Social media is the one of the most powerful channels for businesses to stay in touch with their target audience. But without a proper strategy, getting the desired engagement can be incredibly challenging.
For instance, if you have spent a considerable amount of time creating a stellar video but you post it at a time when your target audience, you will not be able to achieve the instant connection you are yearning for.
When a video receives likes and comments while it is still fresh, it sends positive signals to the algorithm. As a result, the algorithm boosts such content and gives you better organic reach. Also remember that the lifespan of content on social media varies depending on the platform. For example, if you post a video on Twitter, it only has about 20 minutes to grab the attention of the audience before it gets lost in a barrage of tweets. In contrast, a video on YouTube has a lifespan of 20+ days to get noticed. Therefore, knowing when to post your videos on social media can be a game changer if you are serious about maximizing your reach.
Here are some tips on when your business should post videos on social media to get the best results.
Do the “best time to post on social media” surveys hold water in 2021?
Various social media management tools periodically analyze the engagement on social media posts across platforms to find out the best times to post across each network. However, while one of the platforms may base their findings solely on the basis of engagement from users located in the Central Time Zone, others might look at both Eastern and Central Time Zones. As a result, the findings vary greatly.
Take, for instance, Sprout Social that analyzes the engagement of users located in CST considers Tuesdays to be the best day for posting on Instagram. On the other hand, CoSchedule, which analyzes the data from both CST and EST, recommends Friday as the best day to post. Some other surveys suggest posting on Thursdays between 2 to 3 PM to get the best results.
The truth is that there is no single ‘best time to post’ surveys that will help your videos get noticed. Each social media platform caters to a different type of user persona. Moreover, engagement also varies depending on the location of your audience. For instance, if you cater to an international audience, your best bet is to post round the clock instead of relying on data generated from users in different time zones. There is no one-size-fits-all approach you can fall back on and calculate the average best time to post. The timings that work for a particular business or industry may not work for you. It’s that simple.
How to find your best time to post videos on social media?
Every business has a unique audience. Therefore, your posting schedule should cater to the specific audience’s behavior and preferences. Therefore, posting videos when your audience is online is a much better way of ensuring optimal engagement than obsessing over particular days or times of the week.
For instance, if your business is creating various sleeping aids to help insomniacs sleep better, posting videos late at night may make more sense when the chances of your target audience being awake and online are much higher.
Creating your own posting schedule makes it easier to constantly experiment and tweak it as per your findings. In contrast, if you are too dependent on external surveys, you might end up overlooking the unique behavior of your target audience. Remember that most surveys are based on aggregated data that may or may not take your audience into account.
Lastly, even though you may come across a new guide on “best time to post on social media” every year, chances are that the data could be from much older studies. So unless you have a foolproof way of verifying the data, you may be shooting in the dark. Overall, it’s important to focus on creating quality, branded videos instead, which can be done easily with a online video editor.
To make the life of your marketing team easier, here are the analytics you can rely on to find the best time to post videos:
Instagram: Instagram Insights is a native analytics tool available for business profiles. You can check out the Audience tab from Insights to know the days and hours when your followers were online.
Facebook: If Facebook is the platform you plan to post, use the native analytics tool Facebook Page Insights. You can find a section called ‘When Your Fans Are Online.’ It will tell you the number of followers online daily and hourly. The data is based on activity from the past week.
Platforms like Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter do not offer any native analytics tool that can help you to figure out when your target audience is online. For Twitter, a paid or free analytics tool can do the job. Unfortunately, for Pinterest and LinkedIn, you will need to reverse engineer and look at your top-performing posts from the past.
Note the day and time these were posted to find out what works on these platforms.
Finally, checking out when the competition is posting is also a solid strategy for finding the best time to post videos. See if you can identify a pattern from their high-performing posts.
Final Words
There is no universal formula that will tell you the best time to post videos on social media. You will need to keep experimenting and learning — after all, social media is one of the most dynamic marketing channels. What works today may end up being utterly obsolete by tomorrow.
The optimal time to post will depend on your audience and the social media platforms they prefer. Also, while knowing when you should post is incredibly important, you’ll still need to produce high-quality content consistently to reap the rewards. So ensure your videos are engaging and entertaining. And don’t forget to use a free online video editor to churn out sleek and professional-looking videos that help you outrank the competition.
