When is the best time for me to post on social media?

If you want your audience to see what you are posting on social media, then you need them to be using social media. There isn’t a universal optimum posting time for the different social media platforms. As every audience is different. The first thing we would suggest is to find the locations and time zones where your audiences are, the make sure you are posting to match their timezone.

You can find this information within Instagrams “Insights” feature. This shows each day broken down into hour by hour, as well as showing your audiences location and age-range.

The you can experiment with the time you post to find the optimum time. Keep track of what times you test then you’ll know when you tested and don’t repeat yourself. An additional item to keep track of is overall engagement. This could be comments, likes or shares too. Plan out your posts for the week, schedule them to go out at hourly increments each day. Keep in mind that an element of your post needs to remain the same. We would suggest using the same hashtags during the test period.

Once you’ve tested the different time slots, you will come away with two results. Firstly, the optimal posting time and secondly, your optimum day or days. What do you do with these pieces of information. You plan around them. Some other factors to keep in mind is; 1. Post for your most active audience, 2. Post during “Off-Work” hours (Lunchtimes 11:30am-2:30pm and after 6pm). 3. Save the important posts for week-days, people pay more attention to your content and the captions during the week.

There are some occasions where engagement changes during the tried and tested time, these cannot be predicted.. Now and again a post will do very well and get more likes, shares, comments and overall engagement. On the flip side of this, you’ll have a post prepared, caption ready, hashtags all sorted and you think it’s going to do very well, and it doesn’t. Your audience are unpredictable which is something to keep in mind, all you can do is try to create a strong, attractive post and share it at what you believe to be the optimum time.

Once you have found your schedule and best timings, the last pieces of advice we will give to you is 1. Stay consistent with your posting time, 2. Retest posting timings every 3-4 months. Do not get disheartened if there are certain days that your page doesnt do well, or a post doesn’t do well, just make a note of what you posted, and when, then keep it in mind and keep pushing forward.