As times have turned more digital and companies have shifted their focus towards social media, marketers are often wondering the best way to engage with their audience online. With an influx in brands joining the organic social media movement mixed with paid ads coming in from every angle, there seems to be an increase in brand messaging filling up timelines each day. But, from a marketer’s perspective, when is the best time to get your message across?

 

At Glewee, we work with an array of brands that strive in product and service categories ranging from e-commerce to hygiene and everything in-between. Each brand has their own mission and goal, but within those goals comes a unique brand tone, identity, and messaging. The first focus is what is being said, and then from there it’s up to the brand to understand their unique approach to how it is being said. Digital advertising acts as a behavior change module, and it is our job as marketers to change that behavior of those consuming our media correctly. The last piece of the trifecta of messaging boils down to: when you should say it.

 

From Instagram to Facebook, all the way through Twitter and LinkedIn, there is a right place and right time to be posting content to maximize impressions, engagement, and reach. SproutSocial has developed intuitive graphs that depict the best time to post on social media by social platform and industry. All of the times in the data are recorded in US Central Time.

 

What are the best times to post on Facebook?

 

 

• Best times: Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday 9 a.m.–1 p.m.
• Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday
• Worst day: Saturday

Although Facebook is by number the most used social media platform in the world, there are still prime times and low times that brands need to be aware of before sharing messaging to the platform.

 

Think about the consumer themselves – when are they most likely to have some free time to be scrolling through Facebook? The obvious answers that match the data are: mornings, evenings, and weekends. As the data describes, Saturdays are not ideal times for publishing content to Facebook because most people try to avoid work related tasks like scrolling on social for a single day a week, understandably being Saturday.

Play the role of the marketer and the consumer here and understand why the weekdays mid morning are the most engaged times. To us, these numbers don’t come at any surprise. If you’re looking to be sending out branded content and messaging on Facebook, look to that middle of the weeks enhanced engagement zone to get the greatest results.

 

What are the best times to post on Instagram?

 

 

• Best times: Tuesday 11 a.m.–2 p.m., Monday through Friday 11 a.m.
• Best day: Tuesday
• Worst day: Sunday

Over the past year with people around the world being confined to their couches and bedside in-home offices, platforms like Instagram saw ginormous increases in users, content, and growth. With the introduction of Reels, enhancements to Stories, and the new digital shopping mall feature that is the new Explore page, there is so much to do on Instagram now.

 

With a parent company like Facebook, it’s clear that they push their users to engage during prime times and the organic flow of usage follows similar paths from Facebook to Instagram. Engagement during the weekdays even became more dense in the past year, peaking in the 11am – 2pm range, as well as spiking back up in the evenings and weekends.

 

Instagram is an amazing place for brands to reach out to their audience, engage with them, and showcase their products and services all in one place. As a brand, if you’re having trouble increasing followers, engagement, and brand awareness on Instagram, utilizing Glewee’s platform to deploy Instagram Creators as your next brand advocates has shown to enhance engagement exponentially.

 

If you’re looking to ramp up your Instagram presence and strategy, keep these times in mind. If that still isn’t working to increase your numbers, it’s time for Creator Marketing!

 

What are the best times to post on Twitter?

 

 

• Best times: Wednesday 9 a.m.– 3 p.m., Tuesday through Thursday 9–11 a.m.
• Best day: Wednesday
• Worst day: Saturday

Twitter is another social platform that has been in influx in user generated content and growth due to everything that has happened in the past year from the COVID-19 virus, the US Presidential Election, and more. With users being able to get breaking news and information in real time, many people look at Twitter like they do the newspaper. With this in mind, think to yourself “when do people read the newspaper?”

Being a social media that is so easy to access and consume small bits of information on, Twitter sees surges in usage during the day, starting with the morning readers onto those who consume their media during the day. Weekdays are most popular for Twitter, seeing that it is a vehicle for news media. Weekend nights drop off with the lowest levels of engagement on the platform, understandably.

There is something to be said about the increase in the usage times during the day versus during the evenings and on weekends. To a brand, this can be a spark of inspiration to be publishing content during the first half of weekdays, and focusing their Twitter customer support services to the weekends when people are spending less time consuming media and there is less for people to be thinking about while on the platform.

 

What are the best times to post on LinkedIn?

 

• Best times: Tuesday through Thursday 9 a.m.–noon
• Best days: Tuesday and Wednesday
• Worst day: Sunday

LinkedIn has come a long way in the past few years. Raining as a leading social platform in the business world, the platform follows a similar engagement pattern to Twitter as people spend time browsing, uploading content, and promoting their business during the work week. As a tool for marketing, networking, and brand awareness – LinkedIn has proven its importance as a leading social media platform that brands must stay active on in order to stay relevant.

New opportunities, company updates, personal achievements, and recent project releases are just a few of the many reasons individuals as well as major companies flock to LinkedIn. It makes perfect sense that the engagement on LinkedIn spikes during the work week and lowers as the weekend comes around.

There is a very heavy ‘work life’ connotation around LinkedIn as a social media. With that in mind, many people like to take evenings and weekends off from ‘work related processes’ which is proven in the engagement data above. Being such a critical source of B2B marketing and strategy, LinkedIn isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

 

What are the best times to post on TikTok?

 

This seems to be the magic question that millions of people are asking themselves. Between Creators that are looking for the prime time to get their video out there and marketers tasked with creating and growing a TikTok following on behalf of a brand, this is having a lot of people scratching their head and doing far more than some A/B testing.

As of right now, with the foreign-owned platform being so new and its’ management being outside of the US, it is difficult for us to get proper data around the average engagement times of the platform. Not to mention that this is the first social media platform we’ve ever seen that seems to prioritize the value and engagement of the content over when it was posted. If you browse the For You Page, chances are you’ll see videos posted over a month ago mixed in with ones posted that hour.

Seeing that the feed algorithm boosts TikTok videos out to people all over the world that it thinks will engage best with the content, becoming familiar with hashtags, popular sounds, and video editing tools in the app are the first place to look. Next, it’s best to go into your account and look through your Account and Business Panel to see when your followers are most active on the platform and posting accordingly based on that given data.

As more data is created via TikTok and with maturity of the platform will come more concrete evidence around average engagement times. Until then, just focus on hashtags and popular sounds and remember – post post post! Great content proves to gain great traction!

 

Finding The Right Time For Your Company To Post

 

There are a multitude of strategies a social marketer could use to post on social media. Strategies that work best for news publications may not work best for E-commerce brands. The best way to identify the time that works best for your company is with the help of data. On all social media platforms, one equipped with a ‘Business Account’, data regarding the time your followers are most active, their psychographics, and engagement patterns are displayed. Focusin on the data specific to your company, and cross examining it with the average usage data displayed here, a social marketer can have a better grasp and understanding on when the companies’ followers are most active.

 

The strategy of posting at peak times does prove to work well because many users are online and active during that time, but think about the value of the content and how much time it takes to truly go through it, digest it, understand it, and evaluate it. If it’s longer than the average post then it may be beneficial to take a step back and avoid these prime time posts.

 

As a marketer, if you are curious about posting on and off peak time, at Glewee.ee we suggest you do some A/B testing. Try posting content during the most engaged times as well as during less engaged times and view the difference in the analytics of the posts, identify discrepancies in click through rates, and understand what your audience likes the best. At the end of the day, it’s up to the reader to see a post by a brand and think “oh, this looks interesting, I’ll give them a few seconds of my time!”

 

Need help getting a word out there?

If posting organically doesn’t help increase social traction, drive new engagement, and reach marketing goals then it is time for Creator Marketing. With Glewee a brand can choose from a plethora of qualified Creators across all market categories and channels, and deploy them to be their new brand advocates.

 

Need an additional twitter retweet to reach 1 million new eyes? We have the Creator for that. Your new Instagram post didn’t quite achieve the engagement you wanted regarding a new product release? How about having a highly followed and dedicated Creator post that for you.

 

If you’d like to learn more about the benefits of Creator Marketing and the opportunities that await with Glewee.ee, feel free to schedule a live demo here.

 

[ Article by Christian Brown, Chief Marketing Officer ]