Creating an Effective Social Media Posting Schedule

The frequency of your social media posts can directly impact the number of followers that you get and keep.

If you post too infrequently or frequently, you’ll lose followers. You’ll also have trouble getting people to take notice of your social media accounts. For this reason, you need to come up with a schedule.

A social media posting schedule takes into consideration the following factors:

• The best time of the day to post
• The best day of the week
• The topics you should post about
• The percentage of promotional content

Determine the Best Time of the Day and Best Day of the Week

The best time of the day to post will vary, depending on the social media platform that you use. Also, your target audience may have different internet preferences.

Don’t forget to take the time difference into consideration. 80% of the US population are in the Eastern or Central time zones. If you’re in California and want to target the largest audience, you’ll want to plan your posts based on EST time.

Engagement tends to peak at the following times during the weekdays:

• 9 AM EST – overall engagement
• 1 PM EST – most shares
• 3 PM EST – most clicks

Next, consider the best day of the week to post. Monday through Wednesday, people are less active on social media. The majority of the population is too busy getting into the work week.

By Thursday, people are looking forward to the weekend and are more likely to spend time browsing on social media.

User engagement peaks on the weekends. This goes against previous studies that showed higher engagement during the weekdays. But, trends change over time.

The bottom line is that you should post between Thursday and Sunday to increase engagement. You should also plan at least one post for 9 AM, and subsequent posts around 1 and 3 PM.

Find Topics That Your Target Audience Will Enjoy

Along with considering the time of the day and the days of the week to post, you need to consider the topics of your posts. Find topics that your target audience will enjoy.

The first place to start is with the platform that you’re using. Facebook makes it easy to share just about anything, but Instagram and Pinterest are more image-centric. This means that content with a compelling image included in the post will be more effective on these platforms.

The topics should also be related to your niche and provide real value to your readers. This could include:

• News
• Tips and tutorials
• Advice and suggestions

Essentially, it needs to contain beneficial information.

You can explore the most popular topics by performing searches through each social media platform. Each of these networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, includes a search box.

Type a keyword into the search box and look at the top results. View the profiles of the original posters of the top posts. Look for posters that tend to share content related to your niche and see what topics receive the most likes, shares, and retweets.

Balance Your Promotional Content

Along with your schedule and topics, you need to balance the use of promotional content. It’s a perfectly acceptable business practice to use self-promotional posts on social media. But, if you use too many promotional posts, you’ll lose followers.

20% appears to be the median where engagement increases or decreases based on the frequency of promotional posts. This means you should plan one promotional post out of every five posts.

If you post once per day, this is one promotional post per week. If you post several times per day, you’ll share a promotional post every other day.

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