Scheduling social media content is tricky. Each audience is unique and with variations in timezones and audience behaviours, it’s hard to know when to send out your best posts. Nobody wants to work for hours on a beautiful piece of artwork or an incredible video, only for it to be ignored. Of course, social algorithms come into play when determining the ‘affinity’ between your account and its followers (maybe we’ll share some more on this, some time soon!), but getting the timing right can make the world of difference.
We looked back at a huge range of data from some of our own clients, and others in the industry in order to find the best times to post on social media in 2022. Note that this data is primarily focused around European audiences, and B2C accounts - IE: not so much dev-to-dev interaction. Here, we’re centring our attention on direct posts across Twitter and Instagram, so this data does not include replies or rich content like Stories and Reels. Each audience is unique, and what works for us might not work for you. Sites such as this can be a huge help in determining your own best times to post, or ping us a message and we’d be happy to perform a full social media audit of your channels to help you understand your audience better, and what you can do in order to reach them.
The Best Times to Post on Twitter
Data from Twitter
Diving into the data and using the engagement rate as our key metric, this chart shows us that typically early mornings perform quite well on Twitter. We’ve typically been scheduling much of our own content at mid-morning to lunchtime for European audiences, but this huge range of data shows us that our early morning content has been a consistent performer. Behaviours can differ depending on region and audience base, but it might be worth trying a few posts even as early as 07:00. We will certainly shift our strategy as a result of this information.
It’s important to say that even with consistent data about the best times to post on social media, you should endeavour to keep a degree of variation in your content schedule. If behaviours change over time and you’re not there to see the shift, you’ll once again fall behind the curve and fail to meet your content’s true potential. If everyone in the industry starts posting at the same time, that will skew the data too, and before you know it, you could be once again left without the engagement you need to keep your game in the spotlight. Keep testing and varying up your post timings over a series of days, months and even years, then go back and look at the data to see if there have been any shifts.
The above chart shows us also that Monday has been a strong day for social content, and Tuesday likely the least valuable. Weekends perhaps surprisingly perform markedly worse than weekdays. Mornings are again strong here, but a couple of hours later than during the week. Gotta factor in that lie-in.
The Best Times to Post on Instagram
Data from Instagram
Turning to Instagram, we can see much more variation in the overall spikes and troughs. When we clean up the data to account for outliers, it soon becomes apparent that the strongest time to share Instagram content is from around 17:45 to 18:15 - suspiciously around the time that many people finish work. If you’ve been on a train coming home at rush hour recently, you’ll believe it.
Earlier peaks are apparent too, from around 15:00 to 16:00 or so, and again into the evening. Instagram is much more flexible when it comes to sharing out your content throughout the day.
What about other platforms? We’ve limited this test to just Instagram and Twitter for now, the channels on which we frequently focus much of our energy, but it’s worth calling out general rules of thumb for other platforms. Facebook content tends to perform well in the early-mid afternoon and Discord announcements will peak when shared in the early evening. The best way to discover the truth for yourself however, will be to dig into the data and discover what is working for YOU.
If you would like some help in analysing your social profiles, the content you are sharing and suggested actions on how to improve, send me a message here and I will get back to you shortly.