Best Times to Post on Social Media
“You can never step into the same river; for new waters are always flowing on you. No man ever steps into the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he is not the same man..” Heraclitus, Greek philosopher.
As timeless as philosopher Heraclitus may be, he may not have anticipated how relevant that statement is to social media in 2019. Strategies have to continually evolve. For example, Vine and MySpace were once worthy of major investment, now their time has past.
Getting a video or meme or photo post to go “viral” now is trickier than ever before. Part of the strategy is timing, as it always has been.
At this moment in history, it is generally accepted that the best time to post on Instagram is the lunch hour Eastern time, from noon to 1 pm Monday-Friday. Instagram is most used during lunch hour. That is also true on weekends, but for B2B purposes, think weekdays.
For Twitter PrimeTime is 3pm Monday to Friday. The highest amounts of clicks and retweets occurs each day around 3pm.
The best time to post on YouTube tends to be early afternoon between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. That’s because most viewers watch videos in the evening resulting in videos being indexed by then. Thursdays and Fridays tend to be the best days to post on YouTube.
Increasingly though for brands, social media is changing faster than most can keep up. For instance, in January 2018, a major change took place when Mark Zuckerberg decided to make “Pay for Play” the way for brands.. This essentially means, in my opinion, that Facebook is an advertising company now and it’s a social network where people see the ads. There isn’t really much that can be done any more on Facebook organically that will be seen by the masses.
That said, the best time to post on Facebook is between noon and 3pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday—weekends from noon to 1pm. Facebook like Instagram is a strong mobile platform—although Facebook pre-existed the deep penetration of mobile, right now 25% of it users are mobile only that number is growing. If your fan following was built prior to 2018, you have major advantages over someone starting up a new company or product Facebook page this year.
The best time to post on YouTube tends to be early afternoon between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. That’s because most viewers watch videos in the evening resulting in videos being indexed by then. Thursdays and Fridays tend to be the best days to post on YouTube.
It’s possible the information in this blog will be obsolete very quickly, if it isn’t already. That’s how fast the social media river is flowing, but we all have to put on our life jackets and keep paddling.