I have a cool infographic for you today on what are the best and worst times to post to your social media channels.
This, of course, has to come with a caveat: each business is different, and you have to figure out what time is the best time for your business. You do this by experimenting. Create an excel spreadsheet where you lay out your posts for the week, and make sure you schedule them at different times on different days of the week. Then have a look at your analytics and see how each post did. You also have to bear in mind that different kinds of posts are probably going to perform better than others–like photos perform better than plain text status updates on Facebook.
It also depends on what kind of business you run. Many B2B businesses, for example, find that posting during the week, and during office hours can be quite positive, while many B2C businesses don’t post on the weekends, but could get a spike in traffic if they did so.
A second tip: in order to take advantage of high-traffic posting times, there are tons of options out there that allow you to pre-schedule your tweets or posts. You can use Facebook’s scheduling option, or a dashboard program like Hootsuite. I often take advantage of Hootsuite’s “Autoscheduling” feature (I like Buffer for this, as well), but if you want complete control over when your tweets go out, you can schedule them for specific times. Just remember, auto-scheduling is for information-sharing only. You can’t load up a week’s worth of tweets and then log out. You still need to check your @mentions and reply to your tweets.
As of this moment, there are no built-in scheduling features for LinkedIn (although you can connect LinkedIn to your Hootsuite dashboard) or G+, but there is a cool little app called Pingraphy that allows you to schedule pins.
Now, off you go. Time to get nerdy with a spreadsheet.
If you have Facebook set up to post automatically to Twitter, and if you use Hootsuite to post to Facebook, when that Hootsuite post hits your Facebook page, will it also repost to Twitter, or is reposting disabled due to Hootsuite?
This question makes my head hurt! Who’s on first???
Okay, first of all, I would NEVER set FB up to post automatically to Twitter. Twitter is limited to 140 characters, whereas FB is basically unlimited. When someone looks at your tweet and then clicks on the link, they go back to your Facebook page. That’s not what you want. You want them to go to your website, and the more clicks you put between them and your website, the less chance they will.
Honestly? I basically use Hootsuite for one reason: to schedule posts to Twitter. I schedule posts to Facebook, yes, but I use Facebook’s internal scheduler. Some recent research I did turned up that using Hootsuite to post to your Facebook page is actually a bad idea.
Does that help?