The Best Times to Post on Social Media

So! You’ve set up your business on your platform of choice. You’ve slogged over slogans, carved out some content, and your brand is ready to bloom. Now what? Well, to paraphrase an old uni supervisor, scheduling is key.

Lots of businesses struggle with knowing the best time to post on social media. Even with a lot of followers, you still need your business’s content to pop up at just the right time. To be blunt, algorithms used by platforms like Facebook and Instagram often make this a lot more difficult by butchering a post’s reach. By the end of 2020, the organic reach of an average Facebook post was as low as 5.2%, but fear not! Komodo has combed through a lot of research to compile the best times to post your content, so you can make the most of what reach you can get. 

Most people tend to sleep overnight and wake up in the morning, unless they kip in coffins. Appropriately, many algorithms favour posts uploaded in the first half of the day. There is some variation to this, but let’s have a quick look at a handful of platforms, just to get a sense of the times for which you should plan your posts.

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Facebook

We at Komodo can’t tell you if Mr Zuckerberg is an early riser, but his algorithm is. For a post to leap off Facebook’s proverbial page, you want to aim for a 9 a.m. start, ideally on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

Instagram

Facebook’s adopted younger sibling prefers a somewhat lazier morning, as it seems to wake up at 11 a.m. Steer clear of posting on Sundays, though – it needs its beauty sleep.

Twitter

Sympathetically, Twitter doesn’t like Mondays, so you should save your content for the rest of the week. When Tuesday and Thursday come around, start posting at 9 a.m. and stop at 11. Surprisingly, Wednesday might be hump day, but Twitter will bump your posts all the way from 9 a.m. ‘til 3 p.m. However, it’s best to steer clear of Saturdays, because I’ve heard those are for the boys.

LinkedIn

While LinkedIn works part-time, from Tuesday to Thursday, it’s still a professional. You’re best-off sharing your updates from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. Sundays should be avoided, however. Perhaps LinkedIn has learned the value of its days off from its users.

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What Else Do You Need to Know?

Now, these titbits are, admittedly, just for starters. The main course comes when you take more variables into account, including the routines of your target audience, how often your audience might be able to access social media during a given day, how best to highlight your posts to get their attention, and the complications of multiple time zones. After all, despite what some people say about the shape of our planet, we still live on a globe.

When you’re trying to figure out when it’s the best time to post on Instagram, for example, just knowing the basics of the algorithm won’t be enough to make a real impact. Picking through all the other points of data you need is a lot for a busy business to handle, which is why we at Komodo are always open to offer our expertise to brands in need. We pride ourselves on our ability to not only hand-craft the perfect social media strategies for your business, but to also manage the execution of those strategies.