What Are The Best Times To Be Posting On Social Media (2021)

Sprout Social has published their research of the best times to be posting on social media. The research is based on the company’s 20,000+ customers, who use the platform to schedule and post social media content.

Sprout Social determined the best times to post based on when social media content is seeing the highest reach and engagement rates by analyzing this data.

The best times for you to post your content on social media will be based on your unique audience and their demographics, but this research can still help to guide you through your posting strategy whether you’re building an initial strategy or updating a current one.

Let’s dive into what they found in their research for each social media platform. One caveat to this data is that all the times listed refer to the Central Time Zone (CST). So be sure to make the necessary adjustments if you’re in a different time zone.

As you can see in the following chart, The best days and times to post on the Facebook platform are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, between 9am and 1pm CST. And then on Mondays, between 9am and 12pm CST. These are great starting points to begin learning what time frames work best for your audience.

Data shows that the weekends are the worst time to post. This can be a seasonal trend too. Summer months may be down due to users spending time doing other things on the weekends, whereas during the winter months, users may be inside more scrolling their social media feeds. This can all be subjective to where users are located too, so take it for what it’s worth.

The data from Sprout Social indicates that Tuesdays between 11am and 2pm, and Monday through Friday between 11am and 12pm are the best times to post on the Instagram platform.

As with Facebook, the reach and engagement on weekends are going to be lower. Some of the data may be skewed a little by the business customers using the Sprout Social services. Most businesses don’t publish on the weekends so that data will skew the overall number.

Instagram does tend to be a more popular social media platform to be used more often than the others due to the sheer fact that you can scroll the feed much quicker and get those quick hits of entertaining content.

The research Spout Social published says that Wednesdays between 9am and  3pm are the best days to be tweeting, while Tuesday thru Thursday between 9am and 11am are also a high engagement time for the platform.

Twitter’s feed is the quickest of all the social media platforms, so you’ll likely want to be posting multiple times a day. Again it all depends on your unique audience, so keep tabs on your analytics and make any necessary adjustments.

If your unique data shows more engagement during other timeframes, then you should tweet more in those few hours, rather than spreading your tweets out over the course of 6 hours.

The data from Sprout says that Tuesday through Thursday between 9am and 12pm are the best times to post on LinkedIn. The weekends, like the others, are a no-go. This makes total sense for the LinkedIn platform since it is more of a professional business and job searching platform being used throughout the workweek.

LinkedIn recently reported that Mondays are the best day of the week to send InMail and private messages, which is not the same as reach and engagement. If you’re wanting to get a hold of a busy person at any type of business, generally the best time to do so is Monday mornings, so this makes sense.

Still, the times shown in the above graphic shows that Sprout Social users are seeing engagement, which points to when people are likely more active, and ready to engage with posts on the LinkedIn platform.

Whether you’re looking to map out an initial strategy or updating an existing one for your social or a client’s social, this data provides a great starting point to begin your strategy. You can then optimize your social media posting schedule based on your unique audience analytics.

You can read the full report from Sprout Social here.