When to Post on Social Media Based on Your Audience’s Engagement Patterns

With new platform updates and features keeping you on your toes, it can have you questioning when to post on social media. Turning to industry benchmarking reports can only point you in the right direction, but often it’s data compiled from thousands of businesses within your industry. Calculating when to post on social media hasn’t been an easy process, until now!

Vista Social is excited to announce our latest feature, Optimal Time, which takes the guesswork out of social media scheduling by calculating your best times to post and surfacing them for automated or manual publishing. 

Why Industry Benchmarking Reports Don’t Cut It in 2022

In the digital era, businesses not only have moving targets but personalized ones. This means that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for most companies. 

More businesses are turning towards improving internal benchmarks and strategies in 2022. According to this study, data-driven organizations are 162% more likely to surpass revenue goals, and 58% are more likely to exceed their revenue goals than their non-data-driven counterparts.

Brands and agencies are shifting focus from benchmarks to insights. Adam Pressman, former Managing Director at Sirota, said it best “normative data can help you understand where scores typically fall for specific items or dimensions. But, at the overall level, they won’t help you improve.” 

The pace of change in the digital landscape is accelerating. Utilizing industry benchmarking to find the best times to post is comparing past data from thousands of businesses that may not have your target audience information reflected in those results.

At the end of the day, industry benchmarking data shouldn’t be your only strategy to define the best time to post on social media to receive the highest engagement.

By constantly collecting, monitoring, and analyzing your social media data, organizations become better positioned to make smarter executive decisions and develop winning ideas that impact the bottom line, leading to more growth or effective strategies.

Ready to improve your social media workflows? Join the top businesses using Vista Social and get started today – for free!

Why is Optimizing Posting Times For Social Media So Important?

Instagram has recently announced a new home feed of full-screen reels. With this huge new pivot, and the new algorithm prioritizing original content, accounts have been seeing new lows in engagement.

It’s no secret that social media algorithms’ biggest ranking signal is posts that receive a lot of engagement in a short period of time. To accurately rank the content in your Feed and Stories, Instagram prioritizes the following signals:

• Your activity. This signals when you’ve interacted with a post by liking, commenting, sharing, etc., to help the platform understand the most relevant content to your profile.
• Your history of interacting with the person who posted. This factors in content that you may have previously viewed or shared to you by another account but is from one you don’t yet follow. 
• Information about the Reel. The Instagram algorithm favors original content that doesn’t include logos or watermarks. They use ranking signals to understand the audio and analyze the frame’s pixels to guess the video’s popularity.
• Information about the person who posted. This will consider if the account that published the content receives consistent engagement from its audience.

When your post receives an initial boost in engagement on social media shortly after posting, this signals to the platform’s algorithm that the post is original, high-quality, and engaging, so it will appear higher up and more frequently on others’ Feeds.

How to Find The Optimal Time to Post on Social Media For Your Business

Looking to find the when to post on social media for the highest engagement? Vista Social’s new Optimal Time feature makes it easy for brands and agencies to discover when to schedule your posts based on your audience’s engagement patterns. 

If you’re already on one of Vista Social’s plans, your optimal time of when to post on social media will be available when you schedule or publish your post. Making it easier for you to schedule content when your audience is most active across each platform.

Optimal post is automatically enabled on all accounts, so there is nothing that you have to do to start tracking when to post on social media. Here’s how to get started:

#1: Create Your Post in Vista Social’s Publisher

To create your social media post, choose one of the available options to get started. Add your media by uploading content from your computer, uploading by URL, choosing from your media library, or discovering content from stock-free photography. 

Write your caption, add universal mentions, include emojis, and enable the first comment and like to help maximize your reach and engagement. 

#2: Select the Social Media Platforms You Want to Schedule Content On

With Vista Social, you can schedule posts for every major social platform: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google My Business, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube.

Select the entity and profiles you would like to schedule your post to. On Vista Social, you also can schedule one piece of content across multiple platforms at once — simply check each platform you’d like to schedule the post to.

#3: Schedule Your Post & Find The Optimal Time

Once your post is optimized for the relevant social platform, click schedule at the bottom of the Publisher. 

There will be a link labeled ‘Find optimal time’; select this option to see an overview of when to post on social media based on your audience’s engagement patterns.

You also can schedule the post individually and then pick the optimal time for each platform. Click on the three dots menu and select ‘Schedule individually.’ Here you will see the ‘Find optimal time’ link for each social media profile. 

You’re done! Sit back and watch that engagement roll in from one easy-to-use dashboard in Vista Social. 

Why Choose Vista Social as Your Social Media Scheduler 

When picking the right Instagram scheduler for you, it’s important to consider what features meet your needs.

With Vista Social’s free social media scheduler, you can:

• Upload unlimited photos and videos to your Media Library
• Connect up to 3 social media profiles (and it’s only $3/month per every additional profile)
• Upload 15 posts per profile per month
• Use the Visual Planner feature to preview your Instagram grid  
• Find quality stock photography via Unsplash
• Track and measure your weekly and monthly growth with Vista Social’s Analytics
• Manage reviews on your Facebook Business Page or Google My Business
• Crop and edit your content 
• Uncover business-critical insights with Social Listening
• Carousel post scheduling
• Social media location and user tagging
• Optimal Time
• Share calendar

And if you upgrade to a paid plan, you’ll get even more features, including:

• Unlimited social media profiles to connect
• Unlimited number of users
• Unlimited social media posts able to be scheduled
• Bulk Scheduling
• Smart Scheduling
• Find Content 
• Approval Workflow Tools
• Link Shortener
• First comment and like
• Universal Mentions
• Saved Hashtags
• Post Performance Report
• Review Report
• Competitor Analysis Report
• Review Monitoring for Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and TrustPilot
• And more!

In a nutshell, Vista Socials scheduling tools can help you save valuable time so you can focus on other areas of your business. 

And the best part? You can get started for free!