Social Media Posting: Timing Strategies Uncovered

Do you feel like you’re always posting on social media, but no one sees your content?  Are you confused about the best time to post?

As part of our work bringing you great online communication maintenance services, the Mind Key team is always seeking to unlock the keys to understanding the landscape of online marketing. As we learn from our affiliates, we strive to share their knowledge, and their services with you.  Lori Ramas of Lion LinQ is incredibly savvy when it comes to social media and networking, and has agreed to share some tips on how to best time your social media posts.  Learn more about her at LionLinQ.com, or by contacting team@lionlinq.com to set up a consult to better understand how to make your business’ online presence work for you.  

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A beginner in the world of online entrepreneurship often notices that some Facebook or Instagram posts get more hits than others, but they don’t often understand why. Knowing some of the variables that affect who likes or shares your posts can not only help you create more valuable posts, but understand what about the posts is working and what isn’t. In other words, exactly how important of a factor is timing?

Social Media timing graph

Timing does matter

Here’s a fun and easy way to figure out what days and times are the best to post your social media content. Let’s do this together,

1- login to your facebook business page

2 – select “insights” all the way up at the top of the page above your profile picture

3 – choose “posts” on the left hand side

You can see here the numbers at the top, 760, 749, etc. are the active number of fans on each day on Facebook, the numbers you see reflect your specific page statistics. When you select a day and a time where it says “Days,” you can see exactly how many of your fans are looking at Facebook that day.

In the example above, you can see that at 1:00 AM, there’s only 151 fans online. However, when I hovered at 9:00 AM it shows 346 people active. You may want to choose to post at a time of day where more people are active, but do so for at least a month to get some statistics about whether or not that’s effective.

You can also choose to post when there’s the least number of people online so that when they do login your post doesn’t get lost in a mess of other content. I’ve found that posts around 6:00 AM, and 10:00 PM both do very well; the earlier time is when very few fans are on Facebook and the latter is one of the most popular times. The key is testing the posting times by running them long enough to gather data.

Timing + Post Type + Consistency = Success

You’ve probably started to wonder what types of content you should be posting at the times you’ve now figured out you want to

Social Media

post at. Right? It is important that you also test the types of content you post:

1. Content Only – which is when you write a post with no media included
   1. Questions, polls, surveys, quizzes
   2. Information, educational articles, blogs, humor/jokes
   3. A plug about your company or a request for them to message or engage with your business
2. Media Only – is a post that’s media-centric with no content
   1. Like a photo
   2. photo album
   3. Videos
   4. image carousel
   5. infographic
3. You can post media and content both, or a + b in this instance
4. Post any of the above with a link to another website/page

You can run tests on all types of post to see which gets you more engagement and at what times. And beyond that, you can run similar types of tests on your blog posts, emails and with your website updates. You can create a simple spreadsheet, or find a free one on google templates to track when you post and the outcome. Similarly, you can use Facebook and Instagram’s reporting features to track this for you!

Afraid to Get Started? Not Sure if You Can Commit to the Time?

Hire help. Simple as that. It could look like you hiring an intern, asking for professional consulting or training or even hiring a company to help you manage your digital and social presence for you. In just one hour a social media expert can train you on how to source content, manage posting, hiring, understand what to write, learn to leverage Facebook ads, you name it. An hour or two of consulting can change the way you do social forever. For example, digital media specialist and small business owner, Lori Ramas, can whip your social into shape just by consulting with her. From landing her clients Facebook ads for just cents on the dollar, to helping them reach the highest numbers of fans they’ve ever had she can help you, too. More important, you should feel comfortable–no, empowered–to make social go to work for you, so let’s go!

Lori Ramas of LionLinQ