The Best Times To Post On Social Media Part 1 (Facebook and Instagram)

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The Definitive Guide (With Stats & Facts To Back It Up)

Best Times Post On Social Media, If you’re creating a social media strategy that you hope will increase awareness of your blog or business, and increase sales or traffic, you’regoing to want to pay attention to the times at which you’re pushing your content out into the world.

There’s very little point in sharing something that no one will see, right?

You’re going to see a lot of information and advice online if you go searching for the “best times” to post on social media, a lot of which won’t actually be applicable to you.

Those suggested times and dates are great places to start, but the fact of the matter is this: only YOU can really establish the best times and dates for you.

Thankfully, it’s a lot easier to work out than you’d think — and I’ve got some tricks to share with you that’ll make the process a lot easier.

The Best Times To Post On Facebook and Instagram

When is the best time to post on Facebook?

According to the social media scheduling tool Buffer, the best time to post on Facebook is just after lunchtime on every day except for Sunday — between 1pm and 3pm.

According to Hootsuite, however, the best time to post on Facebook is at lunchtime – 12pm – on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. That’s only for business-to-customer accounts, though; if you’re in the business-to-business market, the best time to post on Facebook is reported to be from 9am to 2pm on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

Sprout Social says that the worst performing day on Facebook is Sunday.

Still according to Sprout Social, the best day for performance is Wednesday, and the best time(s) between 11am and 1pm.

It doesn’t matter where you look, the information for the best times to post on Facebook and other social platforms will be different.

Buffer’s studies, for example, didn’t say whether or not their best times to post were for B2B or B2C, but Hootsuite’s study did. Some of the studies didn’t give a timezone for the best times, and we can’t forget that social media is global.

You have the potential to reach people all across the world, at all times of the day. Plus, 12pm on Wednesday lunchtime for you could be 8pm on Wednesday evening for some of your readers.

Helpful advice: Visualise your audience. (Literally.)

What or who is your target audience on Facebook Marketing ?

Not sure?

You’ll need to work that out. Why? Because you need to understand and visualise your target audience in order to give them what they want or need at the right times.

What is your audience going to be doing throughout the day?

Let’s pretend for a moment that you’re a parenting blogger. You want to target other parents — people with children. Posting on Facebook at 8 o’clock in the morning might not be a great idea as that’s when most people are getting their kids ready for school.

A better time to share something for them to read would be slightly later on, after the school run, when busy parents have had time to drive home, put some laundry on, and then sit down for a moment with a nice cup of tea. How about 10:30am? Or 11am?

Now let’s imagine you’re a blogger aiming to help those with 9-5 jobs quit and start the creative life they’d always dreamed of. What’s your target audience going to be doing at 10:30 or 11am? They’re probably going to be stuck in the middle of a busy day at their 9-5 job job.

Instead, a lunchtime post might be a good idea. Your audience can take a peek on their lunch break as they peruse through Facebook and chomp their way through a meal-deal sandwich.

You could also consider commuter/morning rush hour times, when people are miserably sat on the tube and trawling social media, praying to win the lottery; and also in the evenings, after dinner, when those busy workers are comfortably slumped on a cozy couch at the end of a long day.

When is the best time to post on Instagram?

Have you heard of Later? It’s a social media scheduling tool that recently studied users, content, and engagement to work out the best time(s) to post on Instagram. After scrutinising more than 12 million different posts in various time zones, the tool came up with a time that yielded best results: between 9am and 11am Eastern Standard Time (EST). To maximize Instagram Post optimization, you also need to understand Instagram’s algorithm

Let’s move along to another website: Expert Voice says that Wednesday is the best day for posting on Instagram, with the best times being 5am, 11am, and 3pm.

Once again this proves that different studies will often come up with completely different results for the best times to post on social media — which doesn’t help you all that much. These studies also don’t tell you WHY those are considered to be the best times.

Is 11am on a Wednesday the best day to post on Instagram for engagement (likes/comments), or is that the time you’ll gain the most followers when you post?

The results aren’t clear. When they aren’t clear, they’re not helpful for you.

Helpful advice: Post new content regularly. (Like, every day.) Why?

Because according to a Cast from Clay study, 18% of all US adults aged 18 and over are jumping onto Instagram to browse new content or upload their own several times every day.

According to Kids Count Data Center, 18+ adults make up 78% of the US population — 253,768,092 adults in 2018, to be exact.

18% of 253,768,092 = 45,678,256 people using Instagram multiple times per day, just in the US alone … forty-five and a half million people is a lot of people. And, for the record, a whopping FIFTY PERCENT of US adults use Facebook several times per day. That’s 126,884,046 people!

What do those numbers mean for you?

More and more people are using social media on a multiple-times-per-day basis, so uploading daily is a good way to keep your content fresh and relevant and your followers engaged and interested.

If your average follower logs on daily, they’ll likely forget you exist if you’re only posting content a couple of times per month. They won’t forget the other bloggers, businesses and influencers, though … the ones that ARE posting daily or regular content.

For Instagram (as an example), content can come in the form of in-feed photos and videos, Instagram Stories, and Instagram TV. You don’t need to use every feature that the social platform offers you, every day — or even at all. But posting content regularly and using all of the features available is a surefire way of kicking your strategy into touch and boosting your follower numbers and engagement rate.

Maybe share in-feed photos one day and an Instagram story the next? Mix and match things up, not just to keep your followers interested, but also to make your life a bit easier. If you can’t manage an IGTV video or Story, which can take a lot longer to put together or edit, share an image or in-feed video with the world instead.

Followers can’t engage with content that isn’t there.

If you understand and run this then you can excel in Facebook marketing, so you can save your company’s Facebook advertising costs, or even no longer need to use Facebook marketing agency services.

If you are interested in optimizing YouTube, we recommend that you read the best time to post on YouTube

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