Social media marketing is a boon for businesses. People of almost all age groups, coming from different walks of life are using social media extensively around the world for different purposes- entertainment, knowledge, and connecting with the community. A well-tailored social media marketing strategy can lead to improved search engine rankings, brand awareness, higher conversion rates, and more.
Since there is a huge opportunity to interact with the consumers, most of the retail brands use two or three different social networks. But the issue is that the users are spread across vast time zones and they log into their social networks at varying times. So how do we find out the perfect time to post on media channels and why?
Why do you need to find out the best time to post?
To maximize reach, you need to target certain times during the day when most people tune in or are active. Different social media channels will have different peak hours, depending on the type of platform it is.
Observing basic trends about the lifestyle of your target audience would help you decide on the right time to pitch in your product for maximum exposure. For instance, if you are a cosmetics and skincare brand, you would cater mostly to women. The ideal time to connect with them would be late morning hours when most females are done with morning office work or household work.
So is there a generic best time to post on social media platforms? Let us explore.
Facebook is a great platform for setting up business pages and sharing content among your target audience. It has been observed that the best time to post on Facebook is around midnight to 2 pm at noon. If you go by the lifestyle of consumers, lunchtime is the time when most people are active during weekdays. Facebook tends to get maximum traffic during the midweek, on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Early morning on Saturday or Sunday is the best time to post on Facebook. So you can target posting content on Facebook on weekends before 9 am or after 8 pm. But again, look at your target audience and other demographics to get a better idea of when to post.
Instagram is a platform that offers features such as photo sharing, video sharing, live streams, stories, etc. The best time to post on Instagram for your business is in the afternoon, late at night, and early morning. It is recommended that you post content on Instagram at around 7-8.30 am (when people wake up) or late at night (when many users are active). Posting between 2 pm-4 pm can also help reach more people as this is mostly the time when people take lunch breaks, evening breaks, etc.
However, the best time to post on Instagram is on the weekends during the morning and late-night given that people go out during weekends, so they are more likely to check their Instagram feeds before and after coming back home.
Suggested Read: The Cheat Sheet to Social Media Image Sizes
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing platform and it is the second largest search engine. It has been found that the best time to post on YouTube is around 2 pm and 4 pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. For Thursdays and Fridays, when weekends are approaching and the workload usually tends to go down, viewers are active from 1 pm – 3 pm. During weekends, it is recommended to post videos from 9 am to 11 am to get maximum views. Since most YouTube users are children and young adults, the YouTube engagement tends to peak by Saturdays.
Active Twitter users are young adults. The best time to post on Twitter is on Fridays, from around 12 pm to 3 pm. Besides, posting around 3 pm or from 5 pm to 6 pm on other days is good too given that these are usually the times when most people get off from work or are taking evening breaks. It has been observed that weekdays show the greater engagement on part of users as compared to weekends. Ignore Sundays as least engagement is seen then or post around 11 am.
How to know your best time to post?
There is no particular time on social media that you may target. You must know who your audience is, when they are online and when they are most likely to engage with your content.
This again may not be consistent too as the audience behavior might keep changing. So you must keep testing at different times to post and measure the results.
Also Read: Social Media Marketing – What Channels are Effective for your Business
Conclusion
You may use tools like Unbox Social to get the analytics for all your social media platforms in a single place. Using these analytics, you can then track your engagement rate per post and other important metrics to analyze which time works the best for you.
Finding the best time to post on social media is critical to engagement and viewership. Always keep a watch on the ideal time to share content. All the best!
