When you post on your personal Facebook account, you
would like your post to get visible and appreciated by your friends. However,
if you use the social media in general, and Facebook, in particular, for your
marketing or other business purposes, getting the best exposure becomes
essential.
So, what are the best and worst times to post social
media updates? And what are the best and worst days to post your social media
updates?
Posting your social media updates at the best times is
the key to improving your presence on any social network. All social media are
not the same. Each social network has different kinds of users and their daily
activities vary. They use these networks at various times and days to engage
with the updates published. To attain maximum engagement on your accounts, you
need to find out what the best and worst times to post your social media
updates are, and then schedule your posts accordingly. You also need to figure
out the best and worst days to publish your social media updates.
An iconographic below offers you a simple view of the
best times and days to publish your social media updates in order for them to
receive the highest exposure on the following networks: Facebook, Google+,
Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest and Tumblr.
And here is the latest research update…
A new study, conducted by Klout, a website that
measures reach and influence on social media, analyzed more than 25
million Facebook posts, as well as over 100 million reactions to them. What
they found is that posting things at certain times of the day (late morning and
early afternoons) and on certain days of the week (Tuesdays and Wednesday, most
notable) indeed tends to coerce more engagement from friends. The
ideal time, however, does change slightly depending on where you live.
In New York, for instance, the ideal time to share things
is just before noon. Thereafter, engagement falls consistently until it reaches
its lowest point at about 3am. In San Francisco the optimal time to post things
is a bit early (between 9am and 10am); in London, early afternoon is best; in
Paris, there's a peak in the morning, and then again in the afternoon; and in
Tokyo, early morning (between 7am and 9am) is ideal, but the fallout thereafter
is much less severe. The Japanese, it seems, are happy to like, share, and
comment on posts well into the night.
The chart below, plucked from Klout's study, shows how
the probability that someone will react to any given post (likes, shares, or
comments on it) changes throughout the day and week. San Francisco is the red
line, New York City is the dotted green line, London the dotted blue one, Paris
the dotted purple one, and Tokyo is the dotted aqua one. The peak probability
of getting a like, share, or comment in response to a post is about the same in
each city (the zero value for each line is marked by the straight line of the
same color beneath it), so disregard the differences in height. Instead, notice
how consistently engagement ebbs and flows throughout the week.
The trends, though they vary a bit by city, follow a similar pattern. On
Tuesday and Wednesday, Facebook posts are the most likely to get reactions. On
Thursday, friends are a bit shier with their likes, shares, and comments.
On Friday, they are quieter still. And on the weekend they are the quietest.
Monday, it seems, is something of an adjust period, when people are working
their way back into both the week and their Facebook feeds.
Why the reaction to posting things at night tends to be
more muted is both a result of something obvious—fewer people are
online—and something that is perhaps a bit less well known. Most likes, shares
and comments come only a short time after someone posts something. A majority,
in fact, "occur within the first 2 hours of posting
times," the researchers note.
While that estimate includes Twitter, where the delay is
even shorter on average (largely because people are more willing to
scroll through older Facebook posts than older tweets that appear on their
feed), it should be a pretty telling sign for anyone debating whether to
share something before going to sleep or after waking up.
If you want as many people as possible to engage with
your deep thoughts, clever quips, or hilarious memes, be patient,
be calculated, and try to share them during the week, in the morning or
early afternoon. Unless, of course, you live in Tokyo, where there is less
of a work-life Facebook balance. In that case, maybe just do not
post things when everyone else is asleep.
Sources and
Additional Information:
