Social media is always evolving, and users’ behavior changes with it. One fact that doesn’t change is that all social platforms move fast, with a constant stream of content vying for attention. You want to get the most eyes possible on your content and maximize engagement by knowing the best times to post on social networks.
It’s not enough to guess when users might log in to a given network, or when audiences in your niche are hungriest for the latest information. Now that more and more brands from all kinds of industries realize the value of connecting with their audiences on social networks, it’s important to understand how your audience uses social platforms and what they want out of your content. An ecommerce brand may see social engagement follow daily and seasonal patterns of shopping engagement, while a corporate thought leadership account may see plenty of clicks at the start of the workday when readers are looking for inspiration.
In order to get granular and find out the best times to publish on social media for four social media networks, we worked closely with Sprout’s data science team to pull this information based on our customers. The data below shows when our 25,000-plus Sprout customers were engaged the most (and least) across major networks and broken down by industry.
Let’s take a look at the unique insights we found for the best times to post on each social network:
- Best times to post on Facebook
- Best times to post on Instagram
- Best times to post on Twitter
- Best times to post on LinkedIn
- How we gathered this data
Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded in Central Time Zone (CST). Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times.