increase your reach and page activity. So please do not misunderstand that the best times to post are the only times to post.
In general, the best times to post on Facebook are between 9am and 7pm, but more specifically at or around 9am, again from 1pm to 3 or 4pm, and again after 7pm. On Saturdays and Sundays you'll get a nice boost from posting specifically between noon and 1pm as well. 3pm tends to be the time of day your links will get the most clicks, while 1pm tends to be the time of day your posts get the most shares.
Most importantly when considering when to post and schedule content on Facebook, consistency is key. Utilize Postblazer the best by ensuring you have posts going up consistently at optimal times, especially on target days and no matter
Linked In is a very professionally motivated atmosphere so it really should come as no surprise that the absolute best times to post on LinkedIn are during the typical work hours of the typical work week. Specifically, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday between noon and 6pm are the absolute best times to be active. Research has shown that activity on the website plummets on Friday evenings, which makes sense if most users are ready to disconnect from their work week and enjoy their weekend! It would make the most sense to essentially avoid activity between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.
Instagram users really break the mold. They tend to be consistently engaged with the app and website and therefore the best times to ensure that posts are going up on Instagram are, in some cases, vastly different from other social media platforms. In fact, aside from peak times, you should consider posting most of your content during off-work hours and you should strongly consider posts around 2am. That's right, a middle of the night post may be incredibly beneficial on Instagram!
Astonishingly, research shows that posting a video on Instagram at approximately 9pm may boost interactions and followers by as much as a whopping 34%. In general, the best times to post on Instagram are between 8am and 9am, 5pm, and 2am. You should avoid posting between 3pm and 4pm. While sites like Facebook do not do well on Mondays, when it comes to Instagram, you should focus more time and energy on Monday posts because Mondays are very active days for Instagram.
Well, now that you're properly equipped with the when and why of posting at optimal times on all of your favorite social media platforms, all you need to do now is make sure that your posts are going up when they're supposed to. Postblazer is the ideal tool to help you with this task. Postblazer is easy to use and ensures regular and scheduled posting on your social media accounts. Across your entire marketing network, Postblazer ensures that you are using the formulas to their best ability to make sure your content is going up when people will see it.