When Should I Post My Social Media Content? [Infographic]

Author: Carolyn Menz Category: B2B, B2C, E-commerce & Retail, Marketing, Nonprofit, Social Media & Digital Date: March 16, 2017

One of the most common questions we receive from clients regarding social media marketing is, “When should I post to my social media networks?” As you know, each social media platform varies by audience, content type, share-ability, the time it takes to browse through a feed, and the number of people actually using the platform. Therefore, your timing is going to vary by platform as well.

We found a great infographic with recent data that shows when the best time to post on each of the social media networks. While this information is great to have on hand and is great when you are starting a new page, you have to take it with a grain of salt. This data encompasses all posts on each network and therefore it may not necessarily be your audience.

For example, let’s take two types of businesses: a teenager retail shop, and a financial advisory group.

While the infographic states that mid-week on Wednesdays between 3-6 p.m. you’d have a bigger engagement following on Twitter, that doesn’t necessarily hold true for both the retail shop and the advising group.

If the retail store is marketing to teenagers and their parents, they may not have the same sort of engagement mid-week, mid-day, as a financial advising group. They have completely different target audiences and should thus plan their social media marketing around their audiences.

The best way to determine when your target audience is most engaging is by testing and reviewing your analytics yourself. Once you’ve posted for a few months, testing different times and dates, you can review your analytics (as most social media platforms will provide this to you) to determine when the highest engagement levels are. These are going to be your shares, likes, retweets, comments, +1s, views, and impressions. Hopefully, you will see a pattern. If you do not, then we would suggest you stick with the data in this infographic and re-analyze every month until you start to see a pattern.

When Should You Post on Social Media?

Here is the data for the following social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, SnapChat, and Tumblr. This infographic is courtesy of Brafton.