Social platforms are a crucial part of your marketing mix. They are a great way to reach a huge audience and grow an online business.
But did you know that there are certain times when it’s best to post on social media?
Whether you use LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or another platform to market your business, you have to keep in mind that social networks are essentially competing for your attention. If everyone else is posting at the same time, your content won’t be noticed.
So instead of trying to be one of the voices in the crowd, you have to work hard to find out exactly when your target market is going to interact with your content, then schedule your posts accordingly.
To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of the best times to post on social media. This will allow you to see exactly when your audience is online and most likely to engage with your content.
Read on!
Why is it important to know the best time to post on social media?
Image from Pixabay via Pexels
A lot of people think that social media is all about posting once, maybe twice a day – whenever they feel like it. However, that’s not going to get you very far.
If you are trying to get people’s attention, it’s important that they see your posts when they’re most likely to engage with them – and that means knowing when your audience is most active.
This will help you get more organic reach and decide what sort of content you want to put out there.
For example, if your audience is mostly young adults who are going to be at work during certain hours, then posting in the middle of their working day isn’t the best strategy for capturing their attention.
So if you are posting about a sale on Friday morning, but most of your followers are busy working during that time, they might not see it until Saturday afternoon – when they have already missed out on their chance!
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How can you identify the right time to post?
Image from Tobias Dziuba via Pexels
Now, how do you know what time is best? It varies from one platform to another, but there are a few tried-and-true ways to find the most optimal time to post on social media.
Here are some tips to help you out!
1. Find out what your target audience does during the day
To do this, you will need a little bit of research. First, you will need to figure out who your target audience is: What kind of people are they? What are their interests?
It may seem obvious that if you are trying to reach millennials, whose interests are very different than those of baby boomers, you’d want to post at different times of the day.
But there are other factors that play into it as well:
- Are they mostly in the US or Europe?
- Does it matter if the time zone is set to Eastern Standard Time or Pacific Daylight Time?
- Do they work full-time or part-time?
- Do they have kids?
- Are they in school?
- Do they sleep in late?
- Do they work a lot of night shifts?
And so on and so forth. If you know all these things about your target audience, then you can find out what time of the day is the most conducive to engaging with them.
For instance, if you’re trying to reach people who work 9-5 jobs and have kids, then you will find that posting later in the day (after 5:00 PM) works best for them because that’s when most people have time to check their phones.
Also Read: Snapchat vs Instagram
2. Look for patterns and trends in your analytics
Image from Mikael Blomkvist via Pexels
Another great method to identify the best times to reach your audience is to keep track of how many people are engaging with your social media content in real time through analytics apps.
Most social platforms have their own statistics that help you determine the right time to reach your audience. For example, Facebook has the Insights feature for its Pages, Twitter and TikTok have the Analytics tool, and Instagram has its Insights tab.
These apps can help you see how many people have interacted with your posts and gain insights into their behavior. This will help you see whether or not there are any trends when it comes to the times of day that people are engaging with your posts.
In other words, if you notice that most of your followers engage with your content on Tuesday mornings at 10 am, then it is a good idea for you to schedule future posts to go live during this time period.
Pro Tip: You can also use the data from Hootsuite or other social media management platforms to find out what days of the week and times of day people are most active on your platform of choice.
That way, you can schedule content accordingly, ensuring that it gets seen by as many people as possible.
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3. Test different times and see what works best for you
“Best time” may mean different things to different people. So you need to find out what works best for you, which means trying out different times and seeing how they impact your engagement,
To do it, make sure you post consistently – at the same time on multiple days throughout one or two weeks. Then look at your data and see what type of engagement you get at each time!
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Best Times to Post on Social Media
1. When is the best time to post on Facebook?
Image from Facebook
There is no one-fits-all answer for when is the most optimal time to share your content on Facebook. It depends entirely on your specific audience and their online activity.
However, on average, the best time to post on Facebook is during the weekend. The reason for this is that weekends are when people are more likely to be online and interacting with their friends and family, which means there are more chances they will see your post and respond.
In fact, a recent report by Statista reveals that users spend an average of 147 minutes per day using social media. That means that if you are posting during the week, you have just two hours and 27 minutes to reach your audience.
But if you’re posting on the weekends? That time doubles.
Now, according to Hootsuite, there are also a few other great time slots (PST) during the rest of the week:
- Monday: 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM
- Tuesday: 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM
- Wednesday: 6:15 AM to 12:15 PM
- Thursday: 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM
- Friday: 7:00 AM to 12:00 PM
Image from Facebook
The best way to determine which time interval works best for you is by using Facebook’s Analytics tool. You can set up a custom audience based on demographic information to figure out when they will be online, or you can just look at general insights on the default audience.
2. When’s the best time to post on Instagram?
Image from Instagram
A study conducted by Sprout Social shows that the right time to post on Instagram is generally in the morning or late afternoon/evening. During these times, users are more likely to be online and engaged with their accounts.
Here is a more specific breakdown (CST time zone):
- Monday: 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
- Tuesday: 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
- Wednesday: 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM
- Thursday: 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
- Friday: 10:00 AM to 11:00 PM
Remember that these intervals can vary depending on your audience’s time zone. So, just like with Facebook, the best way to find out what time works best for you is by looking at analytics.
Image from Sprout Social
When you’re on Instagram, check out the Insights tool and click on your chosen audience segment to see where there are spikes or lulls in activity. These will give you a better idea about when they are most active throughout the day.
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3. What’s the best time to post on YouTube?
Image from YouTube
It goes without saying that YouTube is the biggest video-hosting website in the world. It has over 2 billion users, and according to YouTube’s internal data, people watch a billion hours of content on YouTube every day.
But when it comes to the best time to share videos on the platform, you have to consider YouTube Indexing if you want to reach as many people as possible.
Like Google, YouTube uses an algorithm to index your content and make it visible in the search results, and that means that the actual best posting times are hours before the peak viewing times.
Why? Because although new videos are generally added to the site’s index within two hours, this process can take up to 36 hours.
Taking this into account, Social Pilot recommends the following time frames (EST) for posting. These are based on a few studies conducted by different social media companies:
- HubSpot: Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM, from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM, and from 12:00 PM to 3:00 PM
- Frederator Networks: Monday through Friday from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and weekends from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM
- Boosted: Sunday at 11:00 AM or at 5:00 PM
- HowSociable: Thursday and Friday from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
- InVideo: Monday through Friday from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and weekends from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Image from HubSpot
This means that, on average, the best time to share your content on YouTube is between 2:00 and 4:00 PM Monday through Friday afternoons, and between 9:00 and 11:00 AM Saturdays and Sundays.
However, like with any other social media platform, you can take advantage of YouTube’s analytics tool in order to figure out what time your target audience generally watches your videos.
To do it, simply log into your account and click on YouTube Studio > Analytics on the left-hand menu.
You’ll then be able to switch between five tabs: Overview, Reach, Engagement, Audience, and Revenue. Select “Audience” and check the chart that displays the days and times most of your viewers are watching your videos.
If you see a spike in watch time at a certain hour, then that might be the best time for you to upload your content.
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4. What’s the best time to post on LinkedIn?
Image from LinkedIn
Most businesses will find that their best time to post on LinkedIn is around 9 AM – 12 PM EST (Eastern Standard Time), but this will vary depending on whether your audience lives in the US or not.
For example, if you have a predominantly European audience then you may find that your best time to post is between 6-8 PM GMT (Greenwich Mean Time).
These, and many other factors, are the reason why there’s no set optimal time to post on LinkedIn. Instead, businesses and influencers use a few different studies as a starting point for finding the right posting times for them.
According to Adobe Express, these are:
- The Balance SMB: Any day of the week from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM, and from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
- HubSpot: Only on Wednesdays from 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM
- Buffer: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from 7:00 AM to 8:30 AM and from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
- Sprout Social: Only on Wednesdays from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM and Thursdays from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM
- Quintly: Any day of the week from 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM, and from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
- Oberlo: From Tuesday to Thursday from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM
Each one of these studies found that posting near these time intervals gave them the highest engagement rate and the most reach.
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5. What’s the best time to post on Twitter?
Image from Twitter
It depends. There are many factors that go into determining when to post on Twitter, and different approaches depending on your goals.
For example, if you’re trying to maximize your reach (the number of people who see your tweet), then posting in the early morning is ideal.
But if you want your tweets to generate engagement (retweets, replies, favorites), then posting later in the day might yield better results than early morning or early afternoon – when activity is lower and people aren’t as likely to stop what they’re doing and engage with you on Twitter.
This can get confusing pretty easily. Luckily, Sprout Social’s report shares a general timeframe as a guideline (if your audience is in the CST time zone):
According to them, the most optimal time to post on Twitter is between 9:00 AM and 1:00 PM on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays.
Image from Sprout Social
However, I recommend you find out what times work best for your followers by taking note of how they respond to your content.
You can also compare different times of day to see which one performs higher for you in terms of reach, engagement, or clicks – just make sure you look at a long enough period of time (at least 24 hours) so you can really get an accurate picture.
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6. What’s the best time to post on TikTok?
Image from TikTok
TikTok has over one billion monthly active users (MAUs) and 600 million daily active users (DAUs).
These figures, combined with the site’s main demographics – e.g. 25% of users are between 10 to 19 years old, and 47.4% are between 19 to 30 – can give you a good idea of when to post content in order to reach the largest number of people.
However, it’s worth doing some research to identify who your followers are and when they’re most likely to see your posts.
According to Influencer Marketing Hub, the most popular times (EST) to share your content on TikTok are:
- Monday: 6 AM, 10 AM, 10 PM
- Tuesday: 2 AM, 4 AM, 9 AM
- Wednesday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 11 PM
- Thursday: 9 AM, 12 AM, 7 PM
- Friday: 5 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
- Saturday: 11 AM, 7 PM, 8 PM
- Sunday: 7 AM, 8 AM, 4 PM
Whether you are using the mobile app or TikTok’s website, you should regularly check the analytics tool to see how many people have seen your recent posts.
You can also check out information about the locations of your followers, which can be helpful if you’re trying to reach a specific audience.
Think that if, for example, you’re a business located in New York City and you want to reach an audience in Singapore, posting at 12pm EST is useless since that’s the middle of the night there!
However, keep in mind that while the data you gather from the platform’s analytics tool is helpful in giving you some insight into overall trends and patterns, it is important not to over-rely on these stats as the sole source for understanding what is happening on your account.
Some other factors to consider are:
- Your audience demographics and their behavior patterns. For example, if most of your followers are under 18 years old (and thus unlikely to be working during typical business hours), then it wouldn’t make sense for you to post during those times.
- The type of content you’re posting. For instance, music videos on TikTok work well during almost all time frames.
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7. What’s the best time to post on Pinterest?
Image from Pinterest
If you’re a business or brand that uses Pinterest to promote your products and services, then you probably already know that there are certain times of day when people tend to pin things more often.
According to a recent report by CoSchedule, the most optimal time intervals (EST) to publish content on Pinterest are:
- Mondays: From 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
- Tuesdays: From 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
- Wednesdays: From 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
- Thursdays: From 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, at 6:00 PM, and from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM
- Fridays: From 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM, and from 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
- Saturdays: At 11:00 AM, 4:00 PM, and 11:00 PM. Also, from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM
- Sundays: At 12:00 PM and 4:00 PM, and from 8:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Image from Pinterest Analytics
Now, the most important thing to do is to figure out your target audience and tailor your posting schedule to their time zone. This will drastically improve your engagement, as opposed to trying to post at these recommended hours that everyone else might be using.
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Wrap Up
When it comes to when you post on social media, timing is everything. It can make or break a savvy marketer’s social media campaign, so it’s important to know the best times of the day to get your followers’ attention and click-through.
The list above shows the hours when people are most likely to engage with your content on social media platforms. However, if you have an audience spread across multiple time zones, these hours can change drastically depending on their location.
That’s why I recommend that you use analytics tools to tailor your posting strategy to the specific target markets for your business.
This will help you get a clearer picture of when your audience is most active on the networks where you have a presence so you can schedule your posts to come out at the highest engagement times.
