When is it really the best time to post to Social Media?
Social media is a big deal these days and if you aren’t on board, people think you live in the dark ages. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogging, and so on can be great platforms to boost your online marketing image and draw people to your website. And let’s be real, everyone wants to know the prime time to post in order to get the most engagement from your followers. There are a lot of social media experts that say they know the magic trick to posting, but what works for some, may not necessarily work for others. However, if your’e interested in getting more involved in social media, read on. We’ll talk about research we’ve found that gives businesses the best times to post on multiple social media platforms and when fans are most likely to engage with you.
Perhaps the most popular social media channel, this platform could potentially earn you many new followers and point increased traffic to your website. Here are a few pointers we have found helpful. It seems that brands post during the week, however, engagement is huge over the weekends, with Sunday being the peak day. It has also been found that posts published at night get the most interaction, especially after 9pm. And this makes sense because you work all day, spend time with family or friends in the early evening and then the later evening is usually your time to catch up on news, emails, and social media. While many businesses usually post during the day, 12-1pm being peak time, if you wait and post at 12-1am, you are likely to be more effective.
Twitter is gaining in popularity with its ease of quick tweets and rapid following. It’s been found that most tweets happen during the work week, with Thursday being the most popular day to tweet. Most businesses don’t tweet much on the weekends. However, most retweets happen on Sundays and during the night. So if you want to engage more with your followers, it might be a smart idea to rethink your strategy and limit what you tweet during the day and set up tweets for evening and late night when many people are free of daily distractions.
Blogging
This is yet another way to get your information out for everyone to see. Blogs can be very valuable if you take the time to write quality content that is relevant to your audience. Most companies publish during the work week with Tuesday and Wednesday being the most popular days. Most brands publish between 9am-6pm and 11am-12pm are peak hours to publish. Now, let’s take a look at when people actually read the blogs. Weekend posts tend to get the most social shares. Blogs that are published on Saturdays see the greatest number of shares and blog posts published between 10-11pm get the most interaction. Are we starting to see a trend here? It may make sense to post during the workday, however, the most engagement, likes, comments, and shares happen outside of normal business hours.
Email Marketing
Let’s move on to email marketing - a great strategy many businesses use as part of their SEO campaign. Here are a few stats - most brands send out emails during the week and Tuesday is the peak day to send emails. As we can imagine, there aren’t too many emails that are sent on weekends and surprise surprise, most brands send their emails between 9am-6pm. Now, let’s take a look at what that does for our engagement. Surprise - most emails are actually read during the week. The best days to open our Wednesday and Thursday. Most emails are read in the afternoon and the best time to send an email is between 2-5pm. Now, this makes sense because most people check their email multiple times a day, so this option is great to do during the week and not so much the weekend.
In summary, you may want to post during the day, but the most engagement seems to happen at night. And you may want to think twice about posting on Thursdays, since that is when everyone else wants to post and your news feed may get lost in the shuffle. Try it out and see what works for you.