Welcome to The Social Lite, Delucchi Plus’ recurring blog feature written by Digital Strategist and social media maven, Isel Galvan. Once per month, Isel will weigh in on the hot trends and new developments in the big, wide world of social media.
Even with all the changes that are constantly happening across social platforms, there’s one question that withstands the test of time: What’s the best time to post on social?
While there are countless of articles, studies, and opinion on the matter — I’m always interested to hear what others have to say and what conclusions come from the different approaches taken to arrive at an answer. This is why when I saw that Klout and Lithium Technologies collaborated on a scientific study to arrive at new insights, I was ready to dive right in. Their study analyzed over 144 million posts and one billion reactions on Facebook and Twitter in order to arrive at conclusions surrounding the best times to post on social media in order to maximize an audience response. In a nutshell, their answer was: It depends.
I like to think that social media marketing is a combination of art and science. While the visuals and content shared on your channels have to be just right — your success also depends on knowledge of your audiences — including their likes, dislikes, and behaviors. If you’re posting content in NYC but your main audiences are in LA, Houston, and Hawaii — would you assume that one specific hour of the day would work best to reach all three groups? Unlikely!
According to Klout’s report, audience response probability is dependent on things like location/time zone, behavior, and volume of messages (feed/timeline noise — based on number of friends/companies/brands followed as well as the general advertising noise).
The best takeaway from the study was not so much a scientific formula for the perfect time, but further validation of the importance of not only really knowing who your audience is but also delivering targeted, relevant, and timely messaging.
Some additional takeaways from the study:
For both channels, the majority of engagement happens within the first two hours after posting. However, volume of engagement on Twitter happens faster – with half of them happening in the first 30 minutes.
Researchers were able to pin point specific behavior based on location and time zone —as expected, there are similarities and differences that reinforce the need to consider our global audiences and their network-specific (or agnostic) behavior. For example, users in California and New York showed similar patterns, with engagement peaking —interestingly enough —at the beginning of the workday. Looking at other countries, engagement from Paris peaked after lunch while engagement from London peaked at the end of the workday. In contrast, engagement in Tokyo saw two unique spikes, both happening outside of work hours.
While engagement on Facebook seems to be pretty steady throughout the day, both channels see a spike in activity between 7:00-8:00pm on weekdays.
According to the study, Twitter loses half of its activity and reach on weekends while Facebook remains relatively unaffected — with a spike in activity on Sunday evenings.
As marketers, we understand that a key to maximizing your reach is timing — a social marketers main goal is often finding sweet spot. In the last few months, we have discussed the continuing decline of organic reach on channels like Facebook and Twitter. With this in mind, best times to post on social as well as segmentation in targeting can also most definitely apply to best practices in Promoting (or boosting) your posts. We are continuously testing posting and promoting our content at different times to different audiences and have seen engagement across clients increase greatly from this tactic.
Feelin’ a little nerdy? Check out the full study — numbers, line graphs, plot charts, and all — here.
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Digital Marketing, Plus Points, Social Media, The Social Lite