When Are The Best Times For Me To Post?

Finding the best time to post is one of the most important steps you need to take when planning your social media presence.

With SmarterQueue, there are several tools at your disposal to help you figure out when is the best time to post for you. ✨

How To Analyze Personal And Competitor Profiles To Learn The Best Times To Post

If you are trying to maximize engagement, SmarterQueue lets you analyze your social profiles (or somebody else's!) and work out just when the best posting times are!

How To Approach Your Analysis

Here are a few quick steps to follow for the best results:

1. Analyze your own Social Profiles' "all-time" data

Look at your Social Profiles and check your "all-time" data, to get an overview of your posting habits and the engagement you're getting out of them.

When doing this, try to also keep in mind content particularities, as well as any additional seasonal engagement, coming during holidays or for specific one-time-only events.

2. Check a more recent time period and compare

Once you've identified trends, repeat the search and analyze a smaller, more recent period of time in your social media presence. Try looking at the last 6 months to compare posting times.

Social media changes constantly, so to stay relevant, it's important to focus on the more recent past. Once you figure out what times have the highest engagement, also compare them to your "all-time" data.

3. Look at your competitors and what they're doing differently

Once you've seen the big picture for your Social Profiles, repeat steps 1 and 2 for a couple or more competitors/influencers in your space and see what their top posting times are.

Try to compare with your posting times and engagement, but do consider any potential differences in content and audience.

4. Adjust your posting times based on your findings.

Make a list of the hot spots you've noticed, both for you and your competitors, and set up your posting plan accordingly.

This would be a good starting place! It will allow you to purposefully build your Posting Plan, learning from others in your industry or with your target audience. 💪

How To Analyse A Profile

Navigate to "Analytics" in the top menu of your SmarterQueue account and select "Analyse Social Profiles"

Select the platform and Profile that you want, or search for a Facebook Page - maybe a competitor you'd like to check out!
Click "Analyse"

Scroll down to "Posting Times"

This shows an overview of each post when it was published, and the engagement it received.

The size of each specific hour bubble will tell you the number of posts that have gone out within that hour. As for engagement, the data is displayed as a heatmap - the redder a specific hour bubble is, the hotter it is when it comes to the engagement it has driven, while a greener color will mean lower engagement.

As you look at the heatmap, keep in mind that both size and color of the bubble are relevant. If you see that at a specific date/time, you had the best engagement, but you only posted once, it's almost guaranteed that the spike was due to the specific content performing well, more than the Timeslot.

Advanced Hack: How To Figure Out Your Best Time To Post Through Testing

Figuring out what the best times to post are becomes much easier if we do a bit of groundwork. To find out what works best, it's always good to add a little bit of experimenting.

Here are some essential steps to take in order to collect all the necessary data for an informed decision:

1. Choose how many times per day you are willing to publish content.

This decision will be based on how large your library of content is, as well as the recommended posting volume for each platform - for profiles like Facebook and Instagram, you can post 2-5 times a day, while for LinkedIn, it's recommended that you only post about 1-2 times a day.

2. Determine the dates/times you want to test for.

Start with any preferred intervals you want to test for, like weekdays between 8 AM and 10 PM.

Set up your Timeslots in your Posting Plan based on the selected dates/times and allow your Queue to publish posts this way for a week.

3. Diversify your Posting Plan to gather more data.

Every week, change up your Posting Plan to send out content during different time intervals. The point is to eventually try every date/time, so that you can compare what's working and what isn't for your audience.

Once you've covered every date/time combination, return to your initial Posting Plan and repeat for several weeks/months. This will allow you to get enough data from multiple posts at each Timeslot, to be able to see if the time affects your post engagement.

By covering every Timeslot for a longer period of time, you will:

have information for all possible date/time combinations, so you won't miss out on a Timeslot that could really work;
be able to tell if high/low engagement on a Post is a result of the date/time, or because of the actual content.

If you've collected a few weeks/months worth of relevant posting data for your Facebook Page/Group, and Instagram account, you can analyze your Social Profiles again, narrow things down and make sure to reach your followers at the best times.

For more details on how to best collect relevant data, check out our How to Find Your Best Times to Post on Social Media blog post.

To see exactly how much data you can gather and analyze with your Analytics level, check out what's included here.