The one strict answer to that question doesn’t exist – as it depends on various factors, and it’s crucial to discuss them all. It is not possible to devise one that suits all hour or day of the week, as this will depend on the audience of each profile.
Why? Each account reaches an entirely different target audience, with its own habits, own content consumption patterns, and numerous social media approaches.
To exemplify what we mean:
- when a brand sells products for young parents, hours of posting should be aligned with their rhythm of the day
- when a brand’s target audience is the group of people working long hours, career-oriented, extremely busy during the day, posting hours will have to look completely different
- teenagers and students demand a totally different approach, as they’re using their phones most of the time
That’s why we’ll focus on how to find and analyze the most convenient time to post – to increase your reach and understand your followers’ habits. Your content schedule must be relevant to their everyday routine.
How to find out who your audience is – for who are you creating?
There are three ways to do that:
- Establish marketing personas
- Check out the data in your website’s GA and GSC
- Analyze hours when your followers are most active, using Instagram Insights and Instagram Creator Studio (via Facebook)
Establishing your marketing personas will let you create a strategic goal: a list of attributes your dream clients may have in common, and you’ll find out who needs your products/services the most.
If you want to dive deeper into the topic of creating marketing personas, you can read more here: How to create marketing personas.
The following method to learn more about your audience is analyzing the data from your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. This is a gold mine of valuable indicators.
Who are your readers, how old are they, and how exactly are they finding you? Not only does it provide data about your audience, but researching those analytics can also give you many meaningful hints about what your followers need from interacting with your content.
The last method we recommend to research optimal posting hours is checking when your followers use Instagram most often – and when they’re online. Thanks to Instagram statistics in the Instagram Insights section and Facebook’s Creator Studio, you can reach this information.
Instagram Insights are built-in-app statistics you have direct access to if you have a business or creator account.
In this section, you can review what time – which part of the day and which days of the week – your followers log on most frequently.
This data is generated based on their behavior in the past (also, the way they reacted to your posts throughout the preceding week).
Is it highly toothcombing, and can you really rely on those insights?
Well, those statistics aren’t exact because the time of activity is presented in the form of 3hours time slots. It means that if you want to know precisely when the users were highly active (not only estimatedly), you need to go to Creator Studio – there, you have access to the exact data.
Smart move: post half an hour (or even an hour) before an hour which is, according to the statistics, the time peak of your audience’s activity – so they will see your post on the top of their feed the moment they log in!