When coming up with a social media plan it’s important to keep your target audience in mind. With this, It can help to go into detail so that you can plan your social media posts to have the most impact.
A factor that not everyone considers straight away, is the times where social media is most active. The time in which you set your social media posts live can mean the difference between a few likes to plenty of interaction.
In this article we are going to explain some of the best times in the day to post on your social channels and why it’s important to aim to post at these times.
Post #1
What is the first thing you do when you wake up? For a lot of people, they grab their phone and head straight to social media. This could be to stay in bed for just that little bit longer or just in search of some entertainment.
If you think about the average 9-5 office worker, they may be waking up between 7-8. Timing your posts for that time in the morning will put your content in front of them straight away. If you were to post before that time your content is likely to be at the bottom of their feed and increases the chances of your posts not even being seen.
This, of course, takes some trial and error as each businesses target audience live different lives. Our suggestion is to start with catering towards the ‘average’ office worker and keep an eye on your analytics. This will tell you which posts are performing better than others. Use this as your guideline and experiment for a little while.
Post #2
Now that your potential customer is out of bed, they make their way to the office. They are likely to be busy working for the next few hours which means they won’t have much time to browse social media. Our tip for your second post of the day is to post later than you think. Yes, there are always people using social media and there is never a time where absolutely no one is online. What you want to aim for is to post during the most popular times.
So when is the best next time to post? Everyone needs a lunch break! Around lunchtime is one of the busiest times for social media and this could be a great time to post more content to your channel. Office lunchtimes are supposed to be relaxing but a majority of the time you are either just trying to pass time or avoid awkward eye contact with a work colleague. The perfect partner to a leftover takeaway lunch is interesting content to ingest.
Post #3
Unfortunately, after lunch, most people have to get back to work so this means that social media isn’t going to be as busy as it was at lunchtime. So make yourself a cuppa and take a break yourself (or free some time to work on something else!).
The next time the average working person will most likely be back on their phones is after work and/or just before bedtime. People tend to finish work between 4-6, so aiming to post around that time may increase your engagement rate. When people are on the train ride home or catching a lift from a colleague the perfect thing to make that time go by quickly is scrolling through new content.
So there are our recommended times for posting on social media and an explanation for why those times are the most popular. We just want to reiterate that posting times will work differently for each business as the target audiences can be vastly different.
Social media is a trial and error game, so experimentation is essential. A good place to start is posting once at each of the times above to see which post performs the best. From that, you can make little changes to suit your platform and audience the best.