Ever since companies started using social networks to distribute their content, the following question has been one of the most frequently asked questions on the internet: When is the best time to publish posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter & Co.?
Why is timing so important for social media posts?
According to the 2019 digital report by We Are Social and Hootsuite, 38 million Germans use social networks. This number alone shows how important social channels are for communication between companies and potential customers.
Around 32 million Germans use Facebook every month, 23 million of them are even active on the platform every day. In addition, there are 25 million monthly active users on Instagram and 2.5 million weekly active Twitter users in Germany.
It is precisely these users who need to be made aware of their own content. Because even the best blog article and the most comprehensive infographic are of little use if nobody sees them.
On Twitter in particular, several hundred tweets are published across Germany in just a few minutes, so that your own posts sometimes disappear in the timeline faster than you can say “social media strategy”.
So, marketers need to figure out when and where their target audience is active in order to target them right then and there and move them with successful social media posts. Because the right timing ensures more attention and more interactions on the relevant platforms.
What are the best times to post on Facebook?
The newsfeed algorithm on Facebook is comparatively complicated. Users have the option of viewing the “latest reports”. However, the “top messages” that are not necessarily listed in chronological order are selected by default.
For this reason, it is more difficult to determine the right timing for one’s contributions.
A survey by well-known internet agency as well as our own tests and experiences from other social media teams have revealed the following:
- On average, 9 am is the best time for companies to publish content. For many people, this is when the working day begins and they are online for the first time.
- Posts between 1 and 3 pm are also successful – exactly when many employees are on their lunch break.
- Between 6 pm and 9 pm there is another peak in Facebook usage around dinner time.
- By the way, the working days can be distinguished from the weekend. Ideally, you should post between 12 and 1 pm on Saturdays and Sundays.
When it comes to which days of the week to prioritize publishing content, companies would do well to align themselves with their products:
- In our experience, users are most active on Facebook from Thursday to Sunday.
- While posts for B2B products perform better on weekdays, content for B2C products is usually more successful on weekends.
What are the best times to tweet?
Getting the timing right for posting on Twitter is so difficult if only because the lifetime of a single tweet is so short. Almost 9,000 tweets are published worldwide every second.
The time window in which companies can catch the attention of their target group is extremely small, so it must be used in the best possible way.
A correlation between usage and typical working hours is also evident on Twitter:
- It should be published on weekdays between 8 am and 10 am and between 6 am and 9 am – which makes perfect sense when you look at the working hours again.
- For posts on B2C topics, the lunch break, around 12 pm, is an additional period. Of course, the figures apply to working days.
- For B2C, Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday are the best days to tweet. By the way, if you are targeting retweets, you should send your tweets around 3pm.
What are the best times to post on Instagram?
When it comes to the right times to post on Instagram, social media pundits are the least unanimous. This may be due to the fact that visual content usually performs well on the Internet anyway and attracts attention faster than pure text contributions.
A well-known internet agency drew the following conclusions from their tests:
The best times for Instagram are the times when users are more likely to be on the go: between 6 am and 8 am and between 5 pm and 8 pm However, these times do not stand out as blatantly as is the case with other networks.
We have also found that in the B2B sector, lunchtime is a good time – as is the case with other networks.
The beginning of the week is generally the best time to post content on Instagram. Friday is also performing well.
All experts agree, at least when it comes to the time with the worst performance: very few users are on Instagram on weekdays from 3 pm to 4 pm
What are the best times to post on LinkedIn?
Regarding the publication times for LinkedIn, experts mostly agree:
- Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday posts perform best on the platform.
- In Germany, the ideal period is from 8 am to 12 pm – and from 4 pm to 6 pm there has also been an increase in the response to posts.
- The experience of our US colleagues is just a little different, where posts published between 10am and noon perform best. However, such small deviations are not surprising due to cultural differences and working methods in the respective industry.
- All surveys allow one conclusion: LinkedIn users primarily use the platform during their working week and check from time to time during the working day whether something new has happened in the network.
What are the best times to post on XING?
Because XING – just like LinkedIn – is a social media platform that is mainly used for business, marketers can roughly use the times for LinkedIn as a guide:
- Contributions should be published in the morning or between 5-6 pm
- The best days for this are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Management tools make planning social media posts easier
To make it easier for you to plan your social media posts, you can use a corresponding management tool:
- In this way, several posts can be planned in advance, which are then automatically published at the desired time.
- Various social channels can be integrated into many tools. In this way, for example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn can be controlled via a single tool.
- The performance of published posts can be monitored directly in the tool. Usually, you can see the views as well as the clicks, likes and comments. Depending on which contributions perform well and when, important conclusions can be drawn for future contribution planning with the help of this empirical data.
Is there an ideal time to post on social networks?
As the previous results show, there is no single best time to publish social media content. It is true that various studies indicate specific days of the week and even times when a stronger interaction with users can be achieved than at other times. However, marketers should only use these results as a starting point for their own social media marketing.
Because the success of your contributions always depends on your target group, your services or products and your location. So be bold and try out different times – this way you can find out exactly on which days and at what times your target group is most active.
Once you know more about your customers’ habits, you can look for ways to make your social media marketing even more efficient. With social media management tools like HubSpot, you can create and measure posts for different channels in one place – so you can keep track of everything despite the different characteristics of the platforms.
