It varies but here’s a rough guide.
After finally polishing up your content, you do some final checks and just as your finger looms over the “publish” button you stop and think wait! Is this the best time to post?!
The short answer is statistics show that early morning or early evenings are the best times to publish content but the reality is, it’s all about when your audience is likely going to be looking at it.
Social Media strategists Hootsuite have done some digging and broken down what the numbers say.
Between 8 am to 12 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
A lot of this comes down to when people have a gap in their day. So first thing in the morning before they start work and around lunchtime where people may be catching up on their feeds.
Around 11 am on Wednesdays. Insta shares a lot of its algorithm with Facebook, so recency and past post performance are key factors.
If you have a professional social manager like Hootsuite, you can track post activity and get a deeper understanding as to when your audience is online and how your posts perform with engagements and views.
This of course helps to tailor your focus on when and to who to match your content.
Around 8 am on Mondays and Thursdays. Specialists reckon Twitter measures click-throughs as a leading metric in how posts perform and how much exposure they give them.
They also post that it’s important not to get too caught up on quote-unquote the best times to post, as this could alienate your audiences in different timezones.
Peppering content throughout the day or split testing different times to measure engagement is a great way to make sure you’re getting in front of the right people.
Roughly 9 am on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Experts note that with LinkedIn the algorithm is more concerned with the quality of content, trends and relevancy rather than how recently a company posts.
Because of LinkedIn’s unique approach to social content, it’s more suited to business professionals and networking, you tend to find more long-form content and less mass marketing bumph that the other platforms share.
So when is the best time to post?
Because a lot of social media platforms want you to see newer posts, they prioritise recency. Knowing this we can start to create a strategy that works best for us.
If you do a little digging with your own brand, find out when your key audience is online.
Look at previous posts and measure the engagement, did it get a lot of likes, shares, comments, clicks etc and then use that info for a content calendar.
Once we know where and when our audience is, it becomes a lot easier to grow followers organically.
Check out competitors and see how their stuff performs too.
And post in your audience’s timezone, not yours. This maximises the number of people getting your content in their feed.
To conclude, whilst there are stats that say certain times are better than others it doesn’t mean that will necessarily work for you.
Follow the steps laid out above and narrow down when and where your audience will be.
Thanks for reading and as always if you’ve taken some value please do give a cheeky like, share and comment to discuss.
Leave a Reply