If you were to ask ten different social media agencies about the best time to post updates to social media, you’re likely to get different responses. While there are a lot of marketing companies who claim to have cracked the timing puzzle, social media posts are extremely dependent on your line of business as well as your target audience.
The more you understand your audience’s behaviour the better chance you have of posting something that they’re likely to see. Here are some insights brought to light by research conducted by SurePayroll and Ghergich & Co. to help you get started on the road of creating more effective posts.
Facebook Posts and Updates
- On weekdays, people tend to be most active post-lunch, between 1 and 4pm showing the highest click-through rates
- The worst time to send out a post is on weekends, before 8am and then to the latter part, after 8pm
Twitter Posts and Updates
- On weekdays, Twitter sees the highest click-through rates between 1 and 3pm
- However the time between 9am and 1pm seems to show the highest activity
- For Twitter, the worst time to post is in the night, after 8pm, or on Fridays, after 3pm
LinkedIn Posts and Updates
- People tend to stay active on LinkedIn from Monday through Thursday, with the best times being between 12-noon and 5pm
- The worst time to be using LinkedIn is over the course of a night, from 10pm to 6am the following morning – your posts are unlikely to be seen by people during those hours
Other Platforms – Pinterest, Tumblr and Google+
- For Pinterest, the best time to post is on Saturday mornings, while the worst time is any workday, during office hours
- Friday evenings show massive click-through rates on Tumblr while any posts before 4pm are likely to be go unnoticed
- For Google+ the peak engagement hour is between 9 and 10am on any day of the week
- Go earlier than 9am or late in the evening and the Google+ audience is likely to give you a miss
Find your Own Strategy with your Social Media Agency
While the SurePayroll and Ghergich & Co report focuses on a variety of industries, your business needs to find its own place and time on the social media market. These timings are mere guidelines to start your program and with the help of your social media agency, you can track the activity and engagement levels around your posts and tweak your plan.
For any business, the social media strategy has to be flexible for effective engagement. As long as you’re constantly monitoring activity and looking for usage and engagement patterns on your posts, you’ll be able to take these industry-reports and fine-tune your social media strategy for greater success!