Getting the timing right on your posts to social media can make all the difference in reaching your audience effectively.
In this blog, we’ll look at the various platforms’ optimal posting times to maximise engagement and visibility for B2B business owners.
Knowing the best posting times will allow you to engage with your target audience demographic more efficiently as well as successfully meeting your goals.
Does it Matter When You Post on Social Media?
The majority of online social media algorithms use recency as a factor to determine ranking. In other words, if you have just posted and your followers are active, your post is more likely to be shown to them.
If you publish at the right time, more people will see your post. If they’re interested and respond to your post, the algorithm will then make sure it is seen by many other users.
So, offering helpful content to your target audience at the right time is important to increase the chances of high engagement.
Why Timing is Important for Your Social Media Posts
It seems a bit odd, caring about when you post on social media. After all, if people spend an average of 2 hours and 32 minutes per day on social media, surely they’ll see your posts eventually. What does it matter?
But what time to post on social media is actually incredibly important.
It’s a bit like the fabled falling tree in the forest: if no one is around to read your post, does it exist? There’s nothing worse than writing great content for it to then end up on the digital rubbish heap, unseen and unloved. This is especially true if you’re trying to market yourself or your company, instead of just posting for fun.
Unfortunately, due to the sheer amount of content on social media, the majority of your target audience won’t ever see what you post. There are just too many companies posting millions of times a day, but that doesn’t mean you can’t tip the odds in your favour just a bit. This is why timing is so important! But how does timing affect your success? There are several ways:
- The almighty algorithms: these secretive rules decide which posts are pushed to the tops of users feeds;
- Engagement: the more people interact with your post, the better it will perform in the algorithms, so the more people will see it;
- Web traffic: the more people see your post, the more likely they are to check out your website and products.
Don’t go to all the trouble of finding your social media audience only to let them slip through your fingers. Engage with them at the right times!
What Engagement Means on Social Media
How do businesses measure success on social media? For some, it’s simply the amount of followers they have, and that’s understandable. Seeing that number reach into the thousands (or if you’re really lucky, millions) is enough to make our brains feel warm and fuzzy.
But what is that number actually getting you? Is it an active community, with discussions, likes, and memes? Or is it a ghost town with a tumbleweed blowing across your empty page? This is what we mean by social media engagement, and boosting this is a true mark of success.
Why? Because an engaged community is a passionate community. It’s a loyal, interested, and returning set of clients. They’re the ones talking to their friends, families, and strangers online about your wonderful brand, and these word-of-mouth reviews are the most powerful marketing you can get.
You can measure your social engagement with some of the following metrics:
- Comments
- Likes
- Followers
- Mentions
- Hashtags
A fantastic way to grow these (apart from following our great guide on social media management) is to post at the right times. As previously mentioned, if you post when your audience is online, they’re more likely to see it and engage with it. It’s the difference between being fashionably late and just late. Don’t post when everyone’s already left the party!
Why is it Worth Finding the Best Time to Post on Social Media?
A successful B2B business marketing strategy on social media must include the best time to post on social media.
The importance of selecting the ideal publishing time varies between different platforms and could significantly affect the engagement, visibility and overall effectiveness that your posts will have.
This is why choosing the best time to post on social media is important:
- Engaging and Maximising Reach
If you schedule your content at the times of day when your targeted group of followers will be most active on social networks, there’s a higher chance that they will view and engage with your content. This can result in larger audiences and more likes, comments, shares, and click-throughs.
- More Conversions
Sharing posts at the right time is crucial when your social media marketing goal is boosting web traffic, generating leads, or closing sales. Increased click-through and conversion rates could result from scheduling your content when your target audience is most active.
- Competitive Advantage
Knowing when your competitors post and when their followers are most active could help in gaining an advantage over the competition. You could be the first to publish during the most popular time of day by scheduling your content.
- Cost-Effective Marketing
If you’re using paid social media ads, knowing the right time to use them will ensure you get the best value for your money. You can increase the chances of interacting with potential clients by running your advertisements when your intended audience is online.
The Best Times to Post on Each Platform
If you’re serious about maximising your success on social media then, you’ll want to post at the best possible times on each platform. It takes time, dedication, and most importantly, consistency, but you’re more likely to increase your social media engagement by following this schedule:
- The best time to post on Facebook: 10am – 3pm on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday;
- The best time to post on Instagram: 11am – 1pm and 7pm – 9pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays;
- The best time to post on X (Twitter) is 9am – 1pm on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays;
- The best time to post on LinkedIn is 7am – 12pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
Again, these are general times based on averages, so they might not be perfect for you and your brand. However, they are a good jumping off point, so start posting at these times and see if your social media engagement increases, and experiment from there.
| Platform | Best Time | Best Days |
| 10 -3pm | Wednesday, Thursday, Friday | |
| 11am – 1pm, 7pm – 9pm | Tuesdays and Wednesdays | |
| X (Twitter) | 9am – 1pm | Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays |
| 7am – 12pm | Wednesdays and Thursdays |
The Worst Times to Post to Social Media
If there’s a best time to post on social media, surely there’s a worst time to post?
You bet there is! Avoid Sundays. Sundays typically have the lowest engagement, as professionals aren’t at work checking their LinkedIn page or people are off enjoying their time with family and friends. Instead, use that time to brush up on your social media management skills (or head to the pub!).
How to Find Out When Your Audience is Online
Now you know just how important it is to post at the right times on social media to engage with your audience – but how can you find out when they’ll be online?
There are a couple of ways you can find out when your audience is online. The first is through old-fashioned trial and error. Just experiment posting at different times of the day, and after a couple of weeks look at when you got the most engagement. Every community is different, so this is a great way to really focus on your individual market.
Also remember (and this is really important) that you can’t just do this for one platform and use those times for the others. Facebook users are active at different times to LinkedIn users, as are Instagram users compared with X (Twitter) users. Each platform is its own ecosystem so while this method works, it can be very time consuming.
The other method is to use each platform’s own insight tools. These are powerful and sometimes quite complex, and can tell you everything you need to know, from page views and reach to number of engagements. They differ slightly for each platform and not all of them tell you when your audience is online. Here’s how to use them:
- Facebook: If you’re a business, you’ll need to head to Facebook Business Suite. Simply login to your Facebook’s business account.
- LinkedIn: Click your profile picture. Under Manage, click Posts & Activity. Depending on what you’re after, click either Articles or Posts, then you’ll be able to view their analytics;
- Instagram: You’ll need 100+ followers and a business account first. Then, go to your profile, click Insights, then Audience, then See More. Scroll down to Followers and you’ll see when they’re online;
- X (Twitter): Login to analytics.twitter.com with your username and password. You can then analyse individual tweets.
| Platform | Insights | See when audience is online? |
| Engagement, reach, loyalty, demographics, performance | Yes | |
| Reach, engagement, highlights, demographics | Yes | |
| X (Twitter) | Impressions, engagements | No |
| Engagements, discovery, impression demographics, article performance | No |
Lastly, there are many third party apps out there that can give you detailed analytics into your accounts, all in one place.
So, to recap, to find out when your audience is online, try:
- Trial-and-error;
- Each platform’s official analytics;
- Third-party software.
Use a system that works for you!
Factors Influencing the Posting Time on Social Media
The best time to post on social media and online content can differ based on various factors:
- The Audience’s Time Zone
Location and the geographical area of your targeted audience are crucial elements in determining the most effective time for posting. To increase engagement, it’s essential to plan your posts to fit your primary target audience’s time zone(s).
- Platform Algorithms
The algorithms of these platforms determine when your audience will see your posts. Each social media platform has its own algorithm. These algorithms consider things like the behaviour of users and trends in engagement.
- The Demographics of the Audience and the Industry
The behaviour of online users varies across different categories and audiences. While B2C audiences may be more active during the evening and weekend days, B2B audiences are likely to be more active during working hours.
- Type Of Content
The ideal publishing time varies depending on the type of content that you’re offering. Content that needs to be published immediately, such as flash deals or breaking news, must be time-sensitive. However, timeless content can be scheduled to be posted at the best times.
Tips for Finding Your Best Time to Post
Here are a few methods to determine the ideal timing to publish:
- Carry out A/B tests
- Analyse your past posts
- Post when your target audience is the most active
Let’s go over these in depth.
- Test A/B Tests
When developing your social content strategy for your B2B business, you should play around with various posting times to discover which works best for your company. This can be done with traditional A/B testing, also known as split testing.
A/B testing is an approach where “A” is the control, and “B” can be the variable.
If you are trying to determine the most appropriate times to post content on social media platforms, “A” represents the content you share and “B” refers to the date you publish it. Therefore, similar posts can be published at different times, and then the outcomes are measured to find out which performed best.
You’ll be able to gather information each time you publish posts on a specific day and at a particular time. After testing, you will be able to observe a pattern to find out which content performs best at certain times and you can then repeat that same pattern.
- Analyse Your Past Posts
If you’ve been using social media for a long time, you’ve likely had posts that did well. Reviewing your most successful posts will give you a sense of the ideal times for posting to your intended audience.
There are several crucial metrics worth paying attention to when you look at those posts that performed best, for example:
- Impressions
- Engagement rate
- Click-through rates
- Reach
- Accounts mentioned
- Likes, comments, retweets, etc.
Find those posts that were viewed the most, received the most engagement and brought visitors to your site. Look at the dates and times you published the posts. This is a good starting point for determining the ideal times to publish using the various platforms that you’re on.
- Post When Your Audience Is The Most Active
There are some websites for social networking that provide analytics to tell you when your followers are most active.
Facebook and other platforms provide tools such as auditory insights, which can give precise information about your followers, their demographics, habits, and the time of day they use the platform most.
Knowing when your followers are more likely to be using social media will increase the chances that they will view the content you share. This will mean you’re not fighting against the LinkedIn and X (Twitter) algorithms and posting content when your audience won’t be using the platforms.
Social media algorithms prioritise the most recent content you share.
When followers scroll through their feeds, they’re more likely to view your latest posts. This is why posting as close to the time that your followers are active is the biggest advantage for your business.
Final Thoughts
Understanding the best time to post on social media and when and how often to post on social media in 2024 can have a tremendous effect on your presence and engagement levels online.
By scheduling posts during peak activity times for your target audience, visibility, reach, and interaction increases significantly. When planning your schedule be mindful of target demographics, industry trends, and platform algorithms.
Experiment with different times until finding what works for your B2B business strategy.
With optimal timing and consistency, your brand’s social media efforts can deliver maximum impact.
Next Steps
If you need help with social media posting, 100 Pound Social has worked with 1,000+ B2B companies across a range of professional service industries, including:
Find out more about our social media plans or join a 15-minute demo to see how they work.
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