Social Media Posting: The Best Time to Post to the Most Popular Social Media Networks

Most people are already aware that when it comes to social media posting, it’s crucial to focus on providing as much value as possible. While it can be tempting to simply blast out messages that are self-promotional in nature, those generally aren’t anywhere close to being effective as sharing information that people find useful or engaging.

However, because the Internet is such a busy place, simply sharing great content isn’t always enough to maximize the effectiveness of social media. In order to generate the best results possible, it’s vital to take other factors like timing into consideration. Although that may sound stressful, the good news is lots of analysis around this topic has already been done. That means you just need to learn that information, and then put it into practice.

Twitter

Since Twitter is a very busy place, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s a lot of data. Out of everything that’s been studied, one of the most interesting findings is the fact that Twitter is extremely active on the weekends. Specifically, engagement with brands is a full 17% higher from Friday to Sunday than it is from Monday to Thursday.

While that’s a very interesting takeaway for businesses, it doesn’t mean you should only tweet on the weekends. Because there’s still plenty of activity during the week, you’ll want to stay engaged. When it comes to the best weekday times, that actually depends on your goal for individual tweets.

If you want as many people as possible to click-through, 12PM and 6PM are the two peak times. And if you’re going for retweets, 5PM is the ideal opportunity. So as you can see from both those facts, it’s best to focus the majority of your Twitter activity later in the day.

Facebook

When it comes to Facebook, people get more active as the workweek gets closer to ending. Thursday and Friday are generally identified as the two days when engagement is the highest, with Sunday being next on the list. And when it comes to actually posting, 1PM has been pegged as the best hour for shares, while 3PM generates the most clicks. So if you want to strike a balance between those two goals, doing your social media publishing on Facebook during the early afternoon is a smart bet.

Google Plus

Although Facebook and Twitter are generally credited for making social media mainstream, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest have all become major social networks in fairly short amounts of time. Since there are signs that Google may use Plus to help influence SERPs, every business can benefit from posting on it. The best times for this network are 9AM to 11AM, while the worst is from 6PM to 7AM.

LinkedIn

If you’re in the B2B space, LinkedIn can be very useful. The peak times for this network are right before and after work, so 7AM to 8:30AM and 5PM to 6PM. Tuesday and Thursday are the best days to post on LinkedIn, while any time from 9AM to 5PM on Monday and Friday is considered the worst.

Pinterest

For products and businesses that have to do with beauty, fashion, decorating, design or DIY in general, Pinterest can be a gold mine. The average Pinterest user spends more than 16 minutes on the site each time they visit! During the week, 2PM to 4PM and 8PM to 11PM are the best times to post. The other time that can work quite well is Saturday morning.

Email

Although email is a different medium than social, given the fact that it plays an important role in the online marketing strategy of many businesses, it’s worth taking a quick look at the best time to hit send. According to various research, if you’re sending a promotional email to consumers, 6AM to 10AM and then 7PM to 10PM are the two sweet spots. And if you’re in the B2B market, 5PM to 7PM is the best time to send emails.

Now that you know the best times for social media posting, all that’s left for you to do is take what we covered and put it into action. Keep in mind that if you utilize a social media dashboard, you’ll be able to track your exact results and refine these times to the ideal range for your specific business.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at SendSocialMedia.com. Interested in learning more? Visit SendSocialMedia.com/blog/

I am Nigel Miller. I work with SendSocialMedia.Com as a VP Sales & Marketing.