If you type in “best time to post on Instagram,” you’ll stumble across countless articles trying to inform you on what time to post according to studies of just a few million instagram posts. In fact, for a long time, many SEO and digital marketing firms believed that this is the way to grow our reach and engagement on social media. However, we now know that this is no longer the optimal approach when it comes to reaching your target audience on social media. There are a wide variety of reasons for this change. The most important component in this change is that you now have a lot more data about your own posts and followers. The best time to post is when your followers are online and engaging with your posts. So how do you know when you should post? There are a variety of indicators that you can utilize, such as recommendations for when to post on Instagram to maximize your reach with the tool Analyze. Read on to learn what time you should be posting on social media to reach your target audience. MyCity Social is a top SEO and digital marketing firm in Fort Lauderdale. Call MyCity Social for a consultation today for services on social media marketing Florida business owners rely on.
Using Analytics
Analytics typically is just some numbers and graphs. It’s easy to understand why so many people are intimidated by analytics. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Analytics can be interpreted in a way that is joyful and fun, and should be able to help you get rid of the tedious work of dissecting graphs and calculating numbers. Analytics should be a helpful tool that is easy to read and should function more like your assistant than dusty graphs that you don’t understand. When you use Analyze, you’re not just getting complicated charts and numbers- Analyze will give you the three recommended times to post on Instagram in order to maximize your reach. These times that they give you are the times when your predicted reach is among the highest throughout the week. While most people would find the three recommendations sufficient, if you want more, you can then dive into the charts.
How Does Analyze Help You Reach Your Target Audience?
The best time for your brand to post is something that is unique and individual to your specific brand. This is due to the fact that your Instagram followers behave differently from the followers of other brands. This means that the best time for you to post will be dependent on the behavior of your followers. So let’s talk about how Analyze figures out wheat times you should post and how it analyzes the behavior of your followers. First, Analyze will look at how your previous Instagram posts have performed and when they were posted. It will see if posts at certain times of the day or the week get more reach. Next, in order to make the predictions more accurate, it will also analyze the times when your Instagram followers are the most active online. By taking these two key pieces of information and data, Analyze will predict your reach on Instagram for each hour of the week. For each hour, Analyze will also let you know how the predicted reach compares with the average hourly reach for the entire week. You’ll notice fairly quickly that the three times which Analyze recommends aren’t necessarily the three times with the highest predicted reach, which is an intentional act. The top times are typically next to each other (Wednesday at 1 pm and Wednesday at 2pm). Unless you are posting about a live event, it doesn’t help your reach by publishing multiple posts around the same time. By spreading out your posts throughout the week, you are able to maximize your reach for the week.
Growing your reach more efficiently
Once you are aware of the best times to post, you can then head over to Publish to update your posting schedule. First, you should go to your Instagram account in Publish and then click “Settings,” and then “Posting Schedule.” In “Posting Schedule” you are able to put in your new posting times based on Analyze figures or adjust your existing posting times to match the best times to post. The times will be automatically saved, so that you are ready to automatically publish at your best items! All you need to do is to add new posts to your queue in order to schedule them at those times. It’s important to keep in mind that your best times to post as proffered by Analyze can change as time goes on. Even though your followers’ behavior most likely won’t change too drastically, every new post that goes up will provide Analyze with additional data to work with. With that, it may be able to find some new best times to post. It’s recommended by MyCity Social, who provides social media marketing Florida business owners trust, to check your best times to post every few months, especially if you have recently try new posting times.
Instagram Insights To Keep In Mind
We need to all be spending a lot less time figuring out our data and more time optimizing our campaigns. With the recommendations that are in Analyze, you are able to save some time analyzing your data so that you are able to focus on what’s more important- creating great content. This new feature is available on all Analyze plans. Give it a spin, and you can stop wasting time analyzing your data for Instagram. Of course, when you put your social media marketing and SEO goals in the hands of MyCity Social, you won’t have to think or spend time worrying about optimizing your posts, since we will do it for you!
Best Times To Post On Facebook
Now that we’ve discussed what times are best to post on Instagram, we will move on to another massive social media platform- Facebook. So what is the best time to post on Facebook? According to an aggregation of studies, the best day to post on Facebook to receive maximum exposure is either Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Friday, or Wednesday at 1 pm, 3 pm, or 9 am. However, these are just averages- what works best for you will depend on your individual brand and industry. Here is a step by step guide of figuring out which times are best to post for your brand on facebook:
- Step 1 Know your target audience- Before you even think about planning a posting schedule, it’s important to know who exactly you’re trying to reach. Let’s start with the basics and define your target audience: What are their demographics? What do they do for a living? Where do they reside? What’s their education level? By creating a full buyer persona, you should be able to understand your audience better, and also figure out when they’re most likely to utilize Facebook. For example, if your target market is college students, you already know that they operate on a very different schedule than middle-aged businessmen, so you should schedule your posts accordingly. Posting later in the evening may be best for stay-at-home moms. If your target audience is business executives, on the other hand, you may want to post early in the morning or during lunch, as these two times are least likely to have any meetings scheduled.
- Step 2 Pay attention to any time zones- It’s not just about knowing the time of day when most users are likely to look at your posts; you also have to factor in their location. Users in different areas are in different time zones, after all. In order to make things easy, you can rely on a couple of industry standards. You’ll need to schedule your posts based on where the majority of your audience is, and if you have a global audience, Google Analytics can assist you. Almost 50% of the population of the U.S. lives in the Eastern Time Zone, and the Eastern and Central time zones put together make up about 80% of the population. These time zones are also only an hour apart, so you’ll probably hit a large portion of the US audience if you’re scheduling based on Eastern or Central time.
- Step 3 Look at what the stats say- Companies have been researching the best times to post on Facebook for many years, which provides marketers with a lot of valuable information. When it comes to Facebook, however, the findings vary. Buffer reports that the best engagement rates are between 1-3 pm on Thursdays and Fridays, while Hootsuite announced that Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday at noon produces the best results for B2C companies. Given the information that is available, you can assume that afternoons are ideal, and Tuesdays don’t produce the same results that other days do. You should keep your best content for later in the week, and expect to see lower engagement rates mid-week, especially on early morning or later-in-the-day posts. These results ultimately should serve as general guidelines and a starting off point for businesses new to Facebook. However, in order to get the most accurate read you’ll have to conduct a little research of your own by seeing what your audience responds to the most.
- Step 4 Use tools and analytics- Analytics, as always, are your friends for account optimization. Once you’ve started to post consistently, you’ll be able to draw from your own analytics to figure out when your audience is the most active and engaged. The best place to begin is Facebook insights. In order to find your page insights, go to your profile and click Insights at the top of your Page. You can track when your fans are online by selecting Posts from the left-hand column, and will automatically be given a detailed chart that shows the days and times your fans are the most active on Facebook.
- Step 5 Schedule your posts with social media automation- This step was detailed above with the Instagram post, and it pretty works the same way. You use scheduling settings to choose the exact day and time you would like your post to run. You can create a content queue to place your content to make sure that you always have content to run right on schedule without you having to do anything manually!
Contact Us Today
It’s important to be holistic when tracking down the best times to post on social media to reach your target audience. Make sure to use all the valuable tools such as Analyze so that you can take advantage of recommendations and continuous, hands-free analysis. MyCity Social is a top digital marketing and SEO firm in Fort Lauderdale. If you’re looking for social media marketing Florida business owners trust, call MyCity Social today!
