The best times to get social with your marketing

Social Media Insights

66% of the UK population actively use social media, making it a vital tool for any business that wants to enhance its visibility and popularity with a digital marketing campaign.

A well-timed post can get you more likes, comments, shares, and click-through. And it goes without saying that the best times to post are when your audience is most likely to see and engage with your content.

So when is the best time to post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn?

 

FACEBOOK

As the number one social networking site, Facebook has over 1.4 billion daily active users globally, and 78% of the UK’s active internet users, making it by far the best platform for exposure.

Here, you’re most likely to see more engagement on posts later in the week, particularly on Thursdays and Fridays between 1pm and 4pm, with most desktop and mobile users browsing in their ‘downtime’ during the working day.

Early mornings see the least engagement, unless your target audience commutes to work by train or bus, in which case catch them between 8.30am and 9.30am.

 

INSTAGRAM

Instagram is another social media giant with around 24 million UK users every month, and rising, so knowing the best times to post here could make a big difference to your social media marketing strategy.

Most Instagrammers access the site through their smartphones, so the best times to post are lunchtimes, 12pm to 1pm during the week. Posts published straight after work hours were also found to get more engagement, anytime between 6pm-9pm.

 

TWITTER

This is the place to share short messages with your followers, the best time being during the lunch hour, between 12pm and 1pm. People tend to engage more during the middle of the workweek and less on weekends, when they’re busy with personal activities. If you’re after retweets or clickthrough, the best times to post on Twitter are noon or 5-6 pm.

 

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn’s popularity is growing in the B2B world, with 13 million active company pages, and 260 million personal profiles. Here your brand’s content can reach mass target audiences, so knowing when to post could work hard for your business.

In the UK, LinkedIn posts tend to get the greatest engagement on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays between 7.30am and 8.30am, and from 5pm to 6pm. As this is a professional site, LinkedIn is used most often during the working day and commuting hours.

 

GOOD TO REMEMBER

Experimenting with posts at different times of the day can pay off; it’s a matter of seeing which times work best for your brand over time.

Then there’s your content quality. Whatever time you post, keep the quality of your content up to scratch to get the engagement you’re looking for.

Do your analytics.
Each social media platform has its own analytics section with all the key information about your account and your followers. Use it.

Facebook’s analytics section is at the top of your business page in the ‘insights’ section, where you’ll find ‘post engagements’. This will show how many of your followers are active and when, how many you’ve reached, and which type of posts did best.

Instagram’s analytics are within the app, in the ‘insights’ section of your profile, showing data on activity, content and audience.

Twitter’s analytics shows a full list of your tweets so you can see which generated the most interest, and the times when they were posted.

LinkedIn has an ‘updates’ section on LinkedIn analytics that shows you likes, comments, shares and clicks, which of your content is working well and which not so well.

In each case, look for correspondence between the harder working posts, and the times they were posted.

For more tips get in touch with our team at hello@harrisoncarloss.com