The Best Times to Post on Social Media

Do you ever wonder why some of your posts on social media get more hits than others? Due to Facebook's algorithms, a random post on your page may be more popular than another. Sometimes that simply depends on how many people it reaches in the first hour.

Rather than going through hours and hours of training to learn algorithm and analytics, use this handy guide to help you figure out when are the best times to post on social media.

BLOG POSTS

Most people tend to read blogs in the morning with the start of their day
More men than women read blogs in the evening
On average, the most pageviews come in at 11am
Highest traffic comes in on Mondays and Thursdays

FACEBOOK

This is frequented most often from 1pm-5pm on weekdays, or during lunchtime
Best times to post are 12pm, 5pm, 6pm on weekdays
Highest engagement are on Wednesdays -- it's the middle of the week and attention span is starting to run low for most folks
Engagement is lowest on the weekends, and everyday before 8am
Fun fact: Weekends have about 17% higher engagement for clothing brands

PINTEREST

Saturdays are the best time to pin, optimally at 8pm-11pm & 2am-4am
Highest engagement for fashion & brands: 3pm Friday
During the week, try to pin from about 1pm-4pm EST

INSTAGRAM

For weekdays, 9am-10am works best for this platform.
For weekends, early morning and afternoon have higher traffic.
Keep in mind that Instagram posts have a longer life than say Twitter and Facebook since people often go back and look at all your photos.

TWITTER

This hub of traffic is most frequented from 1pm - 5 pm on weekdays and during lunchtime
8pm-10pm Thursday-Saturday also get a lot of engagement for social people

Keep in mind that not every reader is the same, and each post should be tailored to your followers. Test your engagement yourself to see what works for highest engagement.

A few tools automate this process (since not all of us want to stay up until 4am to increase the engagement of a Pinterest post), such as Hubspot, Hootsuite and Buffer. Using sites like this can help you schedule social media posts to publish when it would otherwise be inconvenient for you.

Sources:

An introduction to getting visibility in social streams by understanding the algorithms used by Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest

3 Ways to Fight Facebook’s Algorithm and Customize Your Feed

The Social Media Algorithm

Topics: Digital Marketing