There is No “Best” Time to Post to Social Media

October 2, 2013

Clock's Ticking: What is the Best Time to Post to Social Media?

Newsflash: the only way you’re going to discover the truly best time to post on social media is if you take the time to research it yourself. Here’s how to get started.

I started this blog post with the title of “The Best and Worst Times to Post on Social Media.” However, after some research, I concluded that these optimal times don’t exist. When you Google a phrase such as “the best time to post on social media,” you are bombarded with infographics and articles that claim to have all the answers. Yes, they do deliver valuable insight on what times can deliver the most traffic on each network. On the other hand, they aren’t really offering any strategy that you can implement to guide your own social media marketing efforts.

In other words, you’re not going to be successful if your social media strategy is solely based on posting at these magic times. There’s a ton of additional aspects to consider when it comes to social media time management. Below, I’ve come up with some interesting takeaways that a marketer needs to consider before blindly following all the shiny, colorful infographics that offer quick and easy solutions.

The Infamous Infographic

social-media-timesTo the right is the popular infographic from Social Caffeine that seems to have won over the Internet and social media marketers everywhere. What’s so wrong with this? Well, for starters:

  • It’s telling social media marketers to bombard their social networks at these times in order to maximize the possible reach with your audience.
  • It is definitely not the brightest strategy to flood your followers’ streams.
  • These recommended times have no significance to your company or brand whatsoever.
  • It may be important to understand the general pattern of when social media communication is at it’s highest, but it’s more useful to create your own customized “Best Times to Post”.

How to Create Your Own “Best Times to Post” Strategy

Facebook

The Insights Tab on your company’s Facebook page offers a lot of useful data regarding time optimization that is unique to your business. You can check out the average number of fans who saw your posts by the day of the week or even the hours of each day. This is a great tool that offers personal information about your Facebook fans.

LinkedIn

When it comes to time optimization, LinkedIn doesn’t offer insights to the extent that Facebook does. However, it does provide useful data on their Analytics Page, which shows what days had high engagement and what days did not. This is when you have to pull the information yourself and figure out a personalized LinkedIn strategy on your own. If you take the time to sift through the data, you will eventually notice trends that you can strategize around.

Twitter

Tweriod is a tool that all social media marketers should look into. Tweriod will take your Twitter account and produce a report displaying what times your followers are most active on Twitter. Talk about a useful tool! Personally, I was shocked to find out that some of the most action occurs at hours I wouldn’t think would be that popular. I highly recommend this free, useful tool for discovering the best times to post on Twitter.

Key Takeaways

  • Don’t try to go “all in” and bombard social media at “hot times.” Instead, spread out your posts and make sure your agenda includes activity on these times. You don’t want to flood your followers with content all at one time.
  • Remember timezones! It’s extremely important to know where your followers are located. You may have a lot of followers in California but are scheduling with the East Coast in mind. Make sure to spend some time locating your followers.
  • Don’t always fall for the lure of infographics. They may be pretty, but sometimes they are lacking real, actionable insight.

Do you have any time optimization tools that you have implemented in your social media strategy? Share them below!

Alex is Senior Associate, Social Content Systems at Arnold Worldwide <a href="http://arn.com/">Arnold Worldwide</a> . Alex specializes in identifying influencers for multiple brands and campaigns to create multimedia content in the form of blog posts, social extensions, and video content. Before Arnold Worldwide, Alex was a Media Business Representative at <a href="http://patch.com/">Patch.com</a>.