If you want your brand to thrive in the social media world, it’s important to define your audience, understand how and when your viewers spend their time on each channel and maintain an active and engaging presence.

With continual updates developing on each social platform, marketers must find innovative ways to broaden audience reach through each new post. Identifying the best times to post is the first step in getting the attention of your target audience, as the ideal window differs from site to site.

How Often And When To Post On Facebook

Facebook is a powerful engagement tool, and it has become a popular place for businesses to market themselves. If your goal is to reach more consumers via Facebook, you need to first look at how many followers you have.

Hubspot analyzed Facebook data to see if posting more regularly would help businesses reach more people. The research found pages with more than 10,000 followers were the only pages for whom posting more often increased the number of clicks per post. For pages with less than 10,000 followers, the more often they posted, the fewer clicks per post they received. If your follower count falls below 10,000, posting just once a day may drive the most engagement.

According to Hootsuite, the best times to post on Facebook for B2C brands are 12pm ET on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. B2B brands find the most success when posting between 9am and 2pm ET on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Regardless of the time you choose to post, it’s beneficial to constantly check the insights section on your Facebook company page to see how your content is performing and review key metrics, including the reach and engagement of each post. Understanding how your content measures up against those key performance indicators will help determine the best time for your brand to post on Facebook.

How Often And When To Post On Instagram

Instagram is a highly visual platform that thrives on a “less is more” ideology. On average, brands post on Instagram 1.5 times per day. According to HubSpot, on average, the best time to post on Instagram is 2 to 3pm CT, with the most ideal day for posting being Thursday.

When it comes to Instagram, it’s important to know your follower volume, identify who your followers are and understand their Instagram activity and behavior. Comparable to Facebook, the amount of followers on your business page also factors into how often you should be posting. Businesses with smaller audiences are better off sharing one to two photos a day, while those with audiences of 1,000 or more can get away with three or more photos per day without seeing a decrease in engagement. Frequently monitoring Instagram’s insights section, which includes data like user interactions, website and email clicks, profile visits, reach volume and impressions metrics, will aid in understanding the best day and time to post for your specific audience.

How Often And When To Post On Twitter

With only 280 characters to spare, it’s important to keep your tweets short and sweet. In the #TwitterWorld, timing is everything, as the typical lifespan of a tweet is just 18 minutes. After those 18 minutes, your followers are less likely to see your content, as your posts have already been pushed down. In order to stay visible on Twitter, frequency and consistency are key.  

Social Media Today shares that Wednesday and Friday at 9am local time is the best time to post, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays being the best days to post overall. Tweets published on Saturdays or any day after 10pm, on the other hand, see the lowest engagement. The only way to know what works best for your brand is to experiment, measure and repeat. Twitter Analytics allows brands to monitor their insights and select timeframes to view tweet activity from a specific day, week, month or year.  

How And When To Post On LinkedIn

More than 65 million users utilize LinkedIn to network themselves, develop their careers and grow their businesses. When it comes to LinkedIn, it’s important to focus less on the quantity of posts and more on the quality of your content. According to LinkedIn, brands should share at least 20 posts per month, but no more than 30 updates per month. Business should aim to publish content between the hours of 10am and 12pm, specifically on Wednesdays.

LinkedIn users consider this platform a professional networking site, so your audience may differ compared to your Instagram, Facebook and Twitter followings. Brands can analyze their audiences through LinkedIn Analytics, where follower demographics are displayed. Once you become familiar with who your followers are, you must take the time to learn when they are most active. According to LinkedIn’s own best practices, “updates posted in the morning usually earn the highest engagement, with a slight bump occurring again after business hours.” LinkedIn also stated it’s best to research and experiment to see what works best.

How Can Brands Optimize Their Social Posting Schedules?

Marketers must first consider their industry, location, audience demographics and habits. By understanding where your audience is geographically, where and when they spend their time online and how they best receive messaging from brands, you can better plan your social posting schedules. Never assume one strategy will effectively apply to multiple social platforms. In fact, brands may want to establish separate strategies for each platform in which their brands have a presence. Even though many brands access their own internal marketing technologies to develop a scheduling strategy, it’s also beneficial to take advantage of the insights provided by each social platform.

While the specific days and times mentioned above are published averages, this data is a great starting point for marketers who are new to social media community management and marketers who are reworking their current social media strategy.

Once a company’s scheduling strategy is set in place, it’s equally as important to prioritize testing to ensure the selected days and times are performing as strongly as possible. When testing content, you want to compare similar posts against each other at similar times, along with a variety of your content types, including: text, photos, videos and polls. For example, when trying to optimize your engagement reach on Facebook, you will want to analyze metrics for text posts published at similar time frames, similarly with your image and video posts. Ultimately, sharing quality content with your audience, no matter the day or time, is beneficial to your brand, so long as you are gathering and purposefully using social first party data to fully understand audience behaviors.

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