Without being glib, the obvious answer to the pertinent question of ‘What is the Best time to post on Social Media?” Is obviously when the people you want to see the content are on the networks. Simple right? Not really.
The fact you’re here searching for ‘when is the best time to post on social media’ is indicative of you understanding that there are obviously best practices for each social network and that posting at the best times will help you get more traffic, more engagement, and more followers.
First things first: Where are your audiences?
‘On the internets’ Is not a valid answer to this question… If you’re not already using Google Analytics then get that installed and let it run for a few days. Once you’ve done that, go ahead and log in and look at where your web audience is, and potentially where you want it to be. As an agency, we’re based near London in the UK. We do work with a few North America based companies and a couple of Yacht companies based in Monaco. However, the vast majority of our web traffic is UK based, so we’ll concern ourselves with appealing to UK based customers.
Let’s take a channel by channel look at the best times to post for our UK audiences.
Best time to post on Social Media – Instagram:
Generally speaking Instagram engagement for our client base is fairly steady. We see slight engagement increases on Monday and decreases on Sunday. Overall, though, any day of the week is good. In terms of times, it’s not unsurprising to see increased engagement with content during out of work hours and lunchtimes, than during the working day.
Key time: Mondays at 08.00 – try scheduling 4 or 5 posts around 8am and note what kind of engagement you get. Then by all means experiment.
Tip: Try using Iconosquare, an Instagram Analytics Tool
Best time to post on Social Media – Facebook:
Engagement on Facebook will be greater towards the end of the week (Wednesday onwards) and although some people swear by posting on Saturdays and Sundays, we see the bulk of our client’s engagement on Thursdays and Fridays. Saturdays are also pretty good. Engagement is definitely lower on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Happy, upbeat posts on a Friday in the afternoon tend to get the most shares and clicks but bear in mind that your content is also competing against lots of other people’s at these times.
Tip: Ramp up your content from Wednesday onwards, peaking on Friday and keep your posts during the day, with nothing going out after 7pm.
Best time to post on Social Media – Twitter:
First consideration here is: Are you B2B or B2C? If you’re B2B then you’ll definitely get more engagement during the working day and working week – which is no surprise really. B2B or perhaps more accurately B2P (Business to person) twitter activity gets far greater engagement at the weekends. We tend to focus our B2P client activity outside of the working day and we see a definite uptick in user engagement and follows outside of work hours for them.
Tip: Try targeting your tweets at audiences on the commute to and from work
Best time to post on Social Media – Linkedin:
Linkedin is fairly cut and dried for us. We get the most engagement on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. With Tuesdays being the best by some considerable margin. We’re actually scheduling this post to go out initially on a Tuesday at 10.30 as this would seem to be our best time for Shareable. This varies somewhat amongst our client base, but we don’t do anything on Linkedin for clients at the weekend and we tend to keep our times between 7-8am and 5-6pm.
Tip: Schedule any long-form content to go live on a Tuesday at 8 am and see what kind of engagement you get.
Figure out what works for you.
The advice above is fairly general and we have clients whose social channel engagement falls way outside what we would see as accepted norms. As a result, we’d always recommend a process of trial and error to figure out what works. Try rescheduling your content for different times and days to see what works for you. Don’t be afraid to post content multiple times – People consume your social media content over timelines and if they’ve seen the content before, they simply won’t click on it.
