Social media is often one of the biggest and best ways to reach out to your customers and potential buyers. Regardless of whether you are a B2B or a B2C business, social media has a more than a decent return on investment for you, only if you produce the right content.
But, sometimes even creating the right type of content for your audience doesn’t have the kind of impact on them, as you many expect as a brand. We’ve all been there, when we open one of the popular social media platforms, scroll down a feed only to find an image or video by our favorite brand.
As much as we like to double-tap it, so is it a great feeling for the brand to reach out to us and quench our thirst for great content
Why Timing Is so Important on Social Media
If you look at it closely, it isn’t just a chance to come across a social media post from our favorite brand in our feed, when we browse it. It’s the power of being out there at the precise moment and time.
In simple terms, the best time to post content on social media is when your customers and followers are online. After all, there is no point in creating great content if the audience that you’re targeting doesn’t get to see it.
Social media platforms move fast, with a constant urge for instant attention. Just like the way your customers expect a great image or post from your brand, you expect an excellent engagement metric for all the efforts you put in. For this to happen for real, you need to know the way your customers use social media.
The time and day when your users are most likely to be active on different social media platforms play a huge role in deciding the success. But, just knowing this isn’t enough. If you have to be out there expecting engagement on your posts, you need to establish a connection with your customer, and that can vary depending upon the nature of your business.
For example, an e-commerce brand might discover that social engagement follows a daily and seasonal pattern of purchase.
Similarly, a B2B or a corporate brand might seek for engagement in the form of clicks and likes at the start of a working day from people who are looking for inspiration.
To get started with garnering engagement for your customers, you must analyze and study the time and day of their online presence. But doing this on your own can be a tiresome task, which is why we’ve gone ahead and collected this information for different social media channels for you.
Let’s discover the best time and date to post on different social media channels in 2020.
With more than two billion active users, Facebook is the most populated social media platform to date. For this reason, there is a huge opportunity for different kinds of brands from multiple industries to get organic engagement.
If you’ve noticed Facebook’s algorithm recently, you’ll know that it promotes posts from friends and family more than brand, which is why creating a compelling story is your best shot at getting engagement.
Research indicates that the best time for posting on your Facebook business page is between 9 am to 3 pm on weekdays. Because people tend to take a break during this time and stroll through their social media feeds. In another instance, you can also post around 8 pm, because that is a time when people are commuting back home and scroll through their social media feeds.
However, if you’re posting on a Sunday, the best time is 3 pm for the task. Even though many believe that the weekend is usually the worst time to post on the channel, research says otherwise.
The best days to post on Facebook are weekdays, but surprisingly posting on Saturday and Sunday mornings also shows good results. The weekend tends to get one of the highest engagements on Facebook, while it is Friday that accounts for as many as 17 percent of all comments.
Instagram recently surpassed as many as one billion active users. It has not only become a great platform for sharing photos and videos but also for e-commerce brands who find their customers looking for different things.
Instagram is a more authentic and personal social media channel with its own algorithm to prioritize feeds. But, it’s not just the images that exist to generate engagement.
Brands can explore Instagram stories and IGTV videos for reaching out to their customers in the best possible way.
Research indicates that if you’re selling on posting on Instagram, the best time to do it is during the early morning. Upon analysis of as many as 61,000 Instagram posts, research stated that if you post at 2 am and 5 pm, you are more likely to get double taps and views on your images and videos. Similarly, the worst timings to post on the platform were found out to be 9 am and 6 pm.
Another great time to post is in the evening, from 7 pm to 9 pm, which is basically the after work hours. Since Instagram is used mostly from mobile phones, people avoid using it during prime work hours.
Coming to the days, the best days to post on Instagram are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday with Sunday being the worst day. Wednesday gets the highest level of engagement on the platform. However, if you are planning on posting a video, do it on nonworking hours.
Twitter is undoubtedly the nerve center of the world. More than 500 million tweets are sent out every day on the platform. It gives a huge opportunity for brands and their users to connect with each other.
Twitter’s algorithm lets tweets reach out to their users in chronological order based on the user’s interests, which is why timelessness is the key to the platform. But in spite of that, most people manage to scroll up their feeds and catch up on the latest posts from around the world.
Before you get started on Twitter, make sure that you have a brand strategy in place. Since Twitter is the goldmine for social conversations, it can really help you if your moto aligns with that of your audiences.
The best days for posting on Twitter for B2C brands are on weekends along with Wednesday. On the other hand, weekdays are best for B2B companies. People are most active on Twitter when they are commuting, so make sure you align your tweets around 12 noon and 6 pm.
Brands can also schedule their posts so that it hits their audience just at the precise moment. With weekdays being the best days, weekends are usually the worst for Twitter.
LinkedIn has a more targeted audience as compared to other social media platforms. The active users on the platform are mostly the working professionals, which is what makes it the best platform for B2B business.
Even though the audience is more restricted on the platform, there is no reason that you must underestimate its potential for getting engagement. The users of the platform are not just motivated but can generate a lot of engagement for brands out there.
Weekdays and busiest hours tend to be the best days and time to post on LinkedIn. Post in the mornings or midday and leave weekends empty. Since working professionals are active on the platform, brands must utilize work hours to target them with motivational and interactive posts.
Posting on weekends and after work hours might not work in your favor when we talk of LinkedIn, and it is for obvious reasons.
Conclusion
Understanding social media engagement is a big part of creating content and marketing. If you’re just starting out, make sure you understand your customer personas to get a deeper insight into what your customers might be expecting from you.
Make sure you invest time in devising a strategy for a particular channel and perform an A/B testing to reinforce your beliefs. In other words, never stop experimenting when it comes to social media.
social media time – DepositPhotos
