Engaging People On Social Media

When is the best time to post content on Facebook and Twitter?

So your sitting down on a Monday morning and you are thinking about what you are going to post to Facebook this week. Questions such as what will people find interesting? How many posts should I make? Will I try something serious or put something lighthearted and fun out there?

Any of us who manage one or more social media pages have these types of questions running circles in our brains on a weekly basis. Even if you haven’t had these questions yet; fear not as the time will come when you do.

One of the major questions we ask ourselves concerns the best time to post; is it lunch time, maybe its just after 9:00am as people are getting settled at work, or is it evening time when they are at home and hopefully relaxing with their Facebook open. Timing is the first area and then what day of the week comes next. Are people on Facebook at the weekends, or is it on a Wednesday afternoon when the mid week slump kicks in that you should post.

I’m going to step quickly in to this topic of timing through looking at my experience combined with some common trends identified by Social Media Heavyweights including @postplanner, @trackmaven, and @socialmediaweek.

Knowing the best times to post mainly comes down to your own primary research. Every business is different and has a specific and unique collection of customers and fans online. Knowing what works best for your business comes down to simple trial and error, followed by trial and success, followed by trial and error. By testing different types of content on different days and at different times, you will be able to use the insights available to you on social media sites such as Facebook to measure engagement and reach and then correlate those findings with how many people are landing on your website or maybe even coming in to your premises. That being said, this topic of the best day and times to post on Facebook and Twitter are actively discussed worldwide and although there is no definitive answer, the guys at Post Planner and firstly Track Maven have identified some of the current trends:

So when it comes to Facebook, most brands are publishing midweek and the busiest time for posts going up are between 12:00pm and 1:00pm. So they are the trends but the following is how users are actually behaving:

• Engagement is massive over weekends.
• The most interaction with posts occur on Sundays (I have found this with my business Riverside FootGolf)
• Engagement increases after 9pm (For me this is after 7:30pm…..close enough I suppose!!)

On Twitter, most tweets occur during the week and it’s most active on a Thursday with brands and companies tweeting a lot less at weekends. However, user trends once again go against what brands are doing with:

• Most retweets happening on Sundays and,
• Most retweets happen as night descends on us.

So what I’m saying is either get used to posting and tweeting in the evenings and on weekends or start using the Facebook schedule tool and a high quality Tweet scheduler. By doing this, you can start to increase your online engagement by tapping in to the times when your customers feel most like engaging with you. A business can only achieve success online by posting content their customers find interesting at times their customers are online and willing to listen. Being online while you are in the office is just not enough anymore.

I’d love to hear your own thoughts and what your own experiences of the best days and times are to post. As I said, every business is different but for me I have found Sunday evenings the best for engagement.

Until next time you budding digital marketers and entrepreneurs.