When is the best time to post social media? Now that is a good question! From your personal experience how many times have you woken up after a night out, grabbed your phone and groaned when you hazily remember what you got up to and realised that you actually shared the evidence for all to see on social media!
If you have, and you run a business, then you will appreciate there are certain times when you should avoid posting on social media, and this is definitely one of them!
Seriously though, the simple answer as to when is the best time to post on social media is when your customers will be browsing. However, knowing when this is likely to be is still the ultimate challenge.
We recently read an article published by Sprout Social which details the best times to post on social media in 2020 and it has recently been updated to reflect the changes caused by lockdown.
It is a really useful article because it breaks down each social media platform to show which is the best time on each.
Obviously there is a huge caveat in that this data has been gathered from users of their platform which is worldwide and has subscribers from many different sectors. So whilst you can refer to these these findings as a benchmark guide when starting out, as always there is no better way to plan the timing of your posts than to analyse your own posts and schedule accordingly.
That said, even this is getting increasingly difficult as rather than displaying content to users in the chronological order in which posts were published, increasingly algorithms are choosing the content we see based on its relevance to other posts we have interacted with.
So this makes it all the more important to ensure your content is relevant to the followers you are building. Otherwise, regardless of how much effort you put into deciding when to post, the algorithms could determine its relevancy as well as if and when it is displayed to your followers.
The majority of our clients trade with businesses (B2B) and are mostly based in the East Midlands, so when we are determining which social media platforms are best for them and creating their social media content plan we usually find that LinkedIn is the best fit.
LinkedIn historically targets a more specific audience than other social networks, with its focus on professional users. We will work with our clients to understand their buyer profile so that we help to build a following of the right people on their social platforms.
The sprout social research has shown that the best times to post on LinkedIn are:
- Best times: Wednesday from 8–10 a.m. and noon, Thursday at 9 a.m. and 1–2 p.m., and Friday at 9 a.m.
- Best day: Wednesday and Thursday
- Worst day: Sunday
However, this also depends on the content. We’ve found that posts advertising for staff work best in the evenings and weekends, so this further underlines the need to do your own analysis which can involve some degree of testing in the early stages of determining the optimum social media strategy for your business.
Finally, if you are planning to implement a social media strategy always remember to allocate resource to monitor feedback comments left in your posts and also ensure your employee handbook includes a social media policy.
If you need help or advice planning your social media strategy, please contact us.