The Best Times To Post on Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest

With social media marketing becoming mainstream, there is a lot more depth being demanded of social media marketing professionals than before. While earlier, a one-line strategy that said “post 2-3 times a week at least” would have got you by, today there is a lot more to the strategy needed including the exact times of posting. This is from an effectiveness point of view.

Let us look at some tips in this regard.

The Best Time for Posting on Twitter

The ideal time to post with a social network is a factor of multiple aspects – The exact audience that is sought to be targeted and their locations, the networks being used, the goals of the marketing effort and the type of content being shared. A study by Wiselytics shows that as far as Facebook is concerned, a post attains 75 per cent of its engagement in about 5 hours. The same study says that as far as Twitter is concerned, the average Tweet takes less than 3 hours to reach 75% of its potential engagement.

This means that you have a relatively short period of time in which your post needs to effectively get out there. Knowing that exact time can take some amount of experimentation. However, there are some studies available for reference. Hootsuite’s analysis shows that the ideal time to Tweet is between 12 pm and 3 pm, Monday through Friday. According to Hootsuite, the highest number of retweets and clicks occurs at 3 pm.

While Hubspot’s analysis agrees with Hootsuite, other organizations such as Huffington Post and Kissmetrics have arrived at differing numbers. Huffington Post quotes 5 pm, 12 pm and 6 pm as the ideal times for retweeting. Whereas KissMetrics quotes a time of 5 pm on weekdays as being the ideal time to post. What this means is that these studies can only give you a start from where to experiment and figure out the right numbers for yourself. You will have to try out different time schedules and look at the results before reaching an accurate conclusion.

Here are a few aspects to consider when you try to understand the ideal time to post.

• Location: When you are looking at a globally located audience, what you should do is to create individual Twitter handles for different regions. You should use a media management tool to run all the handles from the same place.
• Using the correct tool: There are several tools such as AutoSchedule which can choose a time by looking at when Tweets have demonstrated the best performance.
• Knowing your audience: Knowing your audience deeply is fundamental to being able to determine the best time to post. Information related to age, demographics, location, area of work for your audience can all help you determine the best time to post.

The Best Time forPosting on Facebook

Getting post time right on Facebook can be difficult because of the complexity of the News Feed algorithm whereby the News Feed is not chronological. Even here, studies have been performed by various organizations as to the best time to post. Hootsuite reports that Monday through Friday with the exception of Tuesday, between 12 pm and 3 pm as being the ideal time to post, along with 12 pm to 1 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Quick Sprout, HubSpot and Microsoft all report 1 pm to 3 pm on Fridays and Thursdays to be optimum posting times on Facebook.

You should use Page Insights and tools like Hootsuite Analytics to determine the right time to post in your case.

The Best Time forPosting on Instagram

As far as Instagram goes, videos and photos with more number of likes and comments have a higher chance of showing up close to the top of the follower pages. Although content does not appear in chronological order, it is still advisable to try and identify times during which a large user base can be targeted. To understand at what time your target audience would be using Instagram, try and understand the associated consumer persona – what kind of jobs do they work at, what time do they start their day, do they work predictable hours. Information like this would help you arrive at times to experiment with.

According to Hootsuite, the ideal time to post is between 12 pm and 1 pm, Monday through Friday. There is wide divergence among companies which report vastly different times, so you really do not have a very good benchmark to plug and play there.

The Best Time forPosting on Google+

By nature, Google+ tends to be a slightly different social network. This is with regards to the fact that this network is tightly integrated into Google’s major services like email and Photos. While the social aspect of this network exists, it is not as prominent as for other social networks. This means that the posting times on Google+ show somewhat different trending when compared to other social networks. Studies show that Google+ users tend to be active on weekday mornings. QuickSprout reports that 9 am to 11 am on weekdays tends to be the ideal time to post with Google plus, with Wednesday being the best day of all.

The Best Time forPosting on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a network for professionals. Some of the most prominent pieces of functionality on LinkedIn include posting of jobs, professional blogging, building connections and group networking. LinkedIn is pretty much a social network for work. Consequently, the ideal time to post with LinkedIn depends on aspects that are unique to LinkedIn. Given the fact that professional usage dominates on LinkedIn, the best posting time also depends on the associated usage pattern. HubSpot has performed some analysis in this regard. They conclude that the ideal time to post with LinkedIn is from Tuesday through Thursday, with the time being morning and early at that, lunch and early evening. They report an additional hotspot from 10 am through 11 am on Tuesday.

However, do bear in mind that even with LinkedIn, different agencies have arrived at varying numbers. For instance, some agencies have found that 8 pm is the best time to post and reach C-suite decision makers although this does not imply that 8 pm is a good time for reaching other types of people or for all campaigns. The HubSpot study itself has relied on different sources for coming to these conclusions, some of the analysis looking at the number of shares generated by posts and some others looking at how many are engaging with a post. It would do you good to use these numbers as a start point but experiment around to figure out what works for you.

The Best Time forPosting on Pinterest

Buffer Social has performed some analysis into the area of when would be the ideal time to post with Pinterest. The team here has identified Saturdays, afternoons and evenings as being the best days and times to post with Pinterest. The researchers have gone further and identified some recommendations as to what subjects to post with what day. The recommendation for Monday is for fitness, Tuesday for gadgets, Wednesday for inspirational quotes, Thursday for fashion, Friday for funny gifs, Saturday for travel and Sunday for food and crafts.

While there are a number of studies out there which give some information on the best times to post with several outlets of social media, it would be best to treat these as starting level numbers and do your own experimentation in this regard.