Whether it’s for personal use or advertising purposes, knowing the best times to post on social media and garner audience engagement is important. We want to help you make sure that friends are seeing vacation photos and teens are finding the new trendy fashion website!
Keep reading for tips on how to increase audience engagement on social media!
Your selfie deserves to be seen and commented on! The lighting and angles are perfect and it would be a shame if that went to waste. Some might have their own strategies for getting likes/views on Instagram, such as resharing posts to their stories or having followers share them as well.
That is one method, but another is finding the right time to post. You can do this by testing the timing of your posts to see which time gets the most audience engagement. But if you don’t have time for that, there is data.
Data shows that on average, the best time to post on Instagram is between 10 AM and 3 PM CDT. However, that depends on the day of the week.
According to Hubspot.com, these are the best times (local) according to the day of the week:
* = high levels of engagement
- Sunday: 8 AM – 2 PM (though engagement is generally low on this day)
- Monday: 11 AM – 2 PM
- Tuesday: 10 AM – 3 PM, *7 PM
- Wednesday: 7 AM – 4 PM (engagement peaks at 11 AM – 2 PM)
- Thursday: 10 AM – 2 PM, 6-7 PM
- Friday: *9 AM – 2 PM
- Saturday: 9 – 11 AM
It is important to consider your followers and their daily routines.
For example, if your audience is school-aged kids or high schoolers, they are probably unable to be on their phones throughout the day on weekdays. On the other end of the spectrum, if you are trying to reach adults, they are probably more likely to be on their phones throughout the day.
You know your audience best!
Twitter is a great platform for keeping up with local news in just about 280 characters. You can comment on threads or laugh at funny tweets or memes. It really is the best of both worlds.
Though I will say that the lack of an edit feature on tweets is quite intimidating.
Nevertheless, Twitter is a platform that has the most power in connecting users from all over the world. So, if you are a user in one state, with a different time zone than the audience you are trying to reach, it might be important to know the best times to post.
According to SproutSocial.com, these are the best times and days to post:
- Best times: Wednesday 9 AM – 3 PM, Tuesday through Thursday 9 AM – 11 AM
- Best day: Wednesday
- Worst day: Saturday
Another thing to consider, especially if you are trying to join in on trends, is to track things going on in the world or are of your interest.
For example, if you are watching the Grammys and want to contribute to the social media buzz on it, during the show would probably be a great time to post.
There are some users, who also like to tweet very late into the night because there are always night-owls who are bored and scrolling through Twitter.
Retweets help a lot too. While timing is important, so are features such as hashtags and retweets. You can never go wrong with those elements of Twitter.
From important life updates to creating events, Facebook remains a large piece of the blueprint for connecting people on the world wide web.
Many use it to keep up with distant family members and friends, which is what makes it so appealing. Even more, it garners users of all ages making it easy to keep up with grandma Peggy (LOL).
Not to mention, that with nearly 2.5 billion monthly users, Facebook remains the largest social media site in the world. Why wouldn’t a local business want 2.5 billion people to see their content? Why wouldn’t you want your 50 distant relatives to know you just got into law school?
The answer is simple, you want them all to see so you must know the best time to post your media!
According to SproutSocial.com, these are the best times to post.
- Best times: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday 9 AM – 1 PM
- Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
- Worst day: Saturday
One thing that has remained consistent for social media sites, is the fact of Saturday being the worst day to post. And when you put it into perspective, it makes sense.
Saturday is the one day of the week when (for the most part) users are not consumed by their normal weekly routine of either school or work. Therefore, it is time off the phone and partaking in activities. While this is highly generalized, in the realm of social media, especially Facebook, it makes sense.
Most importantly, for all social media platforms, is considering your audience. Track what has engaged them in the past and make note of that for the future. If you are a new user, over time you will begin to understand your audience and figure out what engages them.
Well, it’s Sunday so get your Instagram posts up between 8 AM and 2 PM!
Thanks to Sprout Social for the graphics.
