REVEALED: Best Times To Post On Social Media In 2022

Brands use social media to engage with their audience and achieve their marketing and business goals.

Their goal(s) is to:

• Drive brand awareness 
• Build a community of users and brand ambassadors
• Drive traffic and conversions
• Build and strengthen brand reputation

Your brand goals dictate your social media strategy.

Along with designing your social media strategy, you must identify the best time(s) to post on social media to ensure your target audience consumes your content, engages with it, and your brand achieves its marketing and business objectives.

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Data informs us that 4.59 billion people are on social media. They are spread across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others.

It’s a key figure for two reasons. First: your social media audience might be a fraction of that, but they are scattered across different timezones, continents, and countries. Second: you should know who your target audience is, and understand when they are most active on social media.

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You can gather audience insights from each social media platform to help with your content planning and publishing schedule.

In this article, we present you with the best time to post on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We’ll also provide you with tips to find the best times to post on social media for your brand.

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But first, a bit of detail about timezones for posting on social media.

The best timezone for your brand is one where your content reaches the maximum volume of your target audience (on the social channels they are most active during a particular timezone).

For example, the Eastern Standard Time (EST) timezone is probably ideal if a majority of your audience is based in North America.

However, you’d want to publish your posts around Central European Time (CET) if your audience is based mostly in Europe.

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Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) might be best for your brand if your audience is based in the UK. GMT is also followed by countries in Africa, including Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and others.

Scheduling or publishing the same post(s) at different times is also an effective way to ensure your content reaches the maximum audience. However, avoid posting the same content more than thrice.

The best time to post on social media also varies based on whether you are B2B or B2C.

Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm displays posts based on their recency. So the best way to drive organic reach and engagement is to publish your Facebook posts when your audience is online and scrolling through their newsfeed.

The best Facebook posting time will vary for each brand, based on where its target audience is located and when they are online.

However, the following times and days are a starting point before you determine your best time to post on Facebook.

Best times to post on Facebook: Noon to late evening (i.e 12 PM to 9 PM)

Best days to post on Facebook: Monday to Friday

Worst days to post on Facebook: Saturday 

Your Instagram posting times won’t be much different from your Facebook schedule.

One reason for this is that Instagram’s ranking algorithm shares commonalities with Facebook, with recency being one of the ranking signals. So, for Instagram too, you should know when your audience is online and schedule/publish your Posts, Stories and Reels accordingly.

Best times to post on Instagram: Noon to late evening (i.e 12 PM to 9 PM)

Best days to post on Instagram: Tuesday to Sunday

Worst days to post on Instagram: Monday

As you’ll notice, the best days to post on Instagram are slightly different. But this also varies for brands based on their industry and whether they are B2B or B2C. 

The type of content that you post at a given time slot is another factor you must consider. For example, an Instagram Post is most likely to be seen during the day than, say, a Reel or a Story. This is because people tend to scroll through their newsfeed during their working hours, while when they are relaxing, they are more likely to explore other sections for slightly more time-consuming content.

The micro-blogging platform is prominent for its real-time delivery of news and events happening worldwide.

It is one of the reasons that its users tend to scroll their Twitter feeds almost as soon as they wake up, which is early in the morning, and they tend to also be active late into the night. 

Best times to post on Twitter: 8 AM to 10 AM; 1 PM to 3 PM; 9 PM to 11 PM

Best days to post on Twitter: Monday to Friday (although weekends aren’t a complete no-no)

If your social media strategy revolves around Twitter content, you should create and publish multiple tweets throughout the day. Twitter users like fresh, up-to-date content, so the latest content often tends to perform better.

LinkedIn is the largest professional social networking platform. It’s used by people to find job opportunities, connect with industry peers, and thought leaders, and share content that’s relevant to a community of business and working professionals.

LinkedIn is predominantly a B2B platform that’s best as a social media marketing channel for B2B businesses.

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Best times to post on LinkedIn: Early morning (8 AM to 10 AM), lunch hours (1 PM to 3 PM), and evening (6 PM to 8 PM)

Best days to post on LinkedIn: Tuesday to Thursday

Worst days to post on LinkedIn: Monday and Friday

When it comes to the LinkedIn ranking algorithm, recency is less of a factor. The platform rewards quality content, content that’s already driving engagement, and content on trending topics. The bottom line is that you should publish quality content.

YouTube is a search engine all by itself. People go on the platform to find and consume video content about self-improvement, career, education, world affairs, music, travel, and more.

Videos make up a significant chunk of all online content and people are looking for informative, value-packed, entertaining videos all round the clock. So you don’t need to think about the precise times to publish your videos to generate a ton of views, comments, and subscriptions.

However, you should give YouTube enough time to crawl and index your video after you’ve published it and amplify its reach. For this reason, you should publish your video two or three hours ahead of the time when your channel subscribers and viewers will log in to YouTube.

Best time to post videos on YouTube: 2 PM to 5 PM
   
Best days to post videos on YouTube: Wednesday to Friday (although except Mondays, people do watch YouTube videos, especially from channels they’ve subscribed to, throughout the week)

Pinterest flips some of the logic of publishing and scheduling your posts on other platforms. 

The best times to post on Pinterest are evenings, between 5 PM and 11 PM.

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The best days to post on Pinterest are Friday to Sunday, although this varies for each brand and whether they are B2B or B2C. 

The less ideal (or worst) times to post on Pinterest would be early evenings (before 5 PM) and during the early part of the work week.

The Snapchat audience is predominantly people in the age category between 18 and 24 years of age who tend to be active on the platform during late evenings and nights. 

The best times to post on Pinterest are between 9 PM and 2 AM.

Being a platform mainly used by youngsters, brands can publish content throughout the week to engage with their audience.

TikTok is a video-sharing platform with more than one billion monthly active users. Another key piece of data is the fact that more than 40 percent of TikTok users are 16-24-year-olds, a majority of whom are from the US. 

Therefore, TikTok content creators must target the EST timezone to maximize their content’s reach.

Best time to post on TikTok: 7 AM to 9 AM; 4 PM to 11 PM

Best days to post on TikTok: Through the week

TikTok users are active almost throughout the week, so content creators can create and publish content consistently to engage their audience.

To drive optimal results, you must take stock of what works for your brand in terms of content and the best times to post the content you’ve planned.

Let’s look at how you can identify the best time to post on social media.

Review Past Posts’ Performance

Performance in terms of engagement rate, clicks, shares, messages received, media impressions, and more can inform you of the best time to schedule or publish a post on social media.

You should look at these metrics from the standpoint of your business and marketing goals. 

• Do you want to generate brand awareness?

If your answer is yes, you should look at the impressions some of your high-performing posts have received and keep that as a guide for future posts.

• Do you want to drive engagement and involvement from your followers?

If your answer is yes, you should look at the likes, comments, and shares that your high-performing posts have received. 

• Do you want to drive website traffic and generate sales?

If your answer is yes, then you should track the number of clicks that your best-performing posts have generated.

Prioritize Recency

Your social media followers want to know what’s happening now, which is driven by our tendency to check our newsfeeds several times during the day.

With most newsfeed ranking algorithms displaying new content first, the first three to five posts on your audience’s timeline will receive the maximum attention. To achieve your social media marketing goals, your posts should be one among them. 

To do this, you should publish multiple posts during the day and, importantly, publish them at the times when your audience is online.

Audience insights and social media analytics tools are your go-to solutions to understand who your audience is, where they are from, and when they are online.

Competitor Analysis

Competitor analysis is not just restricted to analyzing the content your competitors publish, when they publish their content is just as important.

Knowing when they publish their content will help you schedule your posts at different time slots and drive better engagement and traffic.

It also enables your followers to notice and interact with your content, which might not happen if your posting schedule is the same as your competitors’.

Stay On Your Toes

While you should use data to guide your social media publishing schedule, switching it up from time to time can do wonders.

You must keep track of what’s working (and what’s not) and how your followers are responding to your posts over a period of time. How people use social media keeps evolving, so your content strategy, frequency of posting, and timing of your posts might need to change as well.

Knowing your audience’s social media practices will help you identify the best times to post on social media and drive optimal results. It’s also important to understand how people use different platforms, uncover the patterns (if any), and use the insights to drive your content planning and publishing. Still, you must stay on your toes to any changes in audience behavior, perform competitor analysis to gain an advantage, and prioritize recency to achieve your brand’s marketing and business goals.

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