When to Post on Twitter & Facebook

By Jamie Faidley Tweet

Both Twitter and Facebook have a huge audience of potential customers who might be interested in what you are selling, but what is the best way to reach them?  You are competing for each user's attention with a lot of other noise, so it's not easy to get your followers or fans to listen to and be interested in what you have to say.  One of the ways that you can give yourself the best chance of social media success is to post at the right time of day and on the right days of the week.

I have found two different studies (Buddy Media and Dan Zarella) that tried to figure out just when is the right time to post, how often you should update, and what days work best.  One of the thing that is clear from both studies, what works for most people might not necessarily work for you.  As always, you are going to want to test your social media strategy to find your own sweet spot.

What Time of Day to Post

If you want your updates to be seen, early in the morning is the best time to post.  When people wake up in the morning they go online.  Their Twitter streams and Facebook news feeds are ordered in chronological order with the latest updates appearing first.  If you can post right before the person checks their account, you will appear at the top and have a great chance of being seen.

Zarella found that if you want to get your updates retweeted, the majority of people do this between 2 PM and 5 PM, but if the goal is clickthroughs then the rates are fairly even throughout the day.

What Day of the Week to Post

Buddy Media says the best day to post is Thursday and Friday.  Zarella found that retweets go up slightly towards the end of the week as well.  One of the theories behind the data is that people don't want to be at work, so they are more likely to look for distractions online.

Sharing on Facebook goes way up on the weekend, even though most stories are published during the week.

How Often

Zarella studied how often people post on Twitter and correlated that to how many followers they have.  The results were pretty surprising as the users with the most followers post 22 tweets per day and even post the same message in slightly different formats a few times each day.  If you are posting links to your own content, once per hour seems to be a good guide to achieve the highest clickthrough rate.

Using Zarella's information I would try to tweet once per hour, nearly every hour of the waking hours of your target audience.  Don't be afraid to send out a link to the same article once in the morning and once in the afternoon, using slightly different text accompanying the URL each time.

Zarella also found that Facebook was a completely different animal.  While users might not get overwhelmed by a lot of updates on Twitter, your Facebook friends and fans will give you more "likes" if you post every other day.  If you clog up their Facebook stream, they are less likely to want to see your stuff.

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