When is the best time for businesses to post on social media?

If you regularly use social media for your business, you may have seen the image to the right being shared (posted, liked, retweeted, etc) recently. The stats are showing you the best times to post on different social networks, and this concept is very important. However, the important part is not posting at these general ‘peak’ times, but finding the best time for YOUR business. After all, not every business wants to talk to the same people, it is important to know when your customers are talking and to make sure you’re in the conversation! Find your own Time to Talk (#timetotalk). 

Finding the right time to post on Twitter

To show you how to find the best time for your business to post on social media, we are going to use Twitter and our own experience to demonstrate. 21 Forbes Place is a business centre which means we want to speak business to business (b2b), and we find Twitter is the best way to do this.  Below is 21 Forbes Place’s  #timetotalk, let us tell you how we found this out…

Make use of FREE analytics tools for Twitter

There a number of sites which allow you to analyse your tweets for free, including Buffer, Bitly and Twitter itself – we use Buffer! We post all our Tweets on the Buffer website first and they are automatically posted to Twitter immediately or at a scheduled time. The main advantages of Buffer are that we can Tweet all day and night by scheduling posts, and website links will be automatically shortened to leave more room in the 140 character space! Over the past 2 months, we have been using Buffer to schedule tweets at different times of the day and monitoring the engagement they receive. The chart below shows how many times our Tweets have been ‘clicked’ at each posting time and this gave us our unique #timetotalk

What should businesses post on Twitter?

So you’ve identified you’re #timetotalk, now what do you talk about? It’s important to note we use the word talk, instead of just Tweet – make sure you’re in a conversation with your customers while they are online. At 21 Forbes Place, we regularly post about ourselves and try to promote the benefits of our services, but we also try to talk about relevant content out with our own company. We’ve divided our posts into 3 types: own content; own content – promotional; and other content. The chart shows a range of engagement with our posts from retweets, favourites and clicks: our own content is clicked and retweeted the most, while other content receives more favourites. While favourite tweets means they are not directly shared with others and may not be clicked through, they tell you that your post is engaging and your followers will remember that you are the source of this.  If you talk about a range of interesting content throughout the day, you can keep the most important conversation for your #timetotalk 

Share this with your Twitter followers and help them better engage with their customers