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Time of the day to post when it comes to “event days”
Posted by on April 23, 2021 at 5:19 pmThis is a question about those posts that are written to tag along some anniversary or event: “today is the 76th birthday of <famous actor>!” “Today is International High Five Day!” From what I see in other social accounts, specially big corporate ones (presumably run by professional teams with lots of data), people tend to schedule those posts early in the day, as soon as people enter the office (8-9 AM). The problem is that, at least in the accounts I run, people start engaging with their feeds much later, starting at noon, and they engage much more in their free time (afternoons and nights).
So my question is: if you post early in the morning, aren’t you missing out on chances? By the time your users pick up their phones, your post will be already hours old, and other more recent ones might show up on their feeds above yours. On the other hand, it looks a bit weird to publish an anniversary post at noon or even in the afternoon: it looks like you forgot until the last moment. What is the best strategy here?
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6 Replies
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byu/JonODonovan insocialmedia -
I started posting the evening before around the after-dinner traffic.
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i’d do late morning. enough time has passed for people to want to procrastinate work and they’re about to take their lunch break, which will most likely involve some kind of scrolling.
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Most platforms will give you some insights into when your audience is most engaged, right? (I work primarily on Twitter so maybe that data isn’t available on other platforms anymore?) Even if the platform doesn’t provide the info, you can look at previous performance to see what’s most effective. Or you can run some testing to see what posting time is most effective for you. I’d say that watching how things perform for you is more relevant than seeing what big accounts do. They may have a completely different target audience and their strategy may not translate for what you need.
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For my work, time is a marginal advantage. Good content at 2 am will get more eyeballs than “day” posts.
I try (and usually fail) to talk my org out of these posts. Our main traction is on FB and all our rivals/competitors do these posts – they all flop. I can get 10* the engagement on a comabtative post with tight writing and good graphic/video.
Having said that, out best chance is about 1 to 2 hours before knock-off time. Most of my audience finish work at 4.30, so post might go for around 3. It’s a marginal advantage, but take every win you can get.
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The reason most people post earlier in the morning (usually around 9am) is because they can get their first batch of engagement, which will help promote their post further. If you have positive engagement in the first few hours of posting, Instagrams algorithm will assume your content is good, which will incentive them to promote it to your followers. Then the cycle repeats until the next day, where it will be replaced by the next post.
Let’s say you have 100k followers and that 5k of those followers are up at 9am, then let’s say 1k of those 5k interact with your post between 9am-11am. Instagram will be like, “wow, this post got 1k likes in 2 hours. This seems like good content, let’s promote it in the algorithm!” And the post will then be prioritized in another 10k of your followers feeds, and let’s say 5k of them interact this time. Instagram will be like “people really like this post and its keeping them on the app so we can make more money! Let’s promote it more!” So they promote it to another 10k followers and 3k of them interactwith your post. This cycle repeats until you’re out of followers to see your post and the per hour engagement has significantly dropped.
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