When you post on social media is just as important as what you say. Here are some interesting statistics from Hubspot on when to post on the major social networks.
When is the Best Time to Post on Twitter?
Time generally doesn’t matter. There’s some uptick in the number of clicks at the very end and very beginning of the day.
Post on Twitter whenever is convenient for you. Your focus should be on content, not on the time of day. For most tweets, there’s no difference in the day of the week that you post. Twitter is still mostly a chronological social network, and therefore the more marketers post, the more visibility and total clicks their posts get. On Twitter, publishing more is better.
When is the Best Time to Post on LinkedIn?
The median number of clicks doesn’t vary at all, but the 95th percentile of posts does show a drop off with posts that are published late in the evening — after 5 p.m. or so. So post on LinkedIn during business hours (it is a business networking site), but the focus should be on content, not the time of day when you post. Generally speaking, posts published on Mondays, Saturdays and Sundays don’t perform as well as posts published Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
Tuesdays and Wednesdays are good times to publish on LinkedIn.
Once you publish more than 5 times per week (for most companies, this means once per work day) the return on investment drops substantially.
What is likely happening is LinkedIn doesn’t want users’ feeds to be overwhelmed by posts by the same company/person, so the second post in a day that you publish can hurt the performance of the first.
The marginal effectiveness of creating content for LinkedIn maxes out at 2 posts per week, so share between two and five posts per week on LinkedIn to get the maximum value from the network for the time spent creating the content.
When is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?
There isn’t an ideal day to post on Facebook. However, it’s slightly better to post on Sundays, and there’s a natural dip in post frequency and engagement on Friday and Saturday.
Similar to LinkedIn, once you publish more than five times per week on Facebook (for most companies, that’s once per workday) the return on investment drops substantially.
What Does This Mean for Your Social Media Strategy?
When it comes to posting on Facebook and LinkedIn, remember that you may only have between two and five posts per week that will get distribution by the networks’ news feeds. With that in mind, focus on the quality of each post (and the content preferences of your audience), and aim to get more likes, comments and shares as your metrics of success to build up your audience and to make the news feed algorithms work for you.
And when it comes to Twitter, post freely — the timeline updates so frequently that you’re at an advantage posting more often to reach more people.