The Best Times to Post to Social Media [Infographic]

When is the best time for your practice to post to social media – the time that will garner the highest reach and engagement?
The honest answer – there is no best time. While there have been many investigations into what the ideal time to post to social media is, no one can say for sure what the best post time is for your practice. Your audience is not the same as another business, and your clientele might be on social media at different times than other businesses or even other practices. Just like choosing the right social media platform for your practice, only you can say for sure what time you should be connecting with your clients online.
Having said that, a fair bit of research has been done to identify the ideal times to post online, and Quick Sprout has compiled these times into a handy infographic. These times are not set in stone, and you may find that they don’t really apply to your practice’s audience. Ultimately, you need to experiment and test out different posting times to figure out what will work best for your individual practice. However, knowing these researched-backed numbers can give you a good place to start from.
In addition to the infographic, there are also some analytics you can use to help you better understand when your audience is online. More specifically, there are a couple of social media platforms that can give you a more concrete understanding of when your followers are online: Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook

On Facebook, you can find out when your followers are online in your Page Insights, under the Posts tab (found on the left hand side). The Posts Insights will give you a very clear idea of when your followers are online, allowing you to determine when the best times to post are. You may still want to play around with different post times for different peak periods (e.g., in the middle of a peak period vs. the beginning or the end), or with different post times for different days. But thanks to these insights, you are now armed with the data to make more informed decisions about what times to test out.

Twitter

The Twitter analytics are less robust than the Facebook Insights, and a little harder to see and interpret. The Tweet activity tells you how many impressions your tweets earned and at what times, but you can only locate them on your Twitter profile, on the right hand side, and they will sometimes be replaced by your total impressions for the week instead. This information can still be helpful for determining optimal times to post, but you will probably find it less useful than the Facebook Insights.

Do your ideal post times happen while you’re busy treating animals or relaxing after a hard day at work? 

No worries! Schedule posts ahead of time to any social platform you want with WebDVM Social!

Get the full scoop on the best posting times with Quick Sprout’s infographic: