When should you be scheduling your social posts to maximize engagement and response?

While individual results will vary, the team at Blog2Social recently evaluated the average best times for posting, based on social updates from more than 60,000 businesses and bloggers worldwide. The insights, which are listed in the below infographic, can be used as a basic guideline for post scheduling on each of the major social platforms.

Why is posting at the right time important?

The fact is that whenever you post on any social network, only a fraction of your followers will actually see your content, at least in its initial stages. The average lifetime of a social media post is different on each social platform – an average tweet, for example, will only survive 20 minutes before it drowns in the never-ending flow of content on Twitter.

Part of maximizing reach, however, is your initial post response. When people Like, comment and share your posts in their early stages, that sends a signal to the platform algorithms that your content is fresh, timely, and that it’s prompting a conversation that more people may want to be a part of. That will then see your post reach more people, in order to ensure that they’re aware of the trending discussion.

As such, if you post when more people are online, that maximizes your opportunity to get more initial reactions, expanding reach.

The below infographic looks at the optimal publishing times for various networks. And again, while this is not prescriptive, it may help in providing some direction and guidance for your posting experiments.

Also worth noting: Weekdays differ from weekends.

Hopefully this helps in your 2021 planning.