Searching for and getting the right content to post on your social media pages can be an extremely strenuous task. But so is driving traffic to your post or getting maximum engagement.
There are several ways of accomplishing the traffic task, one of them being through paid advertisements. However, the cheapest and most common is using the natural social media algorithms which require mastery of knowing the exact time to post your content.
Timing Is Everything
The general rule of thumb is you should always make your posts when the majority of your customers or followers are online. I know this sounds easy but I promise you is more complicated than you think.
In order to get this right, you have to really understand your audience; what time do they wake up? When do they go to work? At what time do they travel back home from work? And when do they go to sleep?
Research has it that the best time to post your content should be during the lunch hours; that is between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., and during the evening hours after people have gone home from work. We are talking of between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
The reason behind this is most people tend to access their social media accounts especially Instagram through their mobile phones which are challenging to do while they are at work. Therefore, they tend to browse immediately they get some free time which is during lunch hours and in the evening after work.
Also, very few people browse during the morning hours.
Well, because the majority of them if not all of them wake up late and are always in a hurry to get to work. The thought of logging in to their social media accounts never crosses their minds leave alone getting the time to actually log in.
Now that you have this figured out, it would be correct to say you are on your way to social media greatness; however, this level of greatness will depend on whether your traffic or audience are located in one or neighboring countries, or whether they are scattered all over the world.
Global Reach
There is no doubt the world has drastically changed into one huge global village where someone in the United States can sell a product, ship it to Asia and still make tons of profit. Social media is no different.
It is nearly impossible in the current age to have a social media account whose following is from a single country only. If you have such, you are lucky as figuring out when to post is not that complicated.
However, if you are the kind of person with a social media following that scatters all over the world, you have some work to do.
Lucky for you, we will simplify things and make it easier for you to understand and follow.
Figuring out the best time to post requires you to first; understand from which country is the majority of your following, understand their social media interaction habits through answering the questions I had listed above, and identifying the time zones of each country.
Ideally, your objective should be ensuring that your posts are published to reach the majority of the time zones of your audience.
For example:
Let’s consider a case of your Instagram account having the majority of your followers being from the United States and Canada.
The best time zone to use would be the EST time zone as it covers the highest number of people from both countries.
On the other hand, if your following were to be from the United States and the United Kingdom, you would likely be forced to use both the EST time zone and the GMT.
I know this sounds confusing, but let’s dive deeper into it.
What most professionals do and what I would also recommend you to do is post the same content multiple times during the day in order to cover all the time zones.
For example:
If you want your content to be seen during the lunch hours, you would post during lunchtime in the United States and the UK. This works even when you have more than two time zones to consider.
However, you should never send the same content on the same social media account more than four times a day as this will irritate your audience which might result in them unfollowing you.
Another option to consider would be using different graphics or photos to send the same message which calls for you to be a little more creative.
The final thing you need to know is that different social media websites have different audience engagement patterns.
For example:
Instagram receives the highest level of engagement on Mondays, Wednesday, and Thursday, while Facebook receives the highest engagement on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. You ought to consider this too.
I would recommend you to try as much as possible to follow the information in this article.
If you doubt it, you can start by testing it out to find out whether your post engagement will change. If it doesn’t change, then ignore it, but if it does work, well, keep it and treasure it.
All the best.