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Do you know the feeling when you create an eye-catching post full of great value and after all that hard work, you’re ready to finally share it with your audience? Great, right? But then, nothing happens. The engagement rate is far from ideal and you’re thinking that all your efforts were a total waste of time and money. Well, it isn’t the end of the world yet, so don’t give up.
While you may actually have the right sort of content, sadly that’s only half of the battle. What’s equally important to know is when to post on Facebook (or any other social network) so that your content brings results. Want to reach your target audience and avoid your posts getting lost or ignored in the noise of social media? How to do it then?
In this blog post, we will provide you with our insights into when and how to post on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok. All so that you can get the most out of your great content.
The importance of social media marketing in 2022
First things first, why is it important for your business to engage with social media marketing in 2022? There has been a huge surge in demand for social media and social media marketing since 2020 mostly due to the global pandemic and the worldwide lockdown we were all put in.
Out of all the platforms, TikTok experienced an exceptional increase of monthly active users worldwide between 2019 and 2022, standing now at 1 bln users. People had to quickly adapt to the fast changing environment and find new forms of entertainment.
Staying home was the new way of going out, and that’s why social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and, of course, TikTok experienced a significant increase in popularity.
More users mean greater potential reach for people wishing to promote their businesses. If you still have doubts whether social media marketing is profitable, it’s time to forget about them and focus on designing your perfect strategy to post content on your social media accounts effectively.
Let’s explore what influences the best time to post on various social media platforms.
Why does it matter how much you post on social media channels?
It matters how much you post on social media channels because this is one way to represent your brand and engage with customers.
The amount you post on social media channels can either help or hurt your brand.
Posting too much can make you look desperate for attention, while not posting often enough can make you seem uninterested in your followers. Finding the right balance is necessary so that you appear active and engaged without coming across as pushy or neglectful.
Social media is a two-way street. Not only does it provide a way for you to share information about your company, but it also allows customers to learn more about your company and give them ways to connect with you. That’s why it’s important to regularly post content on your social media channels. This not only helps keep your followers up to date with the latest news, but also gives you the opportunity to connect with them on a deeper level and get to know them. As a result, you will give your future campaigns the chance to be more successful.
The number of posts you make on social media channels can be a gauge of your level of engagement and connection with your followers. If you don’t post enough, they may lose interest and start to drift away. Conversely, if you post too much, they may get overwhelmed or bored and stop following you.
A healthy mix is key.
Find what works for you and stick to it.
Below, you’ll find our research on how often to post on social media the best times to do so. You can take these pieces of advice as roadsigns for your social media strategy.
When is the best time to post on social media?
If you want to know the best time to post on Facebook or Instagram to ensure satisfying results, the answer is not so simple.
The Internet is full of discussions on when the optimal time for posting on social media is. And still, not everyone can reach a common consensus. That’s because this issue is much more complex than it may seem to be at first. Actually, there are numerous factors influencing the right time for sharing that you need to get familiar with if you want to start seeing improvements.
Let’s take a look at what plays a significant role in adjusting your content calendar and publishing time:
Platform
Each social media platform has its own culture, usage, and features. They attract different audiences, often with different ages, interests, incomes. The key element for you to focus on should be finding out who your target audience is, as well what their demographics and online behaviors are.
For example, the best time to post on Facebook will highly vary from the best time to post on LinkedIn or Instagram, due to the specific browsing habits of each segment. Focus on the nature of your business, as well as your ideal followers/subscribers, and start from there.
Once you understand who your content is for and where you can find those people, choosing the right platform and time to post shouldn’t be a problem.
Industry
Similarly, the type of industry you operate in is as important of a factor to consider. For example, if you run a B2C company, you may want to focus on posting your content during the weekends and out of working hours, as this is when it would get the highest levels of engagement and impressions. On the contrary, if you’re interested in knowing the best time to post on LinkedIn in order to reach as many business people and companies as possible, then weekdays and working hours should work best for you.
Everything depends on, again, the type of people you want to target. A very common mistake occurs when companies post the same content across every social media platform they maintain a presence on. That’s just wrong for so many reasons, with the most important one being that your target audience is simply not present everywhere. Why waste your resources like time and money on something that won’t give you anything positive back?
Time zone
Naturally, the best time for posting is when your audience is online. However, that can be tricky if your business operates within various time zones.
That’s why it is crucial to conduct an analysis of all your social media networks and find out where your audience is located. According to that information, you can better plan your social media strategy and send the same or different messages to cover all of their different time zones.
To make your life easier, you can use social media management tools such as Kontentino to plan and schedule your content in advance. You can set a different time zone for each of the different pages that you manage. It’s also very easy to communicate with team members and ask clients for approval, even when the whole team works remotely. All of the communication happens directly next to the posts you create, so everything is very transparent.
What’s also amazing about Kontentino is it eliminates the need to exchange numerous emails, files, documents, and so on, as with tools like it you’ll have everything in one place.
Time of year
Interestingly enough, the time of year also influences what the best time to post on your social media profiles is. Just think about it. During autumn and winter, when days are much shorter and colder and people tend to spend more time indoors, they also tend to spend more time on social media. This contributes to increasing your chances of posting content right when they’re browsing through Facebook or Instagram.
On summer and spring days, when the weather is better and people go outside more often, your post engagement can be much lower. Research shows that on rainy days, people are up to 42% more likely to engage with your content on social media compared to beautiful and sunny days. Moreover, rainy weather specifically on summer weekends can increase post interactions by up to 90%. Fascinating, right?
When and How Often to Post on Facebook?
This platform is still the most widely used (2.91 billion monthly active users worldwide as of the 4th quarter of 2021) and the most popular among marketers. That means it is crucial to know how to cut through the noise and get some attention for yourself when posting on Facebook.
The average lifespan of a Facebook post is 5 hours. Due to Facebook’s algorithm, it prioritizes those posts that have higher engagement and are evaluated as the most relevant for the user. Videos (especially live streams) have the highest engagement and organic reach, and therefore also the longest lifespans.
So how often to post on Facebook?
If you’re not a media outlet, the optimal frequency for brands to post on their Facebook profiles is once per day. The recommended maximum number of posts per day is two. According to HubSpot, how often to post on Facebook also depends on how many followers your page has. You should share a maximum of one post per day if you have less than 10,000 followers. If you exceed this amount of posts, each one will get 60% fewer clicks. When you have more than 10,000 followers, you will be most successful when posting 1-2 times per day. Therefore, posting on Facebook is all about quality, not quantity.
Now that you know how much content you need to create, the remaining question is:
When is the best time to post on Facebook to reach the right audience?
Because people access Facebook on both desktops and mobile phones, they are active during their free time as well as working hours. Some say that the best time to post on Facebook is at 9 am for all industries, just when people are browsing the Internet for the first time at the beginning of their working day. Another popular time is around 11 am – 12 pm before lunchtime or at 1-4 pm when downtime at work frequently happens and people just try to relax a bit by browsing their Facebook feed. Most blogs agree that Thursday – Sunday are the best days for posting on Facebook, with Sundays being slightly better than other days. When it comes to strictly weekends, one report revealed something very interesting. According to its findings, engagement rates can be up to 32% higher on Facebook, which is a very clear sign for your company – post content on weekends!
You can follow these general suggestions, but what if your audience is not working the usual 9-5 hours or works from home? You see? We doubt that anything such as a definitive ‘best time to post’ exists. How about instead of spending your precious time on reading the opinions of others, you dive into your own data and find what works best for your business?
By analyzing your data you can easily learn who your audience is and how to post on Facebook in order to gain the highest reach and engagement possible. The easiest way to do this is to use Facebook Insights to see the popularity of your posts, user demographics, their interactions and yes, also the best time and day of the week for posting on this platform
Just play around a bit and find out what a huge variety of data this tool can offer you. The most interesting option, in this case, is the one called ‘People’, which allows you to discover your audience’s demographics such as age and location.
If you click on ‘Posts’ you can see a tab ‘When is your audience online’. Here, besides identifying when your audience is online, you can also see the performance of all of your posts.
Unfortunately, the data are shown only in weekly periods. But you can regularly monitor them to find the optimal hour for posting on your Facebook pages. Also, bear in mind that the time shown is in the Pacific time zone. To get the best results, experiment with posting different types of content at different times and tracking their success (or failure). The key is staying consistent with your observations and keeping track of every trend that you notice. Doing this will allow you to gain insights into things you didn’t know could help you, but almost certainly can.
So, what happens next? Now that you know the best time to post on Facebook thanks to Facebook Insights, does this mean you have to manually publish every post at that time? No. What you could be potentially interested in doing here is investing in a social media management tool like Kontentino, which lets you collaborate with your team and clients. Once everything is approved and scheduled for a specific time, you don’t have to think about it anymore. By doing this, you can build up a successful social media strategy, save time, and avoid misunderstandings or errors. And the best thing? You post at the best time, meaning you reach more people.
When and how often to post on Instagram?
Let’s put Facebook aside for a moment and focus on a similarly interesting and popular platform – Instagram. With a forecast predicting nearly 1.2 billion Instagram users worldwide by 2023, Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms and the second most popular one after Facebook. Because of its highly visual content and features such as Instagram Stories and Reels your brand can easily gain a high level of engagement and increase profitability in no time.
Let’s have a look at how to post on Instagram and take advantage of all its perks. Although the average post lifespan on this platform is usually 48 hours (24 hours for Instagram Stories, and 14+ DAYS for Instagram Reels!), your content could have engagement for days if you pay close attention to aspects like the right hashtags and use of popular filters or even stickers. As you know, stories only last 24 hours, but don’t forget you can always save them into highlights on your profile.
However, similarly to Facebook’s algorithm, Instagram much prefers posts shared by family or friends, which means the likelihood of your content appearing in the feed of your specific target audience is very low unless you decide to promote your posts. Having a good strategy is essential in order to play the game well!
How often should you post on Instagram?
Have you ever wondered what the best frequency for posting on Instagram is? The advised number of posts is from 1.5 up to 3 per day. Yet posting often needs to go hand in hand with consistently posting the same amount. Make sure to spread your content evenly throughout your content calendar so that you avoid both over-publishing and under-delivering. To find out how many Instagram stories you should post, we recommend drawing conclusions directly from… your insights.
You may learn a lot from them about the best number of Instagram stories you should post. The last thing you want is to get muted by people who could be of value to your business, so don’t overdo it. Pay attention to both the number of posts and the number of Instagram Stories you publish if you are to ensure maximum effectiveness.
So when is the best time to post on Instagram to reach the right audience?
Due to the fact that Instagram is primarily a mobile app, people tend to browse it on their phones more outside of their working hours and breaks. Similarly to Facebook, lunchtime (11 – 12 am) is popular for quick feed checking. The best time to share a good afternoon post on Instagram would be around 5 pm, at the end of the working day.
Some sources even pinpointed evening peaks as 7-9 pm, while others opt for 2pm on Tuesday as they best time to post on Instagram. Wednesday is often identified as the best day for posting on Instagram. You will also find Fridays and Saturdays mentioned, especially for B2C companies. Monday is the worst day because the beginning of the working week tends to be a bit hectic, full of meetings and tasks to do, however, sources also don’t recommend posting on Sundays.
Again, finding the sweet spot in regards to how often you should post on Instagram will most likely differ from one company to another. You should dive deep into your data in Instagram Insights to find out how to post there in order to connect with your target audience and maximize the value of your content. You can easily access the data from your Instagram app and see graphs showing followers’ activity and demographics.
Moreover, you can identify which posts are the most successful, so next time you’ll know which type of content resonates with your audience the most. Don’t forget that consistent tracking and re-analyzing is crucial, since both your followers and social media trends can change faster than you might think. Successful brand communication isn’t only about knowing how to post on Instagram. In your eagerness to succeed and try new things, don’t forget that some of them will have already been tested. Avoid the most common Instagram mistakes that others have made before. Learning from past experiences, whether they are yours or someone else’s, will allow you to further improve your social media strategy and perfect your skills.
When and how often to post on LinkedIn?
Contrary to Instagram, on which people are constantly sharing their memorable moments, LinkedIn is a very business-focused network that is commonly used by B2B businesses. Actually, 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their content marketing efforts. So, if you operate in this type of industry, it is important to know how to post on LinkedIn in order to gain the potential clients or employees for yourself. There are several aspects to consider, such as the frequency and the time of posting.
First of all – how often to post on LinkedIn?
People don’t log into this network particularly often, so by posting 20 times per month you should be able to reach 60% of your audience. Therefore, posting every working/weekday should be more than enough. Do remember that you also don’t want to be seen as a spammer. Moreover, there is an unwritten rule that sometimes it’s better to post less content with more value, instead of posting very frequently but with little value for the audience. What’s more, you surely want your B2B company to be respected and well-regarded, so make sure your content looks professional.
To increase your chances of getting noticed aside from your standard posts, it’s definitely worth knowing how to post an article on LinkedIn. Articles on LinkedIn have become a part of many companies’ professional profiles. With LinkedIn articles, you have more freedom to write about what you like, think, or experience. You can express your own opinions from your expertise, and therefore promote yourself and your brand while doing so! Now, if you’re asking yourself how to post an article on LinkedIn in order to get the highest volume of attention possible, please continue reading!
When is the best time to post on LinkedIn?
In this case, because of the primary reasons for its use, an audience on LinkedIn is most often online and ready to actively consume your content during working hours. Most people agree that the best time to post on LinkedIn is between 7 am and 12 pm. The best days have been identified as Tuesday to Thursday, with Wednesday between 10 am and 11 am being the ultimate sweet spot of the week.
Naturally, weekends don’t register much engagement, but it is a common practice to post some ‘lighter’ or motivational content during weekends when people are looking to relax and pay less attention to work than during other days. You can still post some fun, light-hearted, and engaging content at this time that would identify with your company and get people’s attention.
Knowing this information is a great starting point, but again, making strategies based on your own data is much safer and more logical. Even LinkedIn itself points out the importance of finding your own golden mean. Each business page has access to LinkedIn Analytics where you can find information about your visitors, followers, or updates on the engagement of particular posts of yours. All of this information will help you to determine when and how to post on LinkedIn in order to be successful.
You can find out where your audience is located, in what type of industry they operate, or which types of roles they perform. LinkedIn is a true repository of knowledge that is right there for you to use it to its full potential.
Also, you can choose from various metrics such as impressions, engagement rate, likes, and more. Focus on discovering which days of the week or even months of the year perform the best for you.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn Analytics won’t provide you with information about what time of day your target audience is online. So finding out how to post on LinkedIn efficiently will require more of your effort than for other platforms.
We recommend focusing on testing different times and types of content based on your demographic data. Also, don’t be afraid to experiment with posting at unusual hours. Who knows? Maybe the results will be more surprising than you think!
Side note: Did you know that Konentino is one of the first social media management tools to offer its users a feature allowing them to schedule video posts even for personal profiles? Also, it allows you to directly tag LinkedIn pages or specify the type of audience that will be able to see particular posts.
When and how often to post on Twitter?
Twitter is the place where people come to see what’s happening. It’s one of the most popular networks for staying updated in a quick and convenient way. In fact, there are over 500 million tweets sent every day from all over the world. That means the traffic on Twitter is just insane 24/7 and you need to know to manage it well so it’ll bring value to your business.
How often to post on Twitter?
The lifespan of a tweet is only 18 minutes, which is a very tiny time frame to grab the attention of your audience. Don’t panic, though! In this case, you can still succeed by tweeting the same content multiple times per day or week to reach different types of segments.
Don’t give up if your tweets don’t perform well at the beginning. Considering how quickly tweets vanish, it’s difficult to maintain high reach and engagement rates, even for accounts that have many followers and use appropriate hashtags.
With Kontentino, you can easily schedule posts for different times and platforms in advance. If you are opting for greater engagement, you should include media such as photos, videos, and GIFs in your tweets. Tweets with GIFs experience often generate more engagement than those without.
Another great feature are polls, which will give your tweets the chance to reach a wider audience thanks to their engaging nature.
So, how often should you tweet to make sure that you reach your audience while at the same time not coming across as a spammy brand? The advised number of tweets is from 1 to 5 times per day.
Posting this amount should secure you even engagement for each post. Tweeting more often than that won’t increase your engagement until you do so more than 20 times every day. If you have the time and energy for this – great! If not, stick to a maximum of 5 posts daily and watch your profile grow.
When is the best time for posting on Twitter?
You may have a lot of followers on Twitter, but that doesn’t mean you can just publish your content whenever. Similarly to other platforms, Twitter has its own rules and abiding by them can turn out to be very profitable for your business in the long run. Because this platform is easily accessible from both desktop and mobile devices, people log in during working hours as well as in their free time after work. This is great news for you as it means the chances of reaching a lot of people are increased. Still, users tend to browse news during their breaks, downtimes, and also at the beginnings and ends of their days.
Most articles suggest posting between 8 am and 10 am, 12 pm and 1 pm during lunchtime, or 6 pm and 9 pm in the evening. But if your main aim is to boost retweets and your cost revenue ratio (CRR), the best time to tweet would be between 5 pm and 6 pm. The best days for B2B companies are logically during the week, while B2C businesses see higher engagement during weekends and on Wednesdays.
You can check if these data are accurate for your business or if there are other peak times that are more popular for your brand’s followers in particular. In the Twitter Analytics space, you can again find your niche audience, their interests, locations, genders, and ages.
If you play around, you can find the performance of posts under the tab ‘Tweets’. Here, you can also see which days have the highest impression during the previous weeks or months.
As with LinkedIn, this tool doesn’t reveal information about the best hour of the day for tweeting. But with this social media platform, you do have endless options to experiment and discover the ideal times for your business. Again, stay consistent in order to produce accurate results.
When and how often to post on TikTok?
Tiktok is probably one of the best platforms right now for promoting small businesses, as well as for large international companies that are seeking new ways to expand their presence on social media. It’s a platform that was first originally dedicated to young people only, but now you can see more and more people and companies using it, including brands such as Zalando, Ryanair, Guess, and The Washington Post. TikTok has a lot of potential, there’s no doubt about it.
How often to post on TikTok?
There is no strict rule when it comes to how often you should post on your TikTok account. A very general rule is that up to 3 times per day should be fine, but we have noticed some famous TikTok influencers posting up to 10 videos daily. What we recommend is that you work your way around this app for a while and figure out what serves you best.
app for a while and figure out what serves you best.
When is the best time to post on TikTok?
If you are looking to get more likes and follows, or maybe even make your business’s TikTok account famous, we may have some advice for you in terms of when to post on TikTok. Just like with other platforms, posting time does matter. Who will interact with your posts if you publish them when your audience is sleeping? Knowing the best time to post on TikTok will help you to increase engagement, boost your content in the TikTok algorithm, and even increase the chances of your video landing on the For You page.
To find out the best time when to post on your TikTok profile, you must first convert it into a pro account. This can be done in the settings. Once you’ve done that, you may have to wait for about 24 hours for all the data to be collected. After this, you can go to your Creator Tools and then click on Analytics. You will see three tabs there: Overview, Content, and Followers.
When you click on Followers, TikTok will show you their activity – basically when they are active on the app. This is a huge repository of knowledge for you. Sounds sneaky and illegal? It’s actually not. It’s all there to help you grow your business and use the app to its full potential. Note: you can only access advanced Follower Analytics once you’ve gained at least 100 followers, otherwise the results and data shown are not accurate.
The Followers tab gives you insights into where your followers come from, as well as how much time they spend on the app in terms of hours and days. Simply analyze your data and look at when your followers are most active, then bingo – you have your answer. Please note that you will have to collect data quite regularly here, as in terms of hours you can only access them for the specific day you are looking at, and in terms of days you can only analyze a maximum of 7 days at once. Remember this if you wish to track your results regularly.
The lifespan of a TikTok video
Here’s an amazing thing. Technically, your TikTok videos don’t have a lifespan at all. You can post a video today and it might go viral within the next couple of hours. Similarly, a post that you published 3 months ago could also suddenly get into TikTok’s algorithm and go viral even after such a long time. This piece of information should immediately motivate you to set up a TikTok account right now (if you haven’t already done so) and start posting videos regularly.
The real question here should be: how can I make my videos go viral? Our top tips would be:
- use popular songs and sounds
- keeps your videos as short as possible – the shorter they are, the higher your chances of going viral
- include your own audio
- add trending filters and effects
- make you content useful, full of tips and tricks
Find your best time to post on social media
Finding the right time to post on social media is not an easy task. It is definitely more complicated than just reading a few studies and articles on the topic. Even though some recommendations can give you a general idea, having the right know-how about the optimal time to post for your own business and industry is critical if you want to get the most out of your social media presence.
So how to find your own ‘best time’? Try to follow our easy 5 step strategy:
1. Analyze your own data with the help of social media insights to find out who your audience is and what their online behaviour is like. Also, check out which content gets the highest engagement so that you will know where to focus most of your energy.
2. Experiment with different types of posts and posting times. Also try unusual hours and days to avoid posting at the same time as all of your competitors and to reach a wider audience.
3. To do that, use social media planning and collaboration tools, such as the user-friendly Kontentino. By scheduling your posts ahead, you can save a lot of time for content creation. Also, you can easily duplicate successful posts for use on other days or platforms. Internal approval and live previews will help you to mitigate misunderstandings and errors, so you can post on all of your platforms with full confidence.
4. Track the success of your posts and keep analyzing to determine the optimal posting times for your company!
5. Continue analyzing and constantly adjusting your strategy to stay on track with your evolving audience and industry trends.
