Digital Blog: Using engagement trends to post the right content at the right time
In last week’s post, we broke down the demographics of some of the most popular social media platforms so you could determine the best place for your brand to be in the social sphere. But now that you know where to be, do you know what to post? What about when?
One of the great things about social media is that there are so many insights built in to the platforms. You can take those insights and discover when your engagement is highest and what content does best so you can keep adapting your social media marketing strategy to work best for your company.
Overall Trends
Though specific engagement rates vary among the platforms, engagement consistently increases around noon on weekdays. The best days to post tend to be towards the end of the week, with Thursdays and Fridays usually garnering high engagement across multiple platforms. Generally, times when people are otherwise occupied — whether at work, out and about, or asleep — don’t see high engagement.
Facebook’s algorithm promotes content from a user’s friends and family higher than posts from business pages, decreasing organic reach to just 2 percent.
The weekend (from Thursday to Monday) is the best time to post on Facebook.
Content posted in the afternoon usually receives more interactions.
Business content sees 32 percent higher engagement on Saturdays and Sundays according to one study.
Though engagement does spike towards the end of the week, unlike Facebook, Instagram engagement is more consistently higher during the week, with Mondays and Thursdays performing particularly well.
Sunday sees the least engagement.
The best times to post tend to be when people are waking up and getting off of work – 5 to 8 a.m. and 4 to 5 p.m. Instagram seems to not be checked as frequently throughout the work day as Twitter or Facebook.
Like with all platforms, these rates vary among industries, but it’s particularly clear in the breakdown between business-to-business and business-to-consumer Twitter trends
B2B content gets the most engagement during the work week, performing 16 percent better on weekdays
B2C content is more distinctly popular on Saturday and Sunday, performing 17 percent better over the weekend
Overall, tweets see higher engagement rates in the evening and around lunch time. See this infographic.
What to Post
Facebook uses different algorithms for different kinds of posts, which contributes to how much engagement the posts get. While over 50 percent of Facebook posts are links, they receive 72 percent fewer interactions than video posts, which average 65 percent more engagement than images. Though you may want to use links to drive traffic, there’s something to be said for creating diverse, interesting content that bolsters your overall social media community.
Similar trends are apparent on Twitter, with videos six times more likely to be retweeted than photos, and three times more likely than GIFs. Tweets with images are also 34 percent more likely to get retweeted than tweets without, so even if you don’t have the budget to produce video, consider making your tweet visual
Instagram is obviously a visual platform, but according to the platform itself, some of the best practices for video content are:
15 seconds long
Fewer than 20 words per video frame
Square format
Optimized for users who watch the videos without sound (captions or subtitles)
You can get plenty scientific about days, times and content, but when it comes down to it, you probably know your audience the best. People are intuitive. You know when they eat lunch, get off of work, or lay in the bed Sunday morning catching up on Facebook feeds. Between this intuitive knowledge and the data available to you, you can create a truly personalized and responsive plan for your social media marketing.
