When and Where to Post

In order to be consistent, you need to know when is the best time to post your content and where you should be posting your content. Every social media platform is different. Plus, every industry and audience is different. Here is how you can determine the best time and places to share your content.

When to Post

You can read tons of posts about the best times to post on social media. But, the truth is, it totally depends on your unique audience and when they are most likely online. It also depends on how engaging your content is because people can see your post hours after you post it especially when it’s highly engaged.

The best place to find out this information is through testing and analytics/insights. No one is going to tell you what your audience wants to see better than your audience.

Testing: Trying stuff out is a sure fire way to really figure out what your audience likes. Plan out a few different types of content. For example, you make a video, a blog, and a text post. Post each content type at a different time during the week. Measure which one gets the most engagement and interaction. Continue testing until you find the best balance.

Analytics/Insights: Each platform gives you some sort of tool to track the engagement of your content. You can also use outside tools to get an even better idea. Below is how to find analytics for each profile.

• Twitter – Get detailed information about top followers, mentions, and most engaged tweets by heading to Twitter Analytics.
• Instagram – If you have a business profile, head to insights to get info on best time to post, impressions, and more. While business pages aren’t always recommended due to decrease of engagement, the Instagram scheduling tool, Later, allows you to view detailed analytics of a personal or business profile.
• Facebook – For business pages, head to insights to see which posts are performing well and even other pages performance. For groups, insights are available once you reach a certain criteria which is normally over 250 members. You can also use SocioGraph  if you do or don’t have group insights.
• Pinterest – Head to Pinterest Analytics to see your profile and reach plus detailed info on how your pins are performing.

Where to Post

Where you post your content is just as important as when. A post that does really well on Facebook, may do terrible on Facebook. Also, some platforms don’t support certain posts, for example, you cannot post text posts on Pinterest or Instagram without a video or image. So, you must keep that in mind when posting.

To figure out where you should be posting your content, you must do the first steps of testing and analytics mentioned above. After you’ve got a clear idea of what works where, post more of the content that is performing well consistently.

Social media is always changing, so you may need to do this multiple tests and tweaks are to be expected.

Highly Recommended: It is highly recommended, that until you build a team and start outsourcing your content efforts, that your limit your content creation and engagement efforts to 2-3 platforms. The more platforms you run, the more burnout, the lesser quality of content, and the more time wasted.

Instead focus on a few platforms and automate the rest to post as needed (at least weekly)

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