It's important to know how to time your social media updates. The more effectively you time them, the better they're going to work. The general rule of thumb is that you want as many people to see, and read, your updates as possible. How to do this, however, depends on who your target audience is.
Target Audience
Now, let's take for example the target audience of professional adults. They work jobs. Therefore, you want to time your updates to when professional adults are most likely to see them. We will use the time-frame of 9-5 for a working schedule, since this is the most typical. A lot of professional adults check their social networks before leaving for work. Therefore, you might want to make a post that will be published at 8 am. This gives ample time between waking up and starting work for an adult to see your post. Another ideal time to post would be around 11:50. Since most workers have a lunch break at around 12 pm, this will be the time that they are sitting down, eating lunch, and looking through different social media sites. Again, professional adults typically get off work around 5. Another ideal time to update would be right before they leave work, at 4:50. This is the time between getting off work and traveling home that adults are likely to check their social media. Once they get home they may be cleaning, preparing dinner, taking care of kids, etc. Therefore, the last ideal time to make a post would be around 8 at night. This is the time that adults will start sitting down for the night and resting before bed. They'll be watching TV, eating snacks, and checking their social media sites.
Now this is just one example. Of course, with every target audience, your timeline is going to change. Simply thinking about who your target audience is, and what their schedule is typically like, will help you to determine when you should make your social media updates.
Let's look at another example. Teenagers. Now, most teenagers are in high school. This means they get up around 7 in the morning, and get home from school around three in the afternoon. Because of this, you'll want to make your posts accordingly. Publish a post around 6:30 am, to be seen by kids before school starts for the day. Then, publish a post around 2:30 in the afternoon. This is the one that is more likely to be seen. After school, kids want to see what their friends are up to. Therefore, they will be checking their different social media sites. Whether you want to make an update around lunch time is up to you. Most high schools don't allow students to use their phones during lunch, so they may not be able to see it.
Frequency
Now that you know when to update, it's time to think about just how often you should update. There's a fine line between too frequent and not frequent enough. You want to provide enough information for people to understand what your business is, what you're offering, and that you like to stay up to date. But you also don't want to update so much that people find your posts annoying and crowded. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that each time you post an update, the information within it is valuable and useful. If it's not, don't post it.
Now, to determine how many times to make updates per day, you have to look at which platforms you're using. We'll go over the most popular ones. If you look at Twitter, each update is small. Therefore, it's okay to have several - up to five - updates per day. But as mentioned earlier, make sure each update is meaningful and important. Now with Facebook, posts tend to be longer, and there's not as much going on. As a general rule, you should keep your Facebook posts around 1-2 posts per day. For LinkedIn, the amount of times you should post is even fewer--the average amount you should post on LinkedIn is only 2-3 times per week.
After working for a while with different posting times and frequencies, you will see which times have the most appeal from your target audience and get commented on more often. From this you should also be able to tell if you are posting too much, or if you should post more.
Contact a Blue Archer specialist if you have questions or comments concerning social media updating, as well as how to post effective content.
Michelle Hawley
Digital Content Writer
@BlueArcherPGH
