When is it the best time to post to social media?

Social media has been around for sometime and the initial buzz is over. Now is the time to make sense of it all and start using it to generate serious leads or sales. Many small business owners are basically fitting all the roles in their business and sometimes it’s difficult to manage and run the digital marketing side as well. I know. I’ve been there.

I’m sure that if you are interested in digital marketing and social media for your business, you may have read many articles, ebooks, and blog posts about when to post your social media marketing updates to get the best effect for your business. Honestly, I think these people writing the content about this topic is basically just writing them for the pure sake of just generating content and most don’t have facts to back their claims. One article I read says that posting in the evening is the best where another one states that you should post updates when everyone is at home after work.

What’s my opinion? I believe you should post whenever you have time and when it makes sense. That is the best time.

To give you an example; if you are only posting your updates in the middle of the night, at first you might not see any reaction, but maybe after a while you will attract people that are also up that time of the night. Those people will be your audience because you’d have something viable in common with them.

Would that really be that bad? Would you actually change the hours where you post updates or simply schedule your posts just because you read somewhere that you should post at a specific time, even if you are not available? There are no one-size-fits-all strategy or a magic button trick that will be perfect for your business. Experiment and learn what works.

Posting on weekends

Some people don’t post at all on weekends. I don’t, at least nothing business wise as most of my weekend updates will be photos and microblog posts to my own sites about my family. That doesn’t mean you should do the same. If that is the only time you have available, post them. You might even engage with your audience more because you are then reaching out to a specific audience.

If you are struggling to find the right time to post social media updates rather focus on engaging on the social web when you have the time. Also use a combination of Google Analytics, Facebook insights, Twitter analytics or any other analytics software that you use for your marketing measurement to figure out the best times to engage with your audience. This way you will learn what works and what doesn’t and maybe you have hit a gold mine just by experimenting. The digital world is changing at the speed of light and it’s important that you adopt the fail fast mindset.

Be agile and start posting your social media updates when you have time and start measuring the results.