Start Your Blog Today: Best Times To Promote Your Blog Post on Social Media

Sophie here: rounding up the final installment of our ‘Start Your Blog Today’ blog series by explaining when and how to promote your blog posts on social media.

So far in this blog series we have covered some ground: Part One was about how to set a plan of attack for your blog by setting clear objectives and deciding on what content will be most valuable to your readers. Part Two we discussed carving out time in your week to write your posts and ways to delegate the work if needed. By now you should have a few blogs written and pre-loaded, and now you are ready to share them with the world. But when and how?

As you have gone through our blogging method so far, we've asked you to think of your type of target market or dream customer and tailor your blogs to them and their lifestyle. The same applies for when you go through the process of deciding when to tell your audience about your blog post. 

The question is: Who is your audience and when are they online? 

These are the deciding factors in figuring out when to schedule your blog posts, and through which social platform. For example if you are targeting business owners (like we are) then you could publish and promote your blog post at the start of their working day when they are sifting through and organizing their inbox or when they are wanting to read something in more detail during their lunch hour. Doing this mid–week on social media especially Facebook makes more sense when the majority are on it and more likely to share your content with colleagues and friends. 

Best days to post on Facebook is Wednesday between 1 – 4 pm  

However, if you are targeting busy parents (especially new moms) you'll want to tailor your posting schedule to coincide with down times: their child’s nap time, at the end of the day when they are sitting down with their well-earned glass of wine while they catch up on the happenings on Facebook or Instagram.

If you are targeting brides who are planning their big day you may also want to promote your blog post towards the end of the week. They're likely gearing up for a weekend packed with wedding planning, and Thursday / Friday evenings or Saturday mornings are going to be great times to catch brides.  

Also, a pro-tip to consider: the ideal platform for brides is Pinterest – it's become wedding industry crack. Friday afternoons and Saturday morning are peak times on Pinterest (for brides and non-brides), which is when people have more time to read a post more thoroughly while pinning their design inspiration over their coffee. 

Best days to promote on Pinterest is Friday at 3 pm & Saturday mornings

If you hoping to catch the eye of professionals, posting during the middle of the work day, isn't going to get you as much traction as posting when those professionals are taking a break. You want to aim for times when they're in "work mode" still but unlikely to engaged in the day-to-day of their work; posting during a lunch break or right as they're winding down for the day is best. 

Best days to post on Linkedin is Tuesdays – Thursdays at noon or 5 – 6 pm

Best days to post on Twitter is Mondays — Thursdays from 9 —3 pm; but something that sets Twitter apart is you have the option of posting blogs or updates to Twitter multiple times in one day, since this is such a fast moving stream. In fact, you can post every hour, so long as you're peppering in other tweets that are not strictly blog-promotional. Doing this on other platforms might turn people, but on Twitter you can go nuts.  

Best days to post on Twitter is Mondays – Thursdays from 9 - 3 pm

Instagram seems to be the only platform that users will interact with regardless of when it was posted. (A big reason why Instagram is my favorite platform to engage and grow a community). Companies tend to post during business hours but can reach customers during off hours in the evenings and weekends.  Thursdays do see a higher number of posts by far, with Sundays having much less activity. Interestingly though, audiences seem to engaged pretty consistently on Instagram regardless of the day. 

Instagram sees pretty consistent engagement, regardless of what day you post it

Sample Blog Promotion Schedule

One way to get the most traction is targeting your audience multiple times each day and on various platforms. This will mean staggering your promotion on social media depending on the platform’s peak times. For example, here is how I would go about scheduling a social media push for one of our blogs.

We usually aim to get our blogs published on Wednesday or Thursdays, so we can make our initial posts at 9am, hitting a key time for a couple different social platforms. Once published we follow this schedule:

Once you post your blog, be sure to loop back around to check engagement and analytics. Although these are best practices, you'll have to do some tweaking to see what works best for your audience. The best advice I can give is use the specific social platform’s analytic tools, measure your Google analytics and evaluate what's working for your business.

Keep an eye on how people are finding their way to your blog posts through referral traffic, monitor the days of the week, and times of day that  you're getting the most activity your blog. Measure results each week to see what worked and what didn’t, and think about how you can improve results next time.

Try to not get too disheartened when your blog posts aren’t getting the number of likes, shares or comments you expect at first. Rome wasn’t built in a day. This is a process that will take time at least 6 months to build momentum. We have done this for a bunch of brands (big and small) over the years, so going through the building process ourselves as we start our own company blog and social platforms from scratch is humbling experience but a great learning curve.

Remember to keep measuring, tweaking your approach, learn from it and enjoy the little successes each week as your blog audience and social following grows and grows. 

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