In my Social Media Marketing experience, I've met two types of people: those who believe in the time of posting, and those who don’t. Have you mentioned at least once that time of posting matters as much as the content you post? Or does it seem to you that it’s not so important when exactly to post your content?
I was always the second type of person. And I realized I was totally wrong when I discovered the IG lifehack I'm going to share in this article.
The posting pattern idea
I’ve noticed a common thing for all popular accounts in my industry. They post at almost the same time of the day, and almost the same days of the week. Some days are more popular for posting than others. Some periods of these days are crashing under the pressure of the amount of posted content. So, keeping this in mind, I can’t do the same thing I've done before for years - post without paying attention to the time. I need to try to find out which time is perfect for my industry and for my audience. And if this knowledge can help me to reach the best results in impressions for my posts - I will use it.
What do you need for the best-time-to-post experiment?
#1 Competitors List
A list of account names of your main competitors or leaders in your industry. The crucial thing for this step is that the audience of these competitors should be close enough to yours. It won't be any help analyzing the @nike account if you're selling sneakers only locally. So choose those that are targeted almost the same as you are. And don't forget that you should not ignore those sellers who are not your direct competitors by product. So, if you have a massage salon account don't refuse to analyze a popular manicure salon account to find useful info about posting time. I’m making this experiment for a jewelry shop with worldwide shipping. This is a list of its main competitors:
#2 The Profile Analyzer
This is the only tool you need for this experiment. Now we need to research these profiles one by one and fix all results. Then do a group analysis of all the chosen accounts to find a perfect schedule variant for yours.
The course of the experiment
Let’s start collecting the best time to post statistics from competitor’s accounts. This is child’s play. Firstly, paste your competitor’s name in the line:
Scroll down to see all graphics as a next step.
Here is what I’ve got from my competitor’s statistics:
A cumulative analysis
This is easy too. For the first stats just sum up all the results and divide the result by the number of competitors on the list. So, you’ll get the average amount of posts a month you’d be best making. My number is 67 posts a month on average. This means 2 posts a day on average. The second group of statistics shows me that my most important and useful time for posting is 9pm, 11pm and 2pm. Pay attention to the fact that the profile analyzer works on Moscow time (GMT+3). The most popular days which I’ll use for the important content in my industry: Monday, Wednesday, and Sunday.
Lastly
I'll show you my own experiment on the best-time-to-post here. It inspired me a lot to look closely and precisely at what they did to achieve sales. And I've found out that the time to post matters, especially in my niche. Here are screenshots of my post analytics before and after remaking the schedule.
Just look at the results I have. I've made two new schedules of posting in my account after the experiment. And the second schedule worked the best for my account. The correct time for posting brought a 3x reach boost! This is just an amazing result especially given the fact that I haven't changed the content, but only the timing of it.
