It’s no secret that social media completely revolutionized marketing. Now more than ever brands have direct access to their consumers through the personal devices they use on a daily basis. But this begs the question: How can brands make sure their content is being seen?
Maximizing engagement, growing your audience, increasing your reach, skyrocketing conversion… Can all of this be linked to the timing of posts? The thing is, posting is not quite a science. With an ever-changing algorithm, it may not even be worth cracking the code. What can help is understanding times when generic overall engagement peaks.
That was the idea behind Sprout Social’s detailed analysis of their 25,000+ customers’ interactions. They breakdown this data with graphs for each major platform, the specific times where global engagement is the highest and go in-depth for different categories. In this article, we will be reviewing the major lines of the data for the different platforms, which can act as a great starting off point for a social media strategy.
The data suggests that global engagement is focused midweek onwards, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and mostly earlier in the workday. Something interesting to note is the contrast between weekday and weekend engagement. Lowest overall engagement on Facebook happens on weekends, with Sunday seeing the least amount of activity.
On Instagram, the data shows that Wednesdays see the largest overall engagement. Friday mornings also have a burst of higher engagement, with the rest of the week having less concentrated and more spread out engagement. Similar to Facebook, Instagram has midweek onwards weekday focused engagement, but this is sustained later during the day rather than the earlier concentration on Facebook.
The data for LinkedIn does not seem to indicate a pattern other than seeing higher midmorning and midafternoon engagement that varies depending on the weekday. Engagement takes a nosedive on weekends with almost dismal activity on Sundays. This makes sense seeing as LinkedIn content is very business focused and many industries do not work on the weekends.
The data from Twitter shows similar results with a concentrated engagement in the midmornings on Wednesdays and Fridays being the highest. Unlike the other platforms we’ve covered, there is more sustained engagement over the weekend on Twitter, but the weekday concentration is still present.
As we said, posting on social media is not a science, but the data skews towards midmornings on Wednesdays and Fridays having the highest engagement. On the other end of the spectrum, it seems that weekends should not have a heavy focus across the board. While there isn’t a universally accepted peak time for audience engagement, having this data-backed information can be extremely useful for effective social media strategizing.