What Is The Best Time For Social Sharing

You’ve probably struggled repeatedly what is the best time to post on particular platforms. Is it better to reach out to your audience during working hours or rather when they check out their social media platforms in the evening? I do not want to worry you, but there is no secret recipe and it all depends on numerous factors. Thus if you expect to get a clear answer to a question from the article’s header, you can quit reading now and continue to act in the dark. But, if you want to get actionable tips on how to be the most efficient in posting in social media, sit comfortably and read on.

Find Your Timezone

If you want to discover the best time for social sharing, you should, at first, consider when the highest percentage of your audience is active on social media. It entails adopting your sharing to one timezone that accounts for the biggest part of your followers. Companies that operate globally have a tough nut to crack as they should pick more than one timezone. But we get back to this later on.

Let’s consider USA as our target in the beginning. The country has 5 different time zones (including Alaska and Hawaii), but almost half of the population lives in the Easter Time Zone and if you add Central one too, it will account for 80% of inhabitants (KISSmetrics). It implies that in this case you should post according to CET or EST. Easy.

Now, let’s go back to the global strategy. In this case you should also analyze where is the highest percentage of your audience. Pick up to 3-4 areas that account for the majority of your target group and post more times a day, addressing distinct time zones. Naturally, you should also stick to frequency of publishing rules, which I’ll explain in further sections, as posting on Facebook significantly differs from tweeting and from other platforms.

Don’t Overdo Facebook Posts

According to KissMetrics, the best efficiency on Facebook can be achieved when sharing 0.5 posts per day. It means you should not exaggerate with the number of shares on this platform. If you focus only on one time zone area, the math is easy – you should post different content once in two days.

It might be more complicated in the case of global strategy. You should more carefully plan you sharing. Include all the main areas you distinguished in the first step and share your stuff with audience from distinct zones, keeping the 0.5-post-per-day rule.

Tweeting Habits

Twitter is a place where you do not write at length, but on regular basis. Life cycle of a 140-character tweet is very short comparing to posts on other social media platforms. Thus you should consider tweeting more often if you want to keep your audience engaged. You must remember that after dozens of minutes your tweets are not visible anymore to the majority of followers.

Again, there is no magic number that you should stick to. It depends on a goal you want to achieve and time you are able to spare for tweeting. However, there are 3 best number ranges in which your tweets’ efficiency is the highest:

• 4-5 tweets per day,
• 11-15 tweets per day,
• 21-30 tweets per day.

With a lower number you can get higher engagement per tweet, with bigger frequency you can take more out of the platform in general.

What is more, you should not tweet more often than 4 times an hour if you don’t want to decrease a click-through rate to minimum (KissMetrics).

Perfect Time for Posting

When you finally figure out when your audience is the most active and combine it with the posting frequency, you can go on to picking the best days and times of a day to publish. And again browsing Twitter differs from browsing Facebook.

First of all, social media users have gone mobile. It means that their Internet consumption is not so reliant on computer usage anymore. People used to visit social media platforms mostly during their working hours and in the late afternoon/evening, as it was the time when they had computer access. Nowadays, they are more active on mobile devices, especially while commuting or hanging out.

According to KISSmetrics, you can get the highest level of engagement on Facebook around noon. However, increased activity is also observable at 7-8pm.

Twitter gets attention at similar times of a day. Firstly, it is a midday (lunch time) and then around 5-6pm (commuting).

The lowest engagement on this platform is between one and eleven in the morning. In the case of Facebook, the marked drop in engagement appears right before and after noon (6-11am and 1-6pm).

Last but not least, you need to figure out what are the best days for posting. Most Facebook sharing is done on Saturday and other days are characterized with much lower engagement.

On Twitter, in turn, the best time for posting is Wednesday and weekends. However, in this case the difference between specific days is not significant. Only on Monday users seem to get less involved.

5 Key Takeaways:

1. Find out when the highest percentage of your audience is active. If you address your content globally, focus on up to 3-4 time zones.
2. The most efficient frequency to post on Facebook is 0.5 post a day.
3. Tweet 4-5, 11-15, or 21-30 per day, but not more than 4 times an hour.
4. The highest engagement on Facebook is on Saturday, on Twitter – Wednesday and weekends.
5. Best time to share on Facebook and Twitter is noon and late afternoon/evening (FB – 7-8pm, TT 5-6pm).

What is your social media strategy? Leave us a comment!