When is the best time to post on social media?
Every organisation wants their Twitter or Facebook posts to be noticed and generate the maximum engagement, which is one of the reasons why timing is so important.
It’s the reason why here at Dragonfly PR, we are constantly reviewing timings for our social media accounts. Getting the timing right for social media can affect quite dramatically how much engagement and viewings you get from a posting. And, as a larger audience means more opportunities to boost engagement, drive traffic, and gain potential new followers and customers, it really is important. Here we look at some of the latest research and our own findings on what could give you the best engagement...
Research
According to a study by Wiselytics, the average viewing lifespan of a tweet is only 24 minutes - nearly four times shorter than the 90-minute half-life of a Facebook post.
“For Facebook, a post reaches 75 per cent of its potential engagement in five hours. A Tweet reaches the 75 per cent mark in less than three hours,” according to Wiselytics.
This relatively small window of opportunity to be seen means your tweets need to get out in front of as many people as possible—when the largest amount of your target audience is likely to be logged on...
Best times:
Research has found that for b2b organisations, the best times to tweet are between 12pm and 3pm on weekdays, with the highest number of clicks and retweets taking place at 3pm, according to studies by Hootsuite. But this can differ according to audience, country and content. The Huffington Post did its own research and stated that 12 noon, 5pm and 6pm are the best times for retweets, whilst reporting that 12pm and 6pm deliver higher click-through rates.
According to social media scheduling tool Buffer, whose research was based on 4.8m tweets:
- evenings and late at night are the times when a tweet receives the most favourites and retweets
- the most popular time to tweet and the best times to tweet for engagement differ across time zones, and, of course, whether you’re a B2B or B2C organisation, so it’s still important to experiment and find the times when your audience is most engaged.
Buffer followed up their UK research with looking at tweets across the major time zones and found that the most popular time to tweet was between Noon to 1 pm local time, for each time zone. They also reported that:
- The highest volume of tweets occur between 11am and 1pm, peaking between noon and 1pm.
- The fewest tweets are sent between 3am and 4am
However, the best time to tweet is also the time when there is the highest volume of tweets being sent, so paradoxically, it could make it a bit more difficult for your tweet to stand out in someone’s timeline...
So it is definitely worth b2b companies trying out tweeting at non-peak hours, such as early morning and late evening to see if there is any difference in engagement.
Studies have revealed that the best time to post on Facebook is 1–4 pm on Thursdays/Fridays and on weekends.
The recommended ‘best’ times to post on Facebook in general to increase your shares and clickthroughs is 9am, 1pm or 3pm.
In addition, Facebook use spikes by 10% on Fridays – maybe as users start planning their activities for the weekend, so posts are likely to be Liked and shared more at the end of the week.
The best advice is to use these times as a guide and test out some different approaches and measure the results accordingly.
There are a couple of things our social media team advise that you take into account, these are:
- Consider location
If you are trying to reach a global audience, it could be worth creating a Twitter handle for each region and using a social media management tool that operates them from the same platform.
- Try autoscheduling
A number of the major scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite, will help you to find the best time to tweet, using autoscheduling. This chooses a time based on when your tweets have performed the best.
- Who is your audience?
You need to consider the age, location, type of work, commuting distance, free time and interests of your audience, in order to finally decide on a good time to post. If you can broadly answer these questions, it makes it easier to decide on what are the best times to post on social media.
However, remember there are no hard and fast rules and for b2b social media strategies, you can put your trust into Dragonfly PR who will test out and experiment with timings and schedulings to ensure we deliver the social media campaign that delivers the best results for you.
For more information on social media campaigns from Dragonfly PR, Tel 01709 300130 or email: hello@dragonflypr.co.uk.