In the era of Social Media marketing, it is crucial to step up your game and help your business stand apart by effectively engaging users through social channels. Simply posting updates on social media sites is great, but you can do something more to help these posts reach a larger audience and, therefore, create a bigger impact on your followers, likers, pinners and so on. The method is simple: timing. Each social media site has its own, unique high and low traffic times and knowing when most of the site’s users are active is a great tool to have at your disposal. You can use this information to get your content and your marketing message in front of many social media users.
But that doesn’t mean your strategy should stay the same. The same set of tactics that worked a few months ago might not work today. Social media marketing success in the Age of Algorithms requires a more adaptable approach – there is no single way to do social media marketing, and it might happen that one works for others might not work for you. So much depends on your audience, your type of business, your industry, and your overall preferred styles of communication and engagement.
Below are a few key strategies to help you re-evaluate the timing of your social media marketing efforts:
Timing is of the Essence
One of the most appreciated aspects of today’s social media marketing landscape is a matter of timing. Social media platforms are more crowded with posts than ever before, and so the major platforms fight this overcrowding with algorithms. Just because you think your customers are consuming your content in the morning, it doesn’t mean you should post them. In fact, the best time to post to Instagram, on average, is 2 am ET/11 pm PT. Your best time will vary, but you should experiment with scheduling posts for different times of the day and night. You may be surprised by what happens.
If you post on LinkedIn both before and after business hours (7:00 am- 9:00 am and 5:00 pm-7:00 pm), it gets the highest amount of traffic. The best days of the week to post updates to LinkedIn are Tuesdays and Thursdays. It is advised to avoid posting content on weekends and is best suited to publish information outside of standard work hours in order to get the most possible views.
At 9 am, Facebook traffic start raising up and falls off around 4:00 pm, with the most noteworthy traffic volume, experienced on Wednesdays at 3:00 pm. Ideally, it is good to post updates on Facebook between 12:00 pm-3:00 pm and it is ideal to avoid any posts on the weekends, as traffic is much lower.
Twitter traffic starts to become steadily after 11:00 am. The highest traffic time frames are from Monday through Thursday between 1:00 pm-3:00 pm. Traffic on Twitter begins to vanish in the afternoon, around 3:00 pm and the greatest drop is on Fridays after 3:00 pm. For the best outcomes in your Twitter marketing campaigns, you must not post between 8:00 pm-9:00 am.
Traffic on Pinterest boosts around 12:00 noon, with the peak time being Saturday mornings. Ideally, it is good to publish content on Pinterest between 2:00 pm-4:00 pm or 8:00 pm-1: 00 am, as these consider to be high traffic periods. You should not post during the late afternoon hours, especially between the hours of 5:00 pm and 7:00 pm.
Engagement Drives Duration of Views
All the major social media platforms are increasingly driven by algorithms, and the algorithms reward the posts that are driving engagement. This means: getting your timing right – posting at the optimal times of day or days of the week – is even more important. Because if you can reach more of your audience right away and grab their attention when they’re most receptive to hearing from you, they will be most likely to engage with your post by liking, commenting, or sharing. Engagement creates momentum all its own – and the best way to drive engagement is to get your timing right in the first place.
Timing Can Confound Your Assumptions
The optimal time of day can be wildly counter-intuitive. Just because you think your audience is active at a certain time of day doesn’t mean they actually are! We always assumed that we should post to Twitter on weekdays around lunchtime, but Sensai’s A.I. says that we should post around midnight instead.
Getting your social media timing perfect isn’t only the factor in social media success, however, it’s becoming more vital than ever before – and the appropriate responses may not always be obvious. With careful analysis and testing, you can figure out which time frames are the best moments to post on social media in order to reach more people and engagement. Regardless of what you post, you can get better results if you get better at knowing when to post it.
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