At What Time to Post On Facebook, Instagram, Linkedln and Twitter
“At what time can I get more likes on my Instagram post?”. Whatever you are on your personal or on your company account, we have already all asked ourselves this question. This is clearly relevant when you have a company and you want to target potential customers. Many parameters must be taken into account that we will discuss about. We gathered these data thanks to Hootsuite.
The seasonality of your sector
Your post will not have the same impact following the period of the year. For example, in the E commerce, the pic of your audience should be during sales time or Christmas. If you are a services company, you can bounce your audience topics off.
The profile of your audience
Above all, the best strategy is to target your audience. First which type of company are you: B2B or B2C? If you are a B2C company, you must also know the profile and thelifestyle of your potential customers. For example if you want to target a teenager or a young mother, you would neither publish the same post nor at the same hour. Thus a teenager will be more available after school while a businesswoman and man will be during the morning. It also depends on the location of your audience. For example, If your potential clients live in different time zone, it can be interesting to choose an intermediate hour that could fit with both destinations.
Best time on Linkedin
Linkedin offered analytics on its app to study your post performance. As it is a professional social media, your pic of audience is evaluated during work time. Monday and Wednesday are the most effective days and on the contrary Sunday is the worst one. In the same time, publishing in the morning seems the best strategy to adopt.
Best time on Facebook
As Facebook is the most popular social media and can target a large variety of profiles, this is also one of the social networks where it is the most difficult to distinguish itself. You could think, as it is an entertainment media, that you have more opportunities on weekends. In fact, it is not the case. The most optimized period seems during lunch break between Wednesday and Friday.
Best time on Instagram
Instagram is currently one of the most attractive social media. Today especially in the retail sector, it is absolutely necessary for a company to have an account. Best time to post on this social media appears between 12pm and 7pm during all the days of the week, except Sunday. Instagram is the most difficult social network to analyze as it presents many opportunities. It is really important for this media to also think in term of sectors. For example, pictures related to food will have a pic of audience around midday.
Best time on Twitter
Twitter is a huge source of opportunity as you can directly interact with your audience and provide consumer services. Also you must be very reactive as a tweet disappears very quickly from top results. A pic of audience appears on Tuesday and is very high in the morning especially around 10am.
Compare with your best competitors
It can be interesting to analyze the strategies of successful competitors. They have often sophisticated analytics tools that allow them to choose the most effective schedule. You can get inspiration and for example choose a slightly time lag. Thus, you could avoid strong competitors.
This article shows you that the best opportunities on social media are not necessary what we could think. For example, Saturday or in the evening when people are not working, are not really the most effective hours. It is also the period of time where the competition is the highest.
3 Reasons Why Your Small Business Needs Social Media
Whatever it is, one thing is sure: not taking advantage of social media is a huge loss for smaller companies.
Despite the fact that it’s been proven by numerous studies, you will still find small business owners that are not using the power of social media. Indeed, almost 30% companies do not use them. The profile of those firms is SME.
But here are the significant reasons why you, as a small business, you should use social media.
For your business visibility
Many entrepreneurs think that only the perfect product or services matter to succeed. In fact, you also must think in your business plan about a strategy to attract your customers. Otherwise, your company will fail. You must look after your potential clients. This is why you must implement a social media strategy. It is the easiest and cheapest way to increase your visibility. This “Inbound marketing” consists in publishing content so that more visitors go to your website and increase your visibility, especially on the google search bar.
You must present the services and values of your company. This strategy is also applied by large corporate. For example, Dove is very famous for its campaign #Realbeauty. It promotes beauty whatever your body and reach the 70% of women that did not feel represented in advertising. Dove was a pioneer for self esteem and no retouch photographies. The brand called Ogilvy, an advertising agency to achieve the campaign. They spent a huge budget but they were elected as one of the best ads in the world and it increased their profits by $3B in three years.
Credit to Dove's Real Beauty Campaign
You do not have to spend a huge budget but you can ask for community and social media management services that fit with your budget and advisers that help you to find the best strategy for your company.
It creates engagement
Your presence on social media will make you gain trust among potential clients. If you nurture a link between your audience and your brand by commenting, liking, answering to questions, sharing content, you will have a better engagement rate. If you show that, behind your company, there are humanity and values, it will boost your sales.
Studies also show that it is harder for a brand to gain a new client than keeping a current one. So it is relevant to prioritize and manage your clients’ engagement.
Increase your website traffic and sales
You should prefer the quality over the quantity of your content. Patience is the key of success because you must nurture your audience before you succeed in transforming it into clients.
You should study the different opportunities that offer social media. For example, Instagram is the most effective social network to boost your traffic. Instagram has a traffic growth increasing by 114% per year (from leading social networks to US websites) while it has only improved by 9% on Facebook.
So in e-commerce, Instagram seems to have more opportunities for your business. Indeed, in this social media, you can add tags on your pictures that are directly link to a product in your website. It represents a source of information for the client. Once trust is acquired you will convert it into sales.
Today, the competition is so big that you need to take every opportunity into account. Social Media is one of the key for success so you should not neglect it.
Why you should use Instagram Stories for your business ?
Instagram Stories allows users to create pictures and video that disappears after 24 hours. You might think at first that this is useless and unworthy to spend times on this tool. But, it's more than 500 millions of user per day makes it one of the most popular social media features in the world. Knowing that 80% of instagramers follow brands, it’s an opportunity you must seized.
The ability to post a wide range of content
Instagram Stories gives you the freedom to create various content. You can literally post whatever you would like, without needing to be worried about spoiling your Instagram feed. Unlike pictures you post to a regular Instagram profile, people you post to a Story can be decorated using drawings, emojis and text ; making your content more eye catching or in accordance with your branding. You can also tag people on Instagram Stories by putting a @ symbol in front of users' names from the article description or comments.
Do you want to present your new product or service? Do you want to provide your followers a behind-the-scenes of your office ? Announcing the winner of one's social networking competition? From promotional photos and videos to more fun or serious content, everything is possible. So what are you waiting for ? Let your imagination run wild and create !
Boost your visibility and your audience
Being an organization, your main concern should be searching for new ways to increase your visibility and your audience. Growing brand awareness is one of Instagram's major strengths.
Stories appear on both the home page (people you follow), and also in searches (people you don’t follow). So whether users subscribe to your account or not, your stories take up space on the social network, which increases your chances to be seen.
You can use the location tags onto your Instagram Stories boost your company's fame and visibility in local or worldwide. Just like in regular captions, you can include hashtags in your stories to make your business easier to find among other users.
Engage your audience
It is critical to maintain the communication with your followers and to get them more involved. Instagram stories is the perfect tool to have real time interactions and create a real community, more easily than by conventional posts.
Stories make it possible to make them react to several proposals by setting up polls. It's also a good method to collect information and see what your own followers like (or don't like).
With the “Ask me anything” feature, you will be able to directly interact and ask them questions - and vice versa. Again it’s an opportunity to learn more about your audience and to build a real relationship.
Finally, you must tag other brands or influencers because it will raise awareness and your odds to be seen and to be tagged in return.
Drive traffic to your own website
Yes Instagram Stories can also bring more traffic to your website by posting content to redirect your followers so shop your products or services. To do so, you can use the “Swipe up” item. If you incorporate it with some catchy call to action, its will to automatically guide them to your landing pages, blog, e-commerce business, …
Instagram provides product stickers too. Users can click on the notification of the item they want and directly access and shop it to your website.
Wrapping up
Instagram stories gives you more freedom and flexibility. If you’re aiming to boost your audience and create a real community around your business, then, it should definitely be part of your social media strategy.
There are much more existing tools you can use, such as lives - they are becoming more and more powerful these days.
It’s up to you to show your creativity with unique and original content by using all Instagram features whatever you're aiming to achieve.
The end of Facebook likes ?
Likes counts could soon disappear from all social media. This experiment is already underway on Instagram and is being considered by Facebook.
Jane Manchun Wong is an engineer specialized in data app research. In one of her last blog post, she was guessing that Facebook is considering removing Likes after finding out, within the Android app, code allowing to hide the number of likes of a post to the users. The screenshot below, published on her Twitter, shows that the person who created a post can still see names of people and their emojis reaction but a number won’t be revealed anymore. Instead, it would be written “liked by [friend’s name] and others”. For Wong, these moves “indicates that Facebook/Instagram have confidence the pros of hiding like counts outweigh the cons".
(Image credit: Jane Manchun Wong on Twitter)
Mirroring Instagram's test
After being contacted by TechCrunch, Facebook recently confirmed Jane Manchun Wong’s speculation and is considering launching Likes-removal trials. A couple of months ago, the group already tested a similar approach on Instagram in several countries : Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand. These actions are aiming to make users to be more focus on sharing experience and no longer on competition.
Improve mental health issues
Just like for Instagram, Facebook wants to improve well being of its users. Some of them, especially younger ones, are always looking for likes and fame on social media.There is a huge amount of studies, showing how these platforms can have an impact on mental health and even lead to depression or anxiety.
In 2018, a study published by Pew Research Center revealed that 37% of teens sharing social content feel pressure about having a lot of likes and comments. To overcome these mental health issues, hiding likes counts might be a solution.
How can Instagram help you to boost your brand?
Instagram has currently a growth superior to Facebook. This social network represents a great opportunity for business as 71% of companies are already using it whatever their sectors. It is important to acquire some tips to maximize your visibility.
Create a certified professional account for more credibility
It allows to have access to insights about your account performance and statistics. For example, you can see data on your audience or graphics about your popularity. But on the other side, you must make public your phone number, email and address.
Create engagement with the users
Engagement is the key of the relationship with the users. It means that your brand is capable of interacting with the social media members through for example likes, comments or share. This variable can be taken into account by the social media since Instagram does not show publication on your news feed chronologically but following the engagement rate. For example, you can repost publication from the users of your brand, ask or answer questions to your subscribers. The purpose is to create a close relationship to involve the users. You can also create a hashtag with a motto that people could subscribe.
Present the real identity and values of your business
Your account must reflect the story and values of your brand. You should prefer the quality of your publication instead of the quantity. Each publication must be an exclusive content. Ideally you should publish once per day. Be careful of the aesthetic of your account: a high quality of picture is absolutely necessary. You can also define the theme and the tone of your filter. You can also follow, comment and share similar business and contents to increase your visibility. People could share publication with your services or products.
Share your news
Instagram helps you to inform your clients of your company’s different events such as sales period for example. It is important to take care of the content: we are not talking about a newsletter here. Posting stories is a good way to transcribe your event in live or not, with an attractive way. You can more easily show who you are and what you are doing through this way. You will also look more accessible to your subscribers.
Sponsored Publication
You can buy sponsored publication (appearing on a news feed) or a sponsored story. You can schedule at which hour it will be published and target a specific audience (following its age or its location). The prices are based on a bidding system in CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per one thousand of impression).
Better than a collaboration with another brand, you can call on an influencer. This person will publish a sponsored publication on his account and your services will appear to a wide audience with a direct link to your account. Be careful to choose an influencer which fits with your brand identity.
These tips will help you to find the right combination, it is your turn to create your account!