Wondering what the best time to post on social media is?
Admittedly, not knowing when to post sabotage your social media marketing plan.
Do you know the feeling when you create an eye - catching post full great value and after all that hard-work, you're finally ready to share it with your audience, great, right? But then, nothing happens. The engagement rate is far from ideal and you're thinking that all your efforts were a total waste of time and money. Well, it isn't the end of the world yet, so don't give up.
While you may actually have the right sort of content, sadly that's only half the battle. Whats equally important to know is when to post on Instagram (or any other social network) so that your content brings results. Want to reach your target audience and avoid your poss getting lost or ignored in the noise of social media? How to do it then?
In this blog post, I'll provide you with insights into when and how to post on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. All so that you can get the most out of your great content.
Best Time To Post On Facebook
Because people access Facebook on both desktops and mobile phones, they are active during their free time as a well as working hours. Some say that the best time to post on Facebook is at 9am for all businesses, just when people are browsing the internet for the first time at the beginning of their working day. Another popular time is around 11am-12pm before lunch time or at 1-4pm when downtime at work frequently happens and people just try to relax a bit by browsing their Facebook feed.
Take home message: Ideally, 3-4 posts a week on Facebook are enough to keep in touch with your audience. Post on Fridays for driving the most engagement. Other than that, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays are good posting days as well.
Tips to drive more engagement on Facebook:
- Create quality content that gets more engagement on Facebook
- Pair it with a picture if you find it can supplement your message or add to it - don't add an image just for the sake of it.
- Best to keep your posts short, starting with a unique joke.
- Whats more, engage with your audience by asking them questions.
- Facebook live is also pretty popular. So if you've got an audience with an appetite for video content(better you ask them), consider going live on the platform.
Heads-up: Irrespective of the days you post, look at your calendar. If its a public holiday, you'll want to rethink whether you should post depending on how active your target you should post depending on how active your target audience is social on that particular day.
Best Time To Post On Instagram
Let's put Facebook aside for a moment and focus on a similarly interesting and popular platform - Instagram. With a forecast predicting nearly 1.2 billion Instagram users worldwide by 2023, Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms and second most popular one after Facebook. Because of it's highly visual content and features such as Instagram Stories, Reels and Igtv, your brand can easily gain a high level of engagement and increase profitability in no time.
Have you ever wondered what the best frequency for posting on Instagram is? The advised number of posts is from 1.5 up to 3 per day. Yet posting often needs to go hand in hand with consistently posting the same amount.
Note that Instagram posts see the most engagement on Saturdays. So it really helps to understand if your audience is active on Saturdays so you can post.
Tips to increase engagement on Instagram:
- An engaging caption - possibly a descriptive one - a high quality visual go a long way in driving engagement on Instagram. After all, it's a visual first platform.
- Use hashtags in your Instagram content too as they help your target audience find you.
- You can also drive more engagement by launching a user-generated content campaign where users share posts featuring your product, then you share those posts.
- Lastly, get more engagement by encouraging people to comment on your post. For instance, ask them to tag a friend in one of your posts.
Heads Up: The best days to post on Instagram and to get more engagement are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
Best Time To Post On Twitter
Twitter is the place where people come to see what's happening. It's one of the most popular networks for staying updated in a quick and convenient way. In fact, there are over 500 million tweets sent everyday from all over the world. That means the traffic on Twitter is just insane 24/7 and you need to know now to manage it well so it'll bring value to your business.
How often to post on twitter?
The lifespan of a tweet is only 15-20 minutes, which is a very tiny frame to grab the attention of your audience. Don't panic though! In this case, you can still succeed by tweeting the same content multiple times per day or week to reach different types of segments.
When is the best time for posting on twitter?
You may have a lot of followers on twitter, but that doesn't mean you can just publish your content whenever. Similarly to the other platforms, Twitter has it's own rules and abiding by them can turn out to be very profitable for your business in the long run. Because this platform is easily accessible from both desktop and mobile devices, people log in during working hours as well as in their free time after work. This is great news for you as it means the chances of reaching a lot of people are increased. Still users tend to browse news during their breaks, downtime, and also at the beginning and ends of their days. Most articles suggest posting between 8am and 9am, 12pm and 1pm during lunchtime, or 7pm and 9pm in the evening. But if your main aim is to boost retweets and your cost revenue would be between 5pm and 6pm.
Tips to drive more engagement on twitter:
- Posting engagement driving tweets. These are tweets that ask people for their thoughts or encourage interaction using polls.
- You can also jump on trends that are relevant to your brand.
- Finally, focus on social selling by taking a relationship building approach. Join relevant twitter chats for instance. That'll help you drive more brand awareness as well as provide a ground to regularly engage with your target buyers, which helps build relationships.
Best time to post on LinkedIn
In this case, because of the primary reasons for it's use, an audience on LinkedIn is most often online and ready to actively consume your content during working hours. Most people agree that the best time to post on LinkedIn is between 10am and 12pm. The best days have been identified as Tuesday to Thursday, with Tuesday between 10am and 11am being the ultimate sweet spot of the week.
Take home message: Post 3-4 times a week on LinkedIn. You'll see the most engagement on Thursday with the least engagement on Saturday.
Tips to drive more engagement on LinkedIn:
- Take the time to create LinkedIn specific content, particularly, visuals such as LinkedIn carousels. The reason? These can help you stand out in the sea of text based posts.
- Make sure you balance business updates behind-the-scenes content that shows businesses' human side. This way, both your brand personality and professionalism will help you leave a memorable impression on your audience.