Ok, we know the temptation to post is real. We really do.

Maybe your company just held an amazing photoshoot for your products or staff, and the photos are simply too overwhelming beautiful to post individually so you want to get them all out there in an instant. Or maybe you have the most incredible promo running, and you simply are dying to post it ASAP. Because why wait, right?

Wrong.

Wait. Patience is a virtue. It really is.

Don’t get us wrong; we’re not saying it’s totally inappropriate to post at random times, what we’re saying is – it’s inappropriate and completely meaningless to your brand if you’re posting at random times, ALL the time. See the difference? You can sprinkle in the occasional offbeat post whenever. But when your entire strategy runs on posting at random – you kind of have a problem.

Contrary to what many might think, you can’t treat your brand or company the way you treat your own personal social media account. You have to analyze what works best for you company, and be patient.

Hubspot‘s Lindsay Kolowich summed it up best, by stating the best timing to post depends on the following factors “the platform, the regions your targeting, your goals, and how your target audience interacts with the platform.”

It comes down to this: do you want your content to be seen? Or do you want it to vanish into a shadowy realm of social media content?

You want your content to be seen, right? In order to do that, you’ll need to follow Kolowich’s factors for analysis. Figure out what platforms you’re using, the areas you’re targeting, what your ultimate goal is, and how or when your target audience interacts (most) with your platforms.

Before you start analyzing your own data, it’s good to research and understand the best general times to post based on each individual platform. CoSchedule has an excellent, full-length article on this: “What 16 Studies Say About The Best Times To Post On Social Media.” We highly recommend you take a look.

According to CoSchedule’s research and findings, the best time to post to Facebook is late into the week and early into the weekend. The times will vary but plenty of people agree that posting earlier in the afternoon is beneficial.

When it comes to Twitter, CoSchedule found that the best time to post was during the workweek. And while during the day (specifically at noon) is consistently shown to provide the most activity, they still recommend that you experiment with late night and early AM tweets.

Lastly, Instagram is a creature of its own because in a weird way, Instagram is always active. However, from their research, CoSchedule found that people should experiment with late night posts on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. We’ve actually conducted our own experiments in this regard with a few different clients, and have found that posting later at night (consider 9pm to midnight) has actually gotten us a ton more likes, interactions and activity. But hey, that’s why you need to experiment. What works for one brand, might not work for the other.

It’s important at this stage to remember, these are general posting recommendations and while they might boost your exposure, they might not be when your particular audience is actually viewing content. Which is why it’s important to check out your own analytics.

Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics and Instagram Insights are going to be your best bet at analyzing when your accounts are getting the most visibility. By sifting through and figuring out what posts work best and when they work best, you will begin to see a pattern. This pattern is your golden rule.

Hope this helps! We’d love to hear your comments below.

Check out our other posts about Social Media.