It is a widely held view that content is the cornerstone of all your social media strategy. True, but it is equally important to know what is the best time to post on social media. When your audience is most likely to consume that content is as crucial.
You may have a stellar fan base on your social media pages but unless you maximize your reach, your efforts will go in vain. So, what is the best time for posting your content on social media? Fortunately, we now have a number of researches available on the web that tell us what the most active hours are for social natives. Here is an interesting infographic on the topic:
Best Times to post across platforms
As you can tell from the above infographic, LinkedIn and Google+ reign the mornings, Twitter and Facebook take over the afternoons and Pinterest and Tumbler are evening and night time favorites. The trends make sense as it is expected that professionals would normally want to know the market buzz before or as their day starts and rush to LinkedIn and Google+ for it.
Twitter and Facebook are for conversation and entertainment, so, they naturally scoop up the time when people want to take some time off work and relax a bit. Leisure time is devoted to surfing through interesting stuff on Pinterest and Tumbler. The most active days of the week are in the middle for most of the platforms except Pinterest and Tumbler which again goes to show their association with leisure activities.
All this is great but generalizing everything in this manner may prove to be more detrimental than useful for your brand. Many factors need to be taken into consideration. As is evident from the infographic, every platform serves a different purpose and has diverse set of audiences. Sometimes certain events override these general rules and draw people to social media as they unfold. Holidays and important incidents that capture public attention are some such events. After all, your ultimate goal is to boost engagement, create advocates and achieve amplification of your content by taking advantage of every opportunity presented. Based on these goals, here are a few things you should keep in mind:
Do Your Own Analysis
While you are following these external guidelines on best times, analyze whether these tactics are working for you too. Are you creating more engagement, amplification, click throughs at these times or your audience behaves differently? Experiment with other times, sometimes avoiding the clutter at peak hours may prove beneficial to you and you may enjoy undivided attention. Facebook provides you with a metric to inform you about the peak hours of your audience. Use third party tools to find out the peak time of your audience in each of your social media platforms.
Analyze Your Audience
This is the most basic element for any communication plan. Is your audience a professional set, school kids, house wives, teens or working women? A lot depends on that, as this article from Huffington post suggests that professional are likely to check their Twitter on their mobiles during commute times. So, the devices your audience is likely to use for accessing social media also alters their content consumption behavior. By carefully studying your audience and their behavior, you will achieve better results rather than following a general rule blindly.
Schedule Your Posts
Every social platform has a different peak time, so, you must have a distinct posting schedule for individual platforms. Mobile is a fast growing medium for accessing social media for consumers. It is equally handy tool for marketers as well. You may want to make use of your mobile both to set alarms for posting according to your schedule and actually posting your content from it.
Repost If Required
Often, we marketers take advantage of a trending topic or post content on live events. These may not necessarily fall within the peak time of a particular social media platform. In such cases, you may want to repost the content at a more receptive time for your audience.
In conclusion, I offer that every brand is unique in its appeal and social media marketers need to customize the intelligence gathered to come out with their most effective strategy.
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