Best time to post on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in 2020

Are you launching your business in 2020? Or perhaps you’ve got a successful business but you’ve decided that you need to renew your focus on your social media channels so that you can engage with your customers more? Either way, one of the things you’re likely to be thinking about – aside from planning what you’re actually going to put in each of your posts, of course – is whether there’s a best time to add your post on each channel.

Why is the time I post on social media important?

You want your post to be seen by as many of your followers as possible, so ideally, you’d want to be posting just before your audience are likely to be opening their social media apps, so your post is right at the top of their feed. But considering that you’ll have hundreds, if not thousands of followers, then that’s going to be near impossible to do for each and every one – so you’ll need to use the strategies that allow you to be at the top of as many feeds as possible.

Unfortunately – and here is the key thing – there are no rules that will guarantee the perfect time to post on your social media accounts. It makes sense when you think about it – if there was an ideal time that ensured your post would be seen, everyone would use that particular time, and then everyone’s feeds would be completely cluttered. That means you need to identify what will work for your business specifically.

Each social media is different

This is pretty obvious – the type of content that you’re posting on each channel is different, so it makes sense that the ‘right’ time to post on each social media channel is different too. Simply dropping exactly the same post across all your channels at the same time will encourage your loyal fans that follow you on different channels to stop following you. Not only that, the type of content you need to create is different. If you start posting 15 second videos of your team having a coffee together on LinkedIn, your LinkedIn followers will rightly assume there’s something not quite right – because those short videos belong on TikTok or on an Instagram or Snapchat Story post.

It might be a bit of a headache to start with, but it’s important to understand the nuances between the channels so that you can curate your content carefully, and be more successful on each channel – which increases the success of your business. Definitely a worthwhile investment of your time.

Your audience isn’t always on

Unless you eat, sleep and breathe social media, there’s likely to be times that you’re not looking at the feeds for your social media accounts. The same applies to your followers – and depending on variables in their lives, there will definitely be better times than others for you to post, to ensure they will see it. You’ll have done your target customer research, and you’ll need to make sure you refer to it carefully when thinking about the best time to post.

Let’s make a couple of examples. If you’re targeting mothers of new-born babies, you might have engagement through the night or early in the morning, while they’re up feeding, whereas if you’re aiming to reach teenagers, it’s pretty logical to assume that there is little point in posting early in the morning at the weekends!

Don’t forget, not all of your followers may be in the same time zone as you – which can make things even more complicated when you’re trying to work out the right time to post.

Algorithms

Algorithms rule our lives online. They influence what we see on different marketplaces, make suggestions about movies, restaurants and more – and they control what we see on our social media feeds. When using social media for marketing your business, you’ll be looking for your posts to be liked, shared, commented on and for new followers to start adding you as a result of the post.

For algorithms to present your post to more followers, you’ll generally need high quality content that is appropriate for your brand and you’ll need to make use of relevant hashtags, so your posts can be retrieved when users search for that particular hashtag.

Unfortunately, the algorithms that social media platforms use are ever changing, and each platform has their own algorithm. That means you absolutely cannot become complacent, even if you think you’ve cracked the perfect time to post. Make sure you keep up with news about changes to algorithms, and that you scour the analytics available to you on each platform to make sure your engagement doesn’t drop off because you missed an update.

Although there might end up being more information available that you want, or have time to deal with, having a basic understanding of the algorithm can help to guide you.

General guidelines for social media posts

We’re sure you’ve read posts that give you all kinds of advice about how to post on social media. Many of them tell you that you should post on Facebook twice a day but never more than that, that LinkedIn is for weekday mornings only or that your Snapchat content should be posted at a certain time. Of course, there will be some people for which that will work – but as we’ve already said, there is not a magic formula that will work for every single business. Here are a few guidelines that will work across most platforms.

Tailor your content

You’ve probably already understood this from our point about each social media being different. Don’t think you can create one post and simply add that post to all your social media accounts – it just doesn’t work like that. Think about the sort of content you see on LinkedIn – it’s much more professional. That means if you’re posting jokey content that you might add to a Snap or Instagram Story, it won’t be nearly as well received, and posts you add to LinkedIn are likely to be way too serious for followers on other social media.

What we said about quality over quantity applies here. If you’re not posting what followers want to see, then at best you won’t get any engagement, and at worst, you’ll lose followers and your engagement will drop off because the algorithm will determine your posts aren’t suitable.

Post with your audience in mind

You did your target customer research when you started your business, and you likely refer to it for marketing purposes. Don’t waste it by ignoring it when you’re thinking about your social media! Make use of demographic information to help you post at the time that you think your audience will be online, then do research to see if your theory is valid. Once you have this information, you can uncover more by checking the analytics provided by the platforms, and start refining your approach accordingly.

Consistency is key

There’s plenty of different articles on the internet that will tell you ‘the best time’ to post. But depending on where your followers are in the world, which social media channel they’re following you on and so on, will influence when the best time for your posts to go up is.

What is unlikely to change is the need to post content consistently. Even if you’re posting just twice a week, if your audience likes those posts, comments on them and shares them regularly, you’re likely to get more value from them than if you post twice a day every day for a week, then don’t post again for a while.

Quality of your posts are more important than quantity

Think about the accounts you follow on different social media. There’s likely to be some of your friends and family, but when it comes to businesses and brands that you follow, you’re probably a lot more selective. We’re willing to bet that you’ve unfollowed accounts that have cluttered up your feed with spammy, salesy posts, because most of us have done the same!

When you’re creating your social media posts, make sure they’re made up of high quality video or images, that your words are well thought out, that you use hashtags, and that you tag any other relevant accounts.

Use hashtags

We’ve talked about the importance of hashtags on the blog before. They might be an ‘optional extra’, but picking the right hashtags is absolutely essential to your posts being found. If you’re not making use of them, your posts are unlikely to be found by any new potential followers – and those potential followers might become potential customers.

Avoid using hashtags that are over-used (like #happynewyear on December 31st!) since only your followers are likely to see your posts. And although there’s little information from social media about shadowbans, you don’t want to risk your post not being seen at all by using banned hashtags that are currently being overused.

Set goals and objectives

You started your business by setting targets for yourself, so it makes sense to set targets for your social media too. Decide you’re using your social media to increase brand awareness, bring traffic to your website, to create new leads, boost engagement or to help provide customer service, or maybe it is some other reason that is unique to your business.

Whatever you decide the reason for using social media, it’s important to set goals so that you can measure the effectiveness of your work – after all, if you’re not getting the returns you need from your posts, what is the point? Those analytics aren’t just there for influencers, they’re also there to help you take your business to the next level.

Engage with followers

If you’re going to the effort of posting content on your social media channels, then make sure you’re engaging with followers who leave you comments, DMs and who repost your posts. Saying thank you for their comment goes a long way to keeping your followers and shows potential customers that you care – especially where customers have taken to social media to get your help with a customer service issue, as they often do on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Make use of analytics from the social media platform

If you didn’t have great success with a particular post, your engagement drops significantly or you decide to experiment with posting at different times, the analytics will help you uncover what is going on, and how to continue to proceed. Each of the social media platforms have their own inbuilt analytics, meaning that all you have to do is sign into your account to find out much more about reach, engagement, your audience and much more.

Remember time zones

While writing this post we saw so many articles that state things like “post between 1 and 4 on Thursdays for the best results!”. They’re fantastic sweeping generalisations, but none of these types of posts give any indications as to where the author is located geographically, let alone what evidence that claim is based on. You can try following advice from those types of articles, but bear in mind there is no one rule that will work for every business – since the people you are aiming to reach will be so different.

So as we said before – make sure you’re checking your target customer research and finding out what times your posts are being seen and getting engagement from the analytics. Don’t forget, if you suddenly find you’re getting orders from a certain country, then you may want to consider either adjust your social media posting times, or add an extra post in order to catch your customers in that country.

Facebook

Facebook is by far the biggest of the social media giants – it enjoys over double the number of active users of Instagram, and is even further ahead of YouTube users than you might think too. For businesses taking their first steps into growing their social media presence, Facebook is often the first platform they create a profile on. And it makes sense, since over 1.66 billion people log into Facebook every day!

Facebook allows for a range of different types of posts. Businesses can post videos, links to blog articles and more. You can also post to your page’s Facebook Stories, and Facebook Live videos, which means you can share less formal content when you’re attending special events, business updates, and behind the scenes footage. Quality, authentic content is the best kind of content for Facebook, but if you feel your followers are asking the same kinds of questions regularly, you can absolutely post a link to one of your instructional videos. Just be sure that you’re writing an appropriate caption on your post explain the reason for posting.

How often should I post on Facebook?

Although there is a lot of users on Facebook, the algorithm prioritises posts by family, friends and groups – and paid content is less likely to be seen by followers. While Facebook have de-prioritised paid and promotional posts, engagement is super important. If you post something and it doesn’t get any engagement, your subsequent posts get shown to users even less. This all adds up to the conclusion by many marketing experts that a ‘less is more’ approach is wise.

A good rule of thumb is to start with one post per day. If you’re getting good engagement, you might experiment with adding an extra post, and then see what happens. If the algorithm decides that your posts are spammy – either because you’re using a click-baity, attention-grabbing headline or because you’re posting too often, then you’re likely to see a drop-off in the amount of interactions from your followers. That’s not ideal for your business! Don’t try and use ‘engagement bait’ tactics such as “Like this if you’re ready for summer” or similar either – Facebook penalise these kinds of posts too, and they’re less likely to be seen.

The best time to post on Facebook

Your audience is the biggest thing to influence when you should post on Facebook – so as we’ve already said, forget about those articles that are advising you to post between ‘midday and 3pm’ or some other time. Start your Facebook campaign by posting when you think your audience are likely to be checking their feeds, and then make use of the Facebook Page Insights to see how well your posts are performing. If you’re using a scheduling tool to manage your social media posts, you can make use of the extra analytics information available there. You’ll be able to discover which of your posts are performing well, and which don’t, and if there is an optimal time for your business to post on Facebook.

Twitter

Over 500 million tweets are posted on Twitter every single day – that’s a lot of competition to get your voice heard through. Of course, if you’ve built your following appropriately, you won’t be using Twitter just to promote your products. You’ll be using it for interacting with your customers, providing great customer service and sharing posts that are relevant for your target customers.

Since you’ve only got 280 characters, you need to make your message count. That means making use of those characters, whether you’re posting a tweet that’s entertaining, you’re linking to another article, posting an image or a video.

Similar to Facebook posts, the more engagement a tweet gets, the more exposure to other users it receives. This all adds up to the fact that you need to be posting when your audience are online, and you need to be tweeting and sharing quality content. If the algorithm decides that your content is self-promoting, or spammy in any way, it will eliminate your tweets from being seen. Use Twitter to create conversations, rather than using it as an advertising platform, and you’re almost guaranteed to get engagement.

How often should I post on Twitter?

Since the average ‘lifetime’ of a tweet is around 18 minutes, then posting regularly is going to be key. What we’re definitely not saying, however is to post something pointless or spammy on the hour, every hour. The algorithm hates this kind of approach, and if you’re a Twitter user yourself, you’re likely to have avoided, or unfollowed accounts that are using this type of tactic – so don’t damage your business by doing it yourself.

You’ll see engagement by posting several times daily, although it is worth trying to keep your tweets to when you think your audience will be online – lunchtime is usually a great place to start, but refer back to that target customer research for more clues.

The best time to post on Twitter

There’s a genius – yet incredibly simple tip you can use to help find out when your audience are online. Simply use the search box to look for posts containing keywords and hashtags related to your business. If your business is selling fashion, and you’re starting to sell clothing for the next season, you might search for hashtags like #summerfashion, or you might go even simpler and search for phrases like ‘I need a new dress’. When you find those tweets, you’ll be able to see what time they were posted. Bingo! And when you spot this type of post, you can reply to that user – so you could reply “I wonder if we have what you’re thinking of?” and add a link to your store. That’s a resource-heavy approach for engaging with potential customers regularly, but if you’re there doing your research anyway, why not?

Of course, you’ll also need to make use of Twitter’s inbuilt Analytics tool. There, you’ll find metrics about each of your tweets, the dates and times and the reach of the tweet. On top of that, you’ll find incredibly valuable information about your followers, such as whether they match your target customers, which time zone they’re based in, what they do for a living and more – which can help you determine the best time for you to post on Twitter.

Instagram

As we said on our social media statistics post, 90% of Instagram users follow at least one business account, and 83% of Instagram users say they have discovered new products and services through the platform. That’s the kind of engagement you want! There’s a range of ways you can post on Instagram, it’s not just photos – you can post on your feed, on your Story, Instagram Live and IGTV. We’ve spoken a few times on our blog about Instagram, including how to get verified on Instagram, about Instagram hashtags and bios – so check out those posts for much, much more detail.

How often should I post on Instagram?

The question of how often you should post on Instagram depends on whether we’re talking about posting in your feed, on your Story, Instagram Live or IGTV.

When it comes to their feeds, many brands are posting between one and three times each day, and are seeing reasonable success with it, while others are posting even more regularly than that. Whatever strategy you start with though, be sure you can continue with – if you start out posting several times daily and then fade out to posting once or twice a week, your engagement will drop off and your posts won’t be seen by as many people. So the same rule applies for Instagram as for other platforms – post as often as you can create quality content consistently. Make sure you’re using hashtags, and that your posts aren’t spammy – if you’re simply posting shots of the items you’re selling, and nothing else, the algorithm isn’t likely to love you.

For Instagram Stories, you can be a lot less polished and a lot more down to earth – so you don’t need your content to be perfect, and you can post here multiple times daily. Just keep your audience in mind when you’re creating your Story content, and make sure you’re posting what they are likely to be interested in seeing. Short snippets of behind the scenes as you’re dispatching items, or you’re creating a new campaign can be of interest, but if you’re more candid you might decide to post clips or photos of you and your team goofing around.

Instagram Live is part of Stories, so they’re always featured for your followers to see, and when you go Live, you get shown in first place. Of course, sitting with a cup of tea on Instagram Live won’t enthral your viewers unless you’re giving them something else at the same time – so use it carefully.

IGTV is a whole other ball game – it’s Facebook’s (who of course own Instagram) answer to YouTube. IGTV videos need to be between 15 seconds and 60 minutes, and generally they’re a bit more polished than Live or Story videos. Think about using IGTV for adding demo videos, or if you’ve got a video you’ve edited from an event you’ve attended (for example) you might use IGTV for that. You’ll definitely need to make sure your content for IGTV is high quality – so however often you can produce high quality video is right. It’s better to post consistently on your feed and your Story than trying to win at IGTV if you’re just starting your brand, in our opinion.

The best time to post on Instagram

We’ve seen loads of comments from influencers who are struggling with the Instagram algorithm. Users should be seeing the most recent posts at the top of their feeds – which means the time that you post is more important than ever. That means that you’ll need to try and establish what time your followers are likely to be online – so make sure you know who your Instagram audience are likely to be, and make use of your Instagram Insights. (you’ll only get Insights with a business account, although we’re sure you’ve probably upgraded your account already!) The Instagram Insights allows you to access information about your posts, such as which were most popular, how many people saw the post, which country they live in, and so on.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has over 675 million users, and just under half (310 million) users log in every single month. That’s a huge number of potential connections you can be making to help grow your business.

Although it definitely counts as social media, LinkedIn is quite a different beast to other social networks. Since the main purpose of LinkedIn is for professional networking, you need to be a lot more careful with exactly what you post. Keeping it serious and relevant to your industry, and other professionals is wise advice.

Long-form content that you have written yourself is a great way to help increase the reputation of your business amongst your peers. If you’re trying to help boost your website’s rank on Google, you’ll need to be demonstrating expertise, authority and trust – and assuming that you’ve linked from your website to your LinkedIn account, then long-form content can help. Writing articles that are like blog posts is exactly the sort of thing that can help you build your authority in your field.

Sharing content that is interesting for your followers, like the latest trends, research, tips and tricks can also help to build that authority. Make predictions that show you’ve got knowledge to share, or talk about things you’ve learnt as a result of anything that you’re working on.

Cross sharing videos that you found interesting – especially if the video motivates you to get up and running with a new project or something. Maybe you’ve found an amazing TED talk, or an inspirational speech – both of these things would be ideal to share with your LinkedIn followers.

Don’t forget, you’ll also need to blow your own trumpet. Talk about how well you’re doing, if you’ve smashed a massive goal, or even if you’re just treating your team to lunch – you’re demonstrating that your business is a great one to work for.

How often should you post on LinkedIn?

Let’s refer you back to what we said about quality over quantity. If you can post valuable content consistently once a week, that will be more beneficial than if you were to post poorer quality content daily. Of course, if you are lucky enough to have the required time on your hands to create the kind of high value content every single day, or even multiple times the same day, then go for it.

When is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

Although the same rules apply to LinkedIn as apply to your other social media channels – it very much depends on when your audience are online – you can apply some general logic. Since LinkedIn is used by business professionals, recruiters and salespeople, a safe time to post is early to mid-morning, Tuesday to Thursday. You can post on other days of course – but Mondays and Fridays are usually more and less frantic respectively, meaning your LinkedIn posts may not be seen on those days.

Once you’re posting, your LinkedIn analytics are going to be invaluable to help you gain a deeper understanding of who is following you, exactly when they’re seeing your posts and the reach of your posts – so make sure you’re checking them regularly.

Snapchat

Snapchat is the picture messaging app that was first launched with a view that messages (‘Snaps’) would disappear a short time after they were sent. Today, the app includes Snapchat Stories – similar to the Facebook and Instagram Story feature – and many businesses are using Snapchat for marketing purposes. There’s over 190 million users that are active worldwide on Snapchat every single day, with many users checking the app over twenty times a day. If you’re creating authentic content that has potential to be great on Snapchat anyway, then you’ve everything to gain and very little to lose by posting it – especially if you’re using a tool to automate your posting.

You can create content for Snapchat in a similar format to what you are posting on Instagram. Use it to promote certain products, to showcase your branding, to shout about important milestones and to help drive traffic to your website. Snapchat is great for engaging with your customers, and you’ll find that followers will start to reply to your Stories – so make sure you continue to build your reputation by replying to these messages, even if you’re just replying with a single emoji.

How often should you post on Snapchat?

Since the number of daily Snapchat users are pretty impressive, yet again there’s a case for posting as often as you can create the right sort of content. Snapchat users expect to see much more authentic and ‘real’ content, so think about adding photos and videos that are ‘behind the scenes’ in style, adding more of yourself (and/or your team) talking and less of your polished marketing content.

When is the best time to post on Snapchat?

Check your target customer information for clues as to when they’re likely to be using Snapchat – if your target customers are 18-21, then many of them are likely to be in university or at work during the day. You may have success by posting before and after office hours, at lunchtime and through the evening, with this example.

The good news though with Snapchat is that there isn’t a hard and fast rule. Any day of the week can, and will work for you, although some research suggests you will see increased engagement when posting later at night.

Of course, once you’re posting regularly, you’ll want to continue to refine your approach. Check out your Insights, including your unique views, the view time of your Stories, completion rate, screenshots and fallout rate – they’re all helpful and can help you to discover what content doesn’t work with Snapchat users. Your Snapchat Insights will be able to help you nail down when the best time is for you to post depending on your followers. However, don’t forget the ‘perfect time’ to post for your audience may change – referring back to our example of university students, there might be a change in engagement after the end of term, or a drop-off in views just before exam periods. That means making your content count – and highlights the value in knowing your target customer.

TikTok

For many businesses, TikTok is the new kid on the block still, meaning that a lot of smaller businesses don’t think it is worth investing their time marketing on there just yet. But that’s a huge mistake, since being amongst the first to adopt it gives you a huge opportunity to grow your following before other businesses. The TikTok app has been downloaded over 800 million times, and it was the fourth most downloaded app of 2019 – so there’s plenty of users that want entertaining content.

TikTok content is made up of videos of just 15 seconds long – which means it’s great for making use of those short, funny out-takes that you might end up with when you’re creating the more serious video content. That approach is backed up by the TikTok mission – “to inspire creativity and bring joy”. Even on channels that you might expect more serious content from, like the Washington Post use TikTok for jokes and skits that make no mention of world events, so don’t expect videos that are serious, or promoting your products to go viral.

How often should I post on TikTok?

The interesting thing about TikTok is that they don’t make any information available to users about when a video is posted, or the date the user started posting. The algorithm picks what to display on users’ streams, which means that videos that were posted weeks or months ago might suddenly start being seen, liked and shared.

This lack of time and date stamps can be useful if you’re creating a lot of content right now, but won’t be able to for a little while – it means you don’t have to upload your videos gradually. However, there’s a lot of chat around a timestamp feature being tested and added, so this advice is definitely subject to change – make sure you keep your eye on the TikTok newsroom.

The best time to post on TikTok

You need to remember that your content might be seen by viewers literally anywhere in the world – which means that even if you discover you’re getting engagement at certain hours, that might not end up being a trend that you can replicate reliably.

Since there’s so much chat around potential timestamps being added – which may, of course, mean changes to the TikTok algorithm – it’s likely to be a good idea to make your posts when your audience are likely to be watching.

You can find out where your audience are by looking into to your TikTok analytics – if you’ve not switched your account to a Pro account, you’re missing out on valuable information. You won’t get any information until seven days after you’ve switched to a pro account, so make the change as soon as possible.

In the TikTok analytics, you’ll see video views, profile views and follower counts, the amount of likes and comments you’ve had as well as the top territories that are viewing your content – which can help you to identify the ‘right’ time to post for those audiences.

If you’re looking for more in-depth TikTok information, you can look at using a tool like Pentos – at a cost of course, but if you’re serious about growing your TikTok following, tools like these can be invaluable.

Pinterest

Pinterest is referred to as a ‘catalogue of ideas’ by it’s CEO. Since there’s so much interaction possible between users, it’s almost always included in discussions around social media, and there is huge potential for businesses to use Pinterest for their advertising. Pinterest has over 300 million users that are active every single month worldwide, which is close to the number that Twitter receives – and since every pin that is made has the potential to be seen forever, it’s a wise investment of your time.

You can pin almost anything on Pinterest – meaning that there’s plenty of scope for increasing the reach of not only your products, but also your blog posts and your images. You’re not limited to just saving images on your pins though – you can save ‘Rich Pins’, which can increase the amount of information you can save on there.

Product pins are going to be particularly useful for sellers – they include real-time pricing, availability and how to buy the product. They’re known to have higher click-through rates, meaning more sales for you. Carousel pins allow you to add up to five images on your pin, meaning viewers see more of your products, and Video pins can be used to further increase your return on your investment in video content.

Sellers might also make use of Article pins, that allow you to pin blog posts and similar types of articles – great if you’re trying to increase your position of authority in your field. Infographics pins may be useful for the same reason, and there if you have an app, be sure to save a few App pins to increase potential downloads.

How often should you post on Pinterest?

You really can post as often as you can create quality pins. Pinning a few pins regularly, at similar times of the day seems to get much better results than pinning scores of pins sporadically though – so use an automation tool to post for you over the coming days and weeks.

The best time to post on Pinterest

Some social media marketing professionals advocate pinning between 8pm and 11pm – but like the other social media channels, it isn’t as simple as that. The time you post isn’t the only thing that impacts upon your pins being seen on the feeds of other users – it’s about the quality of your pin, which includes the amount of repins, comments and shares your pin gets.

Since Pinterest is the kind of platform that users turn to when they have time on their hands – their evening commute on the train, or on the sofa after the kids have gone to bed – posting then is a good idea. But if your Pinterest followers are likely to be active at other times of the day, posting then will help to increase your engagement.

You can experiment with the timing of your posts and check out how they do using the Pinterest Analytics for your business account. The analytics can help you see your most popular pins, which can help you establish the type of content that users are looking for, which can help you plan your future content accordingly.

Other tools

In addition to analytics and insights pages, there are loads of tools that can help you with understanding your specific audience. Many of the tools that automate your social media marketing posts and help you manage messages have built-in analytics, so if you’re already using one of these, then it’s well worth looking there before trying anything else. In addition to these, we strongly recommend making use of Google Analytics and Google Trends.

There are a whole bunch of free tools that can help you with understanding your social media and the best time to post – including Buffer, Keyhole, Quintly and SumAll, but they’re by far not the only ones, there are hundreds of tools that can help. Search for exactly what you need – a tool is almost guaranteed to be available.