5 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Post Timing

With social platforms like Facebook, where the newsfeed is heavily affected by their social algorithm, the time your post is published might not yield a noticeable difference in your post’s performance. For those platforms (Facebook, namely), a low but high quality cadence with paid promotion would be the best to ensure overall post visibility.

Yet for the platforms where post timing is still a factor to success as algorithms haven’t fully downscaled reach (Instagram, Twitter, & Snapchat), there are nuances teams needs to understand to ensure their post captures the greatest relevance & eyeballs.

Here are some ways that you can ensure that your social cadence is fully optimized:

1. Understand your target audience

In order to ensure that your brand’s social posts are optimized to be most effective, it’s important to first have a thorough understanding of your target audience.

Questions like:

“Where do they live & what time are they most active?”, “What careers do they have?”, or “How do they behave on social and in the real world?” can heavily influence how you choose to schedule.

Example: A white-collar professional living in California might have a standard 9am-5pm workday and is therefore most active on social before work, lunch, and after work. Inversely, a first-year college student has a more flexible time range on social; periodically checking their feed throughout the day.

2. Understand your page’s general demography

While fitting your cadence to match the social behaviors of your target audience could help you attain a larger portion of that audience, be cognizant of the social behaviors of your existing followers. Although the majority of your fans might differ from your target, posting content when your fans are active on social can give your post a higher chance of reaching more people and consequently gaining more engagements.

Tip: Use your platform’s native tools/insights to understand the time ranges where the bulk of your followers are online/engaging with posts.

3. Time Posting by Contextual Relevance

Other than your fans, the type of content your posting can also affect when you should post it on social.

Example: If your content is tied to a real time activation, then the corresponding posts should follow closely to the event to give users an authentic real-time experience. Inversely, content whose main goal is brand building, have a more flexible post timing and can be scheduled to fit whichever time ranges perform best for your channels.

4. Look at past performance

Depending on how long your brand has been on social, it’s also important to look at how your content has performed in the past to inform a better posting cadence. Using data exports per platform or pulling previous data reports, try to look for any year-over-year timing trends that influenced how well your content performed in the past.

Example: If your brand is doing a summer campaign, it would be worth looking at how timing has affected the reach of your previous summer campaign so you can understand what time ranges help boost the reach of your brand’s current summer messaging.

5. Find Moments You Can Own

When setting post cadence, it’s also crucial that a brand manager also look at what drove social conversation in previous years and if there are any moments or dates in the current year that you see as potentially impacting your content. Google trends is a great resource to forecast social conversation as it gives the user the ability to view the peak moments that potential fans are searching — terms/information related to your topic. Plan ahead to take advantage of these peak buzz times and ensure that your brand is top of mind during this heavy period of social conversation.