In this article, we’ll break down the basics of using a social media calendar, along with key benefits and strategies to help manage your social content.

What is a social media calendar?

A social media calendar is a strategic, hyper-detailed plan of upcoming posts for all of your social channels organized by publish date and time. Along with the publish date and time for posts, your social media calendar can also include links, tags, @-mentions, copy and media, such as images and video.

You can use a digital calendar, spreadsheet or a social media management platform like Sprout that offers an interactive dashboard and the ability to schedule posts.

Benefits of using a social media calendar

A content calendar is the key to a successful social media plan because there are so many benefits to using one from saving time to streamlining collaboration.

Here are a few:

1: Saves time and widens team bandwidth

A social media calendar saves time by staying organized, especially when managing multiple accounts. As a social media manager, planning out a social calendar months in advance saves you from scouring trending topics and news stories every day looking for ideas. It will also give you more bandwidth to track and test different strategies to see what resonates most with your audience. Your team will also have more time to focus on creating high-quality content.

2: Maintain a consistent posting schedule

Of course, there’s no hard rule for how much you should post, but it’s important to post frequently to maintain an active presence. A social media content calendar allows teams to prioritize quality, not quantity. Plus, planning will also build greater consistency in terms of your brand voice and style, rather than posting in a reactive or unplanned way.

3: Quality assurance and brand safety

Proactive scheduling allows social teams to check their work and protect their brand’s reputation. It’s easier to catch a typo or prevent a potential public relations crisis when you aren’t rushing and a workflow approval process is in place. Using a social media calendar will help catch these mistakes sooner rather than later.

4: Streamline cross-functional collaboration

A well-crafted social media calendar improves visibility because it provides an overview of all upcoming content. A content calendar streamlines communication and cross-functional collaboration because everyone can look at the calendar and know what lies ahead. It also promotes alignment for department or organizational-wide initiatives because it provides a set posting schedule. Having a posting schedule is important because your social media should support your overall organizational marketing efforts.

For example, your team can ensure social posts sync up with larger campaigns. Stakeholders in the campaign can easily view what you have planned and provide feedback, if necessary.

How to create a social media content calendar

1. Conduct a social media audit

Before creating your social media content calendar, you need to conduct a social media audit of past content to evaluate your current online presence.

Consider the following during your audit:

• Important metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for each account by platform to define success
• Your brand’s goals for each account by platform
• Your target audience
• Highest and lowest performing posts and campaigns
• Opportunities for improvement or experimenting
• Publishing frequency

Pull together native analytics from sources like Twitter Analytics or Facebook Insights. If you’re using Sprout Social, you will find metrics across multiple social networks in one place: Sprout’s Report Builder.

Pay attention to your brand’s analytics to pin down what could be contributing to your highest and lowest performing posts. If you want even more ideas for your calendar, consider doing a competitive analysis during your audit. Auditing a competitor in your industry can help you identify gaps.

Completing an audit will help you identify how to curate posts for your social media calendar template and what content you should create for your audience. The goal is to give you a strategy to fill each day of your content calendar. If you’re able to identify what’s going well and opportunities for improvement, you’ll be better positioned to meet your brand’s goals.

2. Use a social media calendar template

Create a social media content calendar template to stay organized, streamline workflows, improve collaboration and track metrics. Your social media calendar template should include the following:

• Social media networks and accounts
• Date and time
• Social copy including hashtags and links
• Media (GIFs, images, video, etc.)
• Approval steps
• Space for collaboration and feedback notes
• KPIs
• Key (a color-coordinated key with labels to organize your content)

Level up your social media content calendar template with these advanced additions:

• Published post links
• UTM tracking links
• Geo-tag
• Network-specific format (Story, feed post, short-form video like Reels or TikTok, etc.)
• Associated campaigns, like a new product launch
• Approval status
• Paid or organic post (include budget details for paid posts)

These additions provide more context, especially if you want to dig deeper into tracking performance. For example, UTM tracking links enable you to measure traffic from a platform, traffic type (referral, paid or organic) and the specific campaign that brought the traffic in.

Use a digital calendar or spreadsheet for your template, or automate your calendar building with tool like Sprout’s social media calendar to lower the lift on your end.

3. Select your social media channels and content types

Now that you’ve completed an audit and created a social media content calendar template, you’re ready choose the channels and type of content you want to post.

Which channels does your audience engage with the most? And what types of content resonate with them? Lean on your analytics while brainstorming your social media post ideas and identify themes and/or categories to determine the type of content your will schedule in the content calendar.

Once you have a few basic topics in mind, go deeper with a research tool like social listening to learn more about what your audience wants to see. By using listening for competitive research, you’ll see a comprehensive view of the hashtags, keywords, brands and topics that engage with your audience across different social channels. Use this information to plan posts that are highly relevant to your audience and expand your reach to others who may be interested in your content.

Overall, make sure that the majority of the content you work into your social media calendar is intended to help your audience. While the exact mix will vary depending on your brand, niche and the types of content your audience responds to the most, a good rule of thumb is to make two-thirds of the content informational and one-third or less promotional.

While promotional content tends to be sales-focused, a constant stream can alienate followers, making it essential to prioritize engagement over selling in your social media calendar. For example, on Instagram we feature Sprouters talking about their favorite emojis:

4. Define a social media calendar posting schedule

Once you have an idea of the types of content you’re going to post, you’ll need to create a posting schedule to help keep track of ideal times for publishing.

You should aim for a sweet spot based on your audience’s preference, because social moves fast—posting too much, too little or too late can result in dropped engagement. Posting frequently is important, but don’t emphasize quantity over quality. Be wary of sharing content that is irrelevant or redundant for the sake of meeting a posting quota.

Consider the patterns that arose from your audit and competitive analysis. Take a look at publish dates and times for each platform and make a note of any specific themes. This information will help you organize and plan your posts to get the most visibility.

There’s a lot of competing information on publishing cadences. Some professionals recommend posting as regularly as possible to stay top of mind. Others suggest only posting if you have high quality and valuable information to add to the conversation.

There are also best practices around the best times to post on social media, on each platform, broken down by specific industries and niches. Check out our guide on how often to post on social media per channel to learn more. Sprout’s data science team analyzed posting frequencies for more than 30,000 Sprout Social customers to determine the industry average for some of the most popular social media networks.

Sprout also takes the guesswork out of posting cadences by analyzing the best times for you. Using a tool like Sprout’s ViralPost® feature helps you target posting times based on your individual audience data. ViralPost reviews this data and suggests Optimal Send Times for each platform you use.

5. Track and analyze your social media content calendar

Your social media calendar isn’t just a planning tool. It’s also a way to track and measure metrics across every platform you use. Analyze the information you collect from your social media campaigns and continue to optimize your social media calendar.

If you tag posts to specific campaigns, you can keep track of content that may need to be optimized or repurposed. When content performs well, save it or make a note to reintroduce it again in the future when it’s time to reevaluate your strategy again or brainstorm more upcoming posts.

For example, Sprout’s Asset Library lets you store videos, text and images in an easy-to-access library so you can re-incorporate high-performers into your social media strategy. Storing everything in a pre-approved library also ensures that all creative assets are on point in terms of quality and brand style guidelines.

Account for specific campaigns across different social platforms. Different social media platforms serve different purposes, so you should plan strategically when looking to increase the reach of a given post on other platforms. It’s important to remember that just because a post is popular on one platform, doesn’t mean it will perform well on others.

6. Improve your social media calendar by sharing across teams

You probably work frequently with other teams within your organization since social is a key pillar for many brands’ marketing strategies. Social media collaboration can strengthen your content and help your brand reach organizational goals. Seek feedback from your team and marketing stakeholders to improve your social media calendar. The goal here is to iterate your social media calendar as your marketing strategy and business evolves.

Including teams outside marketing will give you fresh ideas for things to post, while also supporting priorities across the organization. The product team can let you know when new features, services or products will be launching. Human resources and public relations can remind you of important dates and company milestones worth posting about.

Modern social teams work with a variety of teams and stakeholders, so you need an easy and reliable way to make sure that everyone involved can access the right tools, accounts and organize their deliverables. When your calendar is integrated into a social media management platform like Sprout Social, you increase the visibility of what needs to be created and approved across contributors.

Sprout’s content calendar include tools like approval workflows that emphasize collaboration so you can grant people in different departments access to relevant parts of the social media calendar.

Social media calendar apps

There are many social media management tools and social media scheduling tools out there to choose from. Here’s a quick overview of our top three favorite tools:

Google Calendar/Sheets

Google Calendar and Sheets are free and fairly intuitive to use. There are a bounty of social media calendar templates you can use from Google Sheets and Calendar. Both apps can be used to allow users to easily view upcoming posts and add comments for feedback and other collaboration.

Notion

Notion is a powerful note taking app, but it’s also a tool for marketers. The app has a database feature that can be used to create templates, including social media calendars. Notion is highly customizable and collaborative so users can easily view the status of content and give feedback via comments all within one platform.

Sprout Social

Okay, so yes, we’re definitely tooting our own horn here, but Sprout’s tools will truly help your social media team.

Our interactive content calendar’s publishing and scheduling tools are designed to increase visibility, improve team efficiency and boost customer loyalty, so social teams have more bandwidth for creative efforts, like participating in relevant trends. For instance, you can follow up on your scheduled posts by establishing a process for responding and engaging with your audience.

With Sprout, you can assign replies to different members of the team, which ensures that your followers always get a timely response when they tag you or comment on a post. Sprout’s Asset Library can also be used to create Auto-Responses and Saved Replies to frequently asked questions on social media. If your company handles support through a separate social media team your marketing team can always control the messaging, no matter who is posting.

Essentially, Sprout’s interactive content calendar allows you to manage the social experience, end to end.

Level up with a social media calendar

Your time is too valuable to spend deciding what to post every single day. A well-planned social media content calendar lets you use your time to plan for the future and focus on other aspects of your marketing strategy. Take your content planning to the next level with Sprout’s social media calendar features.

The post A complete guide to creating a social media calendar appeared first on Sprout Social.

You might think that one account per platform is ideal, but depending on your business’ needs and your social media goals, it could be in your best interest to manage multiple social media accounts for different functions. We’ll help you figure out how to evaluate your account needs and create a strategy tailored to a multi-account approach.

4 signs your business needs multiple social media accounts

It can be difficult to tell when you’ve outgrown the need for one social media account per network. Here are four ways you can evaluate whether it’s time to invest in multiple social media accounts.

Customer support dominates your feed

Customers increasingly turn to social media for customer support. They don’t want to wait for someone to email them back or navigate a maze of phone prompts to get to an agent. They want to make a quick post and have someone get back to them quickly. According to the 2022 Sprout Social Index™, over half (57%) of consumers expect a response from brands within 12 hours.

When your business grows to the point that most of your posts are responding to support issues or complaints, it might be time to dedicate an account to those issues. Xbox Support’s Twitter account is an excellent example of a support account. Their posts are tailored toward informing users about issues they’re working to fix and they reply to user issues with solutions or directions to their DM support channel.

You manage multiple audiences

Take a look at your ideal customer profiles (ICP)–or maybe ICPs. How much do they have in common? If your audiences are starting to break out into distinct segments, it might be time to consider having multiple social profiles to cater to each.

For example, Texas A&M University has audiences of faculty, students and alumni. Beyond that, the university encompasses 16 academic colleges, 19 NCAA sports and hundreds of departments. What matters to a life sciences student probably won’t have a lot of overlap with what matters to a football-obsessed alumnus. With that level of difference, you have to break up your social accounts to make sure you stay relevant.

If you’re a large corporation, you might have audiences looking for information beyond marketing, sales and customer care. At Sprout, we have an investor relations Twitter to showcase relevant highlights for that audience. Enterprise companies with a high volume of job openings might have a careers account dedicated to job seekers. If important messages aren’t relevant to a large portion of your core audience, it might be time for multiple accounts.

For instance, New Jersey Transit runs 14 separate Twitter accounts for each transit line they operate. If a user was looking for information about bus service but NJ Transit’s feed was cluttered with information about hiring, train service interruptions and police activity, they’d become pretty frustrated. NJ Transit manages that complexity through multiple accounts.

You deal with regional differences

If your business has multiple locations, or serves a variety of regions, managing multiple social accounts might be in your best interest. A snowstorm in New York might close your locations there, but that doesn’t matter at all to your customers in sunny Florida. Having multiple social accounts can help you navigate regional complexities.

A great example of this strategy is Aldi’s Twitter accounts. As a multinational company, there are bound to be differences in products and audiences across borders. Aldi splits their social presence into Aldi US and Aldi UK, with vastly different content featured on each. On the UK account, they feature products solely available at those locations and alter their tone and spelling to match the regional standard. On the US account, they use American spelling and tone, while referencing uniquely American cultural events, like the NFL playoffs.

You have a lot of variety in your product suite

If you’re an enterprise-level business, chances are that you have a lot of products. While all of those products might be relevant to a business at large, they probably won’t resonate with each individual user.

As your product suite grows, it might be advantageous to create accounts for specific products or user audiences. For example, Salesforce manages accounts for different products so they can reach a wider audience with relevant content.

How to manage multiple social media accounts in 5 steps

Managing multiple social media accounts can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Follow these five steps to get started.

Step 1: Have a strategy in place

Having a solid social media strategy is imperative for any brand, but it’s especially important when you’re managing the complexity of multiple accounts. To get started, there are a few things you need to evaluate.

First, establish what accounts you need to create. Document your requirements. Are you going to segment accounts by purpose, like support vs. marketing? Or does it make more sense to segment by attributes like audience, location or product? Once you have those answers, decide how many accounts you need and how your team should manage them. You should also think about how your teams will interact.

We combat decentralization by creating relationships and being a resource for other departments or teams in the Texas A&M system that are working in social. Recently, for example, we got a message in Sprout about our recreational sports center. Even though the message wasn’t directed to the Texas A&M rec sports social channels, we were able to pass it along to the right people because we’ve built the relationship.

Krista Berend
Director of Social Media at Texas A&M

After you’ve decided what accounts to create, make tangible goals for each. You’ll need KPIs to make sure the additional complexity is delivering results for your business. Measure your performance against those KPIs constantly and don’t be afraid to adapt or tweak when you’re underperforming.

If you’re looking for a place to start, this 30-day social media plan template is a great jumping off point.

Step 2: Document your brand guidelines

When you have one social media manager and one account per platform, it’s pretty easy to stay within brand guidelines. But when you add the complexity of managing multiple accounts, you need more formal governance. Make sure you have a brand guide with directions for your voice, tone and visuals handy for each account.

When you’re dealing with different audiences, there might be slight shifts you want to make across accounts. Keeping a voice that resonates with your audience is the priority—which means making room for a little nuance. Document those differences in your guidelines as well so there’s never any confusion about how to apply your overall brand voice in specific contexts.

Step 3: Reuse content

Having multiple social media accounts means having to create more content. That’s just math. It’s even more important to have a strong content repurposing strategy.

Crossposting across platforms is a great way to get started. What works well as a Reel could work well as a TikTok. Retweeting relevant content across multiple accounts gets more eyes on the same post, but it also has the benefit of bringing more eyes to your other accounts. You can turn video content into GIFs to share on other platforms. The world of content reuse is endless if you get creative.

Another way to repurpose your content is developing a library of reusable assets. Sprout Social’s Asset Library allows you to organize and categorize frequently used creative assets, helping everyone on your team ensure they’re using approved media.

Step 4: Invest in a social media management tool

It’s hard enough to manage one social media account natively. It’s nearly impossible to manage multiple social media accounts without a helping hand.

Social media management tools keep your DMs, content calendar, replies, mentions and metrics under one roof. Even if you have multiple accounts, they’ll all be housed in one place so you can see everything in one screen, in real time. It also creates a single source of truth for sophisticated social teams so you can stay on the same page and keep writing the same story. Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform that helps teams tackle all the day-to-day aspects of social—from publishing and engagement to reporting and plan for tomorrow.

Start your free Sprout trial

Step 5: Automate your tasks

When you’re managing multiple accounts, scaling can be difficult. That’s where automation comes into play. Social media automation tools will take care of the little tasks so you can focus on strategy.

Managing multiple social media accounts means multiple sources of DMs. Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox aggregates all of your messages across accounts and platforms into one view. You can reply directly from the platform so you won’t ever miss a message. Applying tag-based Inbox Rules can also help automatically route the request to the right responder.

Coming soon, Sprout users on the Advanced plan will also have access to Custom Post Variables, which gives teams the ability to dynamically change specific parts of a social post depending on predefined custom variables. One post can quickly be tailored to each of your location or product-specific accounts, taking one more thing off of your social media to-do list.

Manage multiple social media accounts with minimal stress

Creating and managing multiple social media accounts doesn’t have to be stressful. With the right set of tools and a clear goal, having multiple accounts will improve your audience relationships and simplify your processes.

Interested in trying out a tool that’ll make managing multiple accounts a breeze? Try out Sprout Social for 30 days.

The post How to manage multiple social media accounts appeared first on Sprout Social.

The good news is that with social media automation tools, repetitive or manual tasks that took you hours are now done within a few minutes.

Social media automation is the process of optimizing the tasks you perform for your social media activities. Its purpose is to reduce the hours spent managing your social media networks so you can focus on other tasks like analyzing data or coming up with better strategies to grow your social media presence.

Automated tasks include scheduling posts, replying to the most common customer requests, creating reports and tracking mentions of your brand. Rather than adding these activities to your manual to-do list, using automation tools to get them done will help you:

• Save time managing every social media account in one place
• Stay active on social media when your audience is most engaged or outside business hours—without you being there
• Check social data in real-time across social media networks
• Enhance team collaboration to boost productivity with workflows

In this article, we’ll walk you through the best social media automation tools—free and premium. You’ll learn features, use cases and who would benefit the most by using them.

1. Sprout Social

It’s no surprise that Sprout Social is our favorite solution to automate social media tasks. We developed it with your best interests in mind to unlock the potential of your social media strategies.

Here are three areas of our tool that will help you automate your social media efforts:

Social management

Sprout’s social management features focus on publishing, scheduling and reporting to aid your day-to-day social media activities.

Key features:

• Content Creation & Management: Schedule up to 350 posts and campaigns with a content calendar that spans all your social media networks. This feature also recommends proven times to post and generate engagement.
• Conversation Management: Get messages from all your social media networks in a Smart Inbox and reply from one platform. You can delegate these messages to specific team members and automate canned responses.
• Data Reporting: Analyze your performance across all your social media networks. Create custom reports and see graphics of your growth.

Customer care

Sprout Social’s customer care features help you better the experience of your customers or social media audience with your brand. With us, you can build stronger relationships and provide a responsive service.

Key features:

• Bot Builder: Create chatbots to automate your customer support. This feature helps you provide information 24/7 for Twitter and Facebook.
• Social CRM: Generate customer profiles and add relevant information to help your customer support team. Check conversation history from customer profiles to provide a custom experience. Sprout integrates with Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot so you can work across platforms to track the end-to-end customer experience.
• Review Management: Get notifications from Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook and Glassdoor. This helps you manage your social media and online presence from a single platform.

Sprout Social Listening and Analytics

Sprout Social’s Listening and Analytics tools give you business-critical insights to help you make strategic decisions. Get deep insights and data about the general sentiment around your brand, topics your audience is interested in and specific keywords you want to monitor.

Measuring performance data across your social networks, and integrating listening data, enables you to get the big picture of your brand’s health quickly. Plus, you can automate reports using the graphs and charts Sprout creates for you. With this, you can see what people are saying without having to manually search each social platform.

Key features:

• Competitor Reports: Compare your metrics against your competitors to understand your brand’s health. This feature allows you to filter topics by competitor, content type and sentiment, helping you identify trends to benchmark your social media performance. Sprout does the work for you, gathering the insights that matter to you and cutting out the need to manually audit each competitor’s social performance.
• Paid Performance Report: Analyze your social media advertising across networks. Instead of monitoring performance within each platform’s ad dashboards, Sprout pulls your data into one place so you can easily see how your paid efforts are performing. You can select the accounts and campaigns you want to include during a specific period. The reports give you metrics and graphics for Paid Video Views, Paid Web Conversions, Paid Engagement and Paid Impressions. All of these can easily be repurposed into a report for stakeholders, enabling you to focus on making strategic and timely optimizations.
• Social Listening: Rather than digging through millions of online conversations manually, quickly get business-critical insights from thousands of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback to impact your current strategy and guide future action.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, mid-size brands, small businesses and agencies that want a full package of tools to make data-driven strategic decisions, build lasting relationships with customers and grow their social media presence.

Free or premium? Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial or a demo. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

2. Sendible

Sendible is one of the social media automation tools that has all the features you need to run your social media daily activities from scheduling, posting, monitoring and analyzing on a budget.

Key features:

• Publishing: Schedule individual posts on your content calendar from your dashboard or in bulk with CSV files. With Sendible, you can resize images to fit every social media network without leaving the app.
• Collaboration: Add clients and team members to create workflows with approval and custom permissions.
• Analytics: Generate and automatically send reports to your clients. Also, get insights about the social media networks that drive the most traffic to your website, optimal posting times and top-performing posts.
• Social listening: Check data around industry keywords, hashtags and trends.

Who is this for? Agencies, brand managers or social media marketers that manage social media presence for clients or their own.

Free or premium? Sendible offers a free 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse offers an all-in-one social media automation tool that’s great for those just starting to grow their social media presence. This solution takes pride in providing great customer service with a 30-minute response time.

Key features:

• Social Inbox: Manage your messages with the Inbox Assistant, which organizes or labels your items. With this feature, you can create canned responses to address the same questions multiple times.
• Social Publishing: Schedule and approve content with your team and clients. Agorapulse also offers a mobile app to publish on the go.
• Social Listening and Reporting: Use parameters to focus on conversations about your brand and competitors. Get custom reports of gained or lost followers and social media interactions.

Who is this for? Freelancers, agencies, small businesses and enterprise organizations that want to manage their social media presence from one platform.

Free or premium? Agorapulse offers a 30-day free trial or a demo. If you’re looking for free social media automation tools, Agorapulse offers a free plan for individuals with limited functionalities along with other premium plans.

4. ContentStudio

ContentStudio differs from other social media automation tools as one of its features analyzes the content strategy of influencers, so you can use it to your advantage. Plus, this tool covers the basics of scheduling and analyzing social media posts.

Key features:

• Publishing & Scheduling: Schedule and approve content with your team or clients. You can also use the Chrome extension to share content with your audience easily.
• Analytics: Get demographic information from your followers and publishing behavior data from competitors.
• Social Inbox: Categorize your conversations and assign them to the right team member. You can reply to messages with canned responses and see if a teammate is already replying in real-time.
• Discover: Search high-performing content and analyze it so you know what topics are trending.

Who is this for? Agencies, brands or marketers that want to grow their social media presence while boosting productivity.

Free or premium? ContentStudio offers a 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media automation software that focuses on checking the general sentiment around your brand. With this, you can manage conversations with your clients and better their experience with your brand.

Key features:

• Discussion Volume Chart: Check graphs of your brand mentions online. When you spot a peak, you can analyze if it’s the result of your social media efforts or a sign of an issue that needs investigating.
• Sentiment Analysis: Brand24 uses AI to determine if online brand mentions are positive, negative or neutral—and set up alerts so you can act if you receive a negative mention.
• Data Exporting: Automate the generation of reports on PDF, Excel and even infographics.

Who is this for? Solopreneurs, agencies and enterprise companies that want to track their online reputation.

Free or premium? Brand24 offers a free 14-day trial. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

6. Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media automation tool that provides general features like scheduling, analytics and social listening with integrated AI. They scale up B2B social media by offering a People Database to get more qualified leads.

Key features:

• Social Publishing: Create multiple social media posts in seconds with AI. Then approve or reject these posts using workflows with tier permissions.
• Employee Advocacy: Generate a leaderboard where you can track your team’s performance metrics. Oktopost lets you filter your posts by topics so your team can share content they care about on their social media.
• AI-powered Social Listening: Monitor your brand mentions across major social media networks and websites. You can also get information about influential profiles that address relevant topics.

Who is this for? B2B companies that want to scale their social media presence and show its impact on business goals.

Free or premium? Oktopost offers a demo, becoming a premium tool after.

7. Loomly

Loomly is a social media automation tool that offers content management features for both organic and promoted posts, plus live optimization tips for your content.

Key features:

• Social Publishing: Get step-by-step guidance to create organic and promoted content on Loomly. Then receive notifications (email, Slack, push or Microsoft teams) every time a team member edits or comments on your content.
• Ad Campaigns Creation: Create campaigns and boost sponsored posts from Loomly and schedule the date you want them to go live.
• Analytics: Analyze all your social media posts, even the ones that weren’t posted from Loomly, and get insights with automated UTM codes added to your URLs.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, agencies and small businesses that want a simple and easy-to-use tool to manage their social media presence.

Free or premium? Loomly offers a free 15-day trial. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

8. CoSchedule

Different from other social media automation tools, CoSchedule helps you organize, schedule and publish all your marketing projects in one place.

Key features:

• Marketing Calendar: Organize and schedule all your marketing projects (blog posts, social media, presentations and landing pages) in one place. Assign these projects to team members and monitor the progress in real-time, using easy drag-and-drop features if your plans change.
• Other CoSchedule free tools: A variety of free tools to help you optimize your content like the Headline Analyzer, Email Subject Line Tester and Social Message Optimizer.

Who is this for? Agencies, small businesses and solopreneurs that want a tool tailored to the project management of your marketing content.

Free or premium? CoSchedule is one of the few free social media automation tools. It offers a Marketing Calendar that will forever be free with limited functionalities and other paid plans.

9. Tailwind

Tailwind is a solution that helps you market on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest while also helping you grow with email marketing. With Tailwind you can generate ideas, design stylish content and optimize it to convert more customers.

Key features:

• Plan: Get a social media plan tailored to your type of business and marketing needs. This feature provides content ideas and reminders to track your posting schedule in the social media calendar.
• Create: Automatically generate multiple designs for your posts with customizable brand colors, fonts and your logo with one click.
• Schedule: Schedule your post at the best times for engagement or set a reminder to manually post.
• Optimize: Obtain recommendations for high-performing hashtags according to your captions. Add links to your posts to convert more customers and get sales.

Who is this for? Brands or small businesses that want a tool focused on content creation and design while covering their scheduling needs.

Free or premium? Tailwind offers a free plan and three other premium plans.

10. PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is a tool that offers social media automation at scale. You can manage hundreds of social media accounts across networks from a single hub. This makes PromoRepublic a perfect tool for brands with multiple locations.

Key features:

• Content Creation: Have access to templates for high-performing posts and customize them with your brand colors and style.
• Publishing: Use workflows to approve edits or leave suggestions and collaborate with your team.
• Advertising: Create advertising campaigns that reach local audiences by using filters for zip code or city.
• Engagement: Post your content at proven times to generate engagement and answer customers’ questions or comments from your social inbox.
• Listening: Get data about your posts to determine the kind of content that your audience likes the most.

Who is this for? Small businesses, agencies and multi-location brands that want to manage multiple social media accounts across different business locations.

Free or premium? PromoRepublic offers a demo and then becomes a premium tool.

Automate your social media success

With social media in the game, there are a lot of opportunities to understand, entertain and communicate with your audience. But often, managing your presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok in front of thousands of people online can seem like a lot for one person or even a small team.

That’s why it is imperative to use social media automation tools—not only to automate social media posts, but to enhance customer care and scale up your strategic decisions.

If you want the full experience of managing your social media accounts, customer support and deep insights into your audience, sign up for a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social.

The post 10 effective social media automation tools to use in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Thankfully, there’s an endless list of tools to take advantage of for any part of your social media strategy.

Throughout this article, we’ll cover some of the top social media management tools in the industry and their main features, to give you the information you need to decide which software will work best for your team.

But first…

What is a social media management tool?

In simplest terms, a social media management tool is a software designed to allow a user or users to manage one or more social media profiles across one or several networks in one dashboard or program.

It makes all aspects of social media management – creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, engaging and collaborating – simplified.

Best social media management tools to use

Social media management tools assist with a variety of tasks—content scheduling and publishing, social listening, commenting and engagement, customer care, analytics and reporting, and so much more.

There are a variety of tools available to fit within any budget: from free tools for businesses on a budget to tools for agencies or smaller companies. Each includes different features and options to best suit your team’s needs.

Let’s go through each of our recommended social media management tools to help you find the best ones.

1. Sprout Social
2. Social Pilot
3. Sendible
4. KeyHole
5. Zoho Social
6. eClincher
7. NapoleonCat
8. Buffer
9. Later
10. Hootsuite
11. CoSchedule
12. MeetEdgar
13. Preview
14. Tailwind
15. Tweetdeck
16. Oktopost
17. Pallyy
18. PromoRepublic

1. Sprout Social

Can’t blame us for giving ourselves the top spot, right? Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool that allows businesses of any size to manage all aspects of their social media strategy.

Integrating with Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and other platforms, you can work across your entire presence in a single dashboard. Plus, you can also manage reviews from sources like Google My Business and Facebook, and create shoppable posts integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs.

Looking to make your employee brand advocates, as well? Our Employee Advocacy tool provides a curated feed of content for your employees to share across their social networks and amplify your business’s reach.

Features:

• Social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, reporting and more in one easy-to-use dashboard
• Access to our ViralPost feature to ensure you publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage, boosting visibility and reach automatically
• Smart Inbox that compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms, giving you a complete view of all your social interactions
• The ability to identify the most relevant hashtags for your content
• Custom URL tracking to get a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions

2. Social Pilot

SocialPilot is a simple and straightforward social media management solution for those just starting out with a management tool. In addition to publishing and scheduling, the tool features a curated content list based on categories and keywords and will share automatically to your feed.

SocialPilot offers in-depth analytics reports to guide better strategies. From content performance and audience insights, users will be able to understand what audiences are engaging with and analyze growth patterns to continue creating content.

Features:

• Integration with several major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
• Ability to customize and optimize posts for multiple social networks in a single Post composer
• A content curation platform provides a list of content pieces to inspire you with new ideas

3. Sendible

Sendible has done a great job of niching down, working to cater their social media management software specifically to agencies and other large businesses that manage a number of social media profiles. They also offer a number of helpful integrations to make social media management as easy as possible for their users.

Features:

• An all-in-one dashboard that makes it easy to see your overall social media performance at a glance
• Collaboration tools that allow your team to create content and then send it to the client or team leader for approval
• Presentation-ready reports to showcase ROI of your social media efforts to clients
• A mobile app that lets you monitor and manage your social media accounts on-the-go

4. KeyHole

KeyHole is unique from most of the tools on this list in that it boasts itself as an influencer tracking and marketing tool as well. Its Influencer Analytics feature provides marketers with the data they need to understand how each influencer is impacting their campaign goals. In fact, social media reports are their bread and butter.

Features:

• Automated social media reports that are shareable and presentation-ready within seconds
• Several reporting features, including brand reporting, campaign reporting, hashtag reporting and influencer reporting

5. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a tool that boasts features “built for every social media feed.” The app allows you to start discussions, share reports, create team roles and encourage feedback. This makes it easy to get everyone on board with your updates, strategies and performance insights.

In addition to scheduling, the platform has its own optimized timing features similar to Sprout. Zoho Social also has built-in Instagram scheduling, allowing you to publish posts and repost user-generated content straight from your desktop.

Features:

• An instant integration with the Zoho CRM and the ability to monitor customer interactions
• Social listening dashboards to track brand reviews, @mentions and branded keywords
• Ability to collaborate with teammates within the platform via chat, audio and video calls

6. eClincher

eClincher markets itself as a social media management platform that highlights their commitment to 24/7 customer support. They focus on the agility of their team to constantly improve their tool for the needs of their customers, with the intent to simplify and save time for users.

But what features does their tool offer? Like most tools on this list, eClincher features a cross-network social publishing tool and visual calendar, with a dedicated messaging inbox and publishing queue. Plus, it features brand monitoring across social, news, blogs and more, as well as sentiment analysis.

Features:

• Provides 24/7 customer support for its users so they can “strategize, optimize and measure ROI”
• Team collaboration with drafts, comments, notifications, tagging and assigning messages

7. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a social media management tool that helps users and teams untangle complicated workflows and simplify collaboration. In addition to approving, publishing and scheduling, users can color-code and visualize calendars.
Probably the most unique aspect of NapoleonCat is that it’s marketing to help with ecommerce goals: posting product updates across profiles, handling customer queries and reviews, and tracking your results.

It’s worth noting that NapoleonCat only has integration with Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube – not TikTok.

Features:

• Dedicated inbox for all social media comments, messages and reviews
• Professionally designed, in-depth social media reports that will help you identify successes and areas of opportunity
• Boasts automated Facebook and Instagram comments that may help with converting comments into sales

8. Buffer

Buffer is another social media management tool that is ideal for small businesses or businesses that are just getting started. They offer a completely free plan for your first three social media channels, making this the perfect option for setting up your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Features:

• Social media publishing tools that allow you to easily schedule out all of the social media content you’ve created for each channel
• A social media engagement dashboard that lets you respond to all mentions or messages online in one place
• Analytics and reporting to give you a bird’s-eye-view of how your social media efforts are performing
• The ability to create landing pages for lead generation, sales and more

9. Later

Later started as an Instagram-only social media management tool and has slowly added in other platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and more. They offer a number of features, including a link-in-bio tool, that make Instagram management an absolute breeze.

Features:

• Social media scheduling tools that let you plan out and schedule your content ahead of time in batches
• A visual content calendar that makes it easy to visualize and plan out feeds on Instagram and other platforms
• Tools to help you find and curate user-generated content that your audience will love

10. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool that, like Sprout Social, is well known for original research it  publishes regarding social media and digital marketing across the globe.

This tool has been around nearly as long as social media marketing has been a strategy and has evolved over the years to offer more useful features to businesses—but one thing that’s stuck around has been its  dashboard that gives you a glimpse at all of your social media progress at once.

Features:

• Publish and schedule social media posts to a variety of platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and more
• Manage incoming messages and mentions and respond to them in a single inbox
• Monitor online conversations around your brand and industry to gather audience sentiment and stay on top of trending topics

11. CoSchedule

CoSchedule began as a content marketing company and has since brought in social media management and calendar into their fold. Their overall goal is to help brands keep their marketing organized by allowing teams to schedule out all marketing content—blog content included—using their content calendar.

Features:

• A content calendar that lets you see when every single piece of marketing content will publish
• Project management tools that let you monitor the progress of marketing content and when it’s ready to publish
• The ability to manage all content creation in one single dashboard
• A headline studio that helps you to write better headlines for more traffic and attention

12. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a lesser-known social media management tool that helps teams automatically curate their social media feeds. This is perfect for solopreneurs or businesses with small teams. Startups where team members wear a lot of hats may benefit from the features available with MeetEdgar.

Features:

• Repurpose old content and give it new life by automatically republishing it at a later date
• Scheduling tools that let you set the optimal times for MeetEdgar to schedule your content
• A/B testing so you can discover which types of content your audience loves best

13. Preview

Preview is a mobile app that lets you visually plan out your Instagram feed. If you’re looking to create a feed that’s based on a pattern, rainbow colors or some other Instagram feed aesthetic, you can upload as many photos and videos into the app so you can preview your feed before you publish.

Features:

• Upload photos, videos and Carousels to the Preview app to get an idea of what it would look like live on Instagram
• Schedule your content right within the Preview app so it’ll publish when you’re ready
• Plan out Reels and Stories as well as your regular Instagram feed so you know how everything will fit together

14. Tailwind

Tailwind is another tool that started with one social media platform in mind and then branched out to others. Because there was a hole in the market for Pinterest scheduling, Tailwind began to help schedule and automate Pinterest marketing for brands before expanding into Facebook and Instagram.

Features:

• Post ideas to help you always have Pinterest content in the pipeline
• A design tool to create your own Pinterest graphics and immediately save them Boards
• Automated scheduling and SmartSchedule feature that keeps your Pinterest feed full

15. Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a Twitter-owned management tool that makes it easy to monitor and engage with followers and potential customers from your target audience. It’s also a great way to participate in Twitter chats and keep up with the conversation. Simply head to tweetdeck.twitter.com and sign in with your Twitter profile to get started.

Features:

• The ability to view several feeds at once, like your home feed, notifications, a hashtag or trending topic, someone else’s profile, etc.
• Windows that let you tweet or view and respond to your own messages right from Tweetdeck
• Real-time updates and notifications that let you manage your Twitter profile easily

16. Oktopost

Oktopost is another social media management tool that has niched down to a specific audience. They serve B2B companies and have added feature that help them best serve this audience. They’re also one of the few social media management tools that offer employee advocacy features.

Features:

• Tools that let you plan, schedule and even approve social media content before it is published
• Analytics and reporting tools that help B2B teams monitor performance and adjust strategy accordingly
• A People Database that lets users turn their social audience into qualified leads in their CRM

17. Pallyy

Pallyy is a unique social media management tool specifically targeted for agencies. This tool helps agencies plan and schedule clients’ social media posts all in one place. The Pallyy dashboard is very visually appealing: a kanban-style workflow, media and folders library, and actual visual planner where you can plan your grids.

Features:

• Integration with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest and TikTok
• Visual planners make it easy to prepare content across platforms and grids, especially when aesthetics is high in mind
• Media storage can be organized into folders for better organization
• Collaboration with clients made easy with shareable content calendars where clients can also leave comments, make notes and approve posts.

18. PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is a unique tool on this list as it highlights itself as a local marketing platform. Having a localized social media management tool is unique, especially for small businesses, franchises and multi-location enterprise organizations, who want to target their local audiences. Through its local SEO tool, businesses will be able to grow foot traffic and web traffic, and managing customer reviews and feedback will be easier in the dashboard as well.

Features:

• Best for small businesses, franchises and businesses who want to grow awareness in local audiences
• Create brand consistency with a media and asset library
• Target the right audiences through hyper-localized ads, and uncover opportunities and business insights through social listening.

Why do you need a social media management tool?

Whenever marketers tap into a new tool, they want to find one that adds value to their marketing tech stack rather than more bloat. Here are some factors to consider to narrow down your choices as you’re deciding between tools.

1. Pricing and budget

Whether or not you can get by with totally free social media management tools really depends on your business’ size and scope. For solo businesses and up-and-coming agencies, free or freemium tools might serve as a stepping stone toward paid ones.

But oftentimes, “you get what you pay for” rings true. That’s why it’s important to assess which features matter most to your business and what your non-negotiables are.

And when in doubt, testing out tools (like with Sprout’s 30-day free trial) and seeing what they can do firsthand is always a safe bet. Sprout is also the only tool on this list that provides a 30-day free trial; most of the others only offer a 14-day trial.

2. Automation and time-saving features

“How is this tool going to save me time?”

Any tool you add to your tech stack should be able to answer this question for you and your business.

Features ranging from publishing and scheduling to a social media calendar, automated responses, and content ideation can seriously free up your schedule.

Another key consideration is whether or not your tool of choice integrates with the rest of your marketing stack. This can serve as a massive time-saver in and of itself.

3. Collaboration features

From scheduling content to responding to customers in real-time, the best social media management tools make it easy to collaborate.

How many users can work within the tool at once? Can you easily set up permissions to onboard new members to your social team?

How many seats a social media management tool has is crucial, especially if you’re outsourcing part of your social or plan on scaling your team.

4. Reporting and analytics

We can’t stress enough how much analytics matter.

The easier it is to highlight your performance and KPIs, the better. Whether you’re reporting on behalf of clients or presenting data to stakeholders yourself, in-depth and easy-to-read reports are an absolute must-have.

Additionally, reporting can help highlight what’s working and what’s not in terms of your social presence. Before investing in any tool, make sure that it monitors the social metrics that matter most to your business.

Find the best social media management tools for your brand

Social media has become an integral piece of any given business today: customer service, competitive analysis, promotion and sales.

And that only scratches the surface.

Start searching for the best social media management tools for your team’s needs. After reading through all the tools in our list, take some time to mull over the best options before biting the bullet.

And remember, you can test drive a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social to get a first-hand look at our automation, collaboration and reporting features yourself.

The post Top 18 social media management tools for businesses in 2023 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Here are 17 social media management tips to help you stay productive and organized:

1. Identify the best platforms for your brand

From longstanding favorites like Instagram and YouTube to newer apps like TikTok and BeReal, there are so many social media platforms to choose from. And with monthly updates and new features, it can be tempting to try everything, but you need to choose the right social media channels for your business.

Consider your brand’s goals, resources, current content types, your audience, your competitors and the industry you’re in. Use this information to form a strategic approach and identify the best platforms for your brand.

Continue your research as you find the platform that works best for you. For example, if your brand uses Instagram, seek platform-specific advice by searching “social media management tips for Instagram.”

2. Set your social media goals

Set social media goals that are measurable and align with the overall business objectives of your brand.

Use the SMART goal-setting framework to guide you. The acronym stands for:

• Specific: Your goal should be clear and defined. State what you will accomplish specifically.
• Measurable: You need to track any social goal with numbers. This is where metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) come into play. Metrics are just numbers, but KPIs bring context and meaning to your data.
• Achievable: Do you have the necessary resources (time, budget, creatives, etc.) to achieve your goals?
• Realistic: Dream big, but within reason. Avoid promising results you can’t produce (think quadrupling conversions in one week).
• Time sensitive: Give yourself a timeframe (monthly, quarterly or annually) to reach your goals.

Once you set your goals, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’d like to use to measure your success. Your KPIs are contingent on each goal so choose those metrics after confirming your goals. For example, if you wanted to increase your brand engagement, likes, comments, shares and mentions could be potential KPIs.

3. Create a routine for your day or week

Routines make the world go round. Create a productivity regimen to help organize your daily, weekly and monthly workload. A classic to-do list is always effective—whether it’s using a physical planner or an iOS app. Block off time on your calendar and dedicate it to specific tasks or projects. Experiment with productivity tools like Asana, Todoist or Hive— there are so many to choose from, so don’t be afraid to try something new until you find what works best.

4. Batch similar tasks

Think about which tasks are similar so you can strike everything off your to-do list. For example, if you need to write social copy for several posts across several platforms, do it together. You can do the same for pretty much anything from creating social graphics to scheduling content.

5. Use a content calendar to visualize your efforts

A content calendar serves as a great visual reminder of what you need to do to accomplish your goals, but it can also help you save time and avoid social media burnout.

Use the calendar to plan out your content type, along with where and when you would like to post it. Just like your personal or business calendar, a content calendar visualizes your efforts.

6. Upload and schedule social media posts with time-saving tools

Work smarter, not harder with social media scheduling tools. A social media scheduling tool is software that assists with scheduling your posts across multiple accounts and platforms. You save time because you can upload content and assign a date for publishing instead of having to do everything within the app.

With social media management platforms like Sprout, you can schedule your posts in advance, upload content and track KPIs all in one place.

Start your free Sprout trial

7. Understand your best times to post

It’s not just what you post that matters, but when. The best times to post on social media vary by network, content type and your brand’s audience and industry. Take a deep dive into research and review your brand’s social media data and analytics to decipher the best timing trends.

For example, if you notice your audience engages with your LinkedIn content in the afternoon more than in the morning, noon until 4 p.m. could be a sweet spot for posting.

8. Revisit your social media content mix

Variety is truly the spice of life. You need a mix of content to keep your audience engaged and grow your social presence. Consider adjusting your content mix based on your goals, resources, budget or brand identity.

To give you a little extra help, we created an interactive quiz to help you find the right social media content mix for your brand.

9. Create an authentic brand experience for your audience

The heart of social media is human connection, so it’s no surprise that audiences are seeking brand authenticity. According to the Sprout Social Index™,  34% of consumers want to see authentic, less produced videos from brands on social.

Your brand can shape a genuine brand experience by studying and listening to your audience. What do they care about? Which posts do they like the best? What are they talking about online? Cater to these questions with the content you share.

10. Add user-generated content to your social media content plan

Amplifying user-generated content is a great way to shout out your customers, while also helping your social media content strategy. UGC can be used to advocate for a business, and you can also feature content that relates to your brand’s values or the lifestyle of your target audience.

For example, ESPN is known for its coverage of college and professional sports, but you don’t have to be an athlete to get reposted on their TikTok page. They highlight a range of user-generated content from intramural sports to wholesome moments like in the video below:

11. Don’t be afraid to recycle content strategically

Instead of constantly coming up with fresh, relevant ideas for every post, think about how you can repurpose your best content. Repurposing your top-performing content saves you time and energy. If you reuse the content you know works, it could perform well on another network too. Reshare a Reel on your story, create a carousel or edit YouTube videos into digestible snippets for TikTok.

12. Use social listening to stay up-to-date on emerging trends

Social media managers are familiar with trying to get inside the head of their audience.

With social listening, you can become a fly on the wall and gain insights into your content. Social listening allows you to uncover conversations about your brand, keep a pulse on industry trends and learn more about your audience in general.

13. Use saved or canned replies

Using saved or canned replies is a common tactic for escalation management. Think of these responses like an FAQ page. FAQ pages help facilitate customer care because they provide immediate solutions to common questions or problems—a templated response does the same.

Plus, conversational commerce is growing, so automated responses used in messaging apps and other tools can attempt to help customers before escalating to an agent in real time.

14. Set up social media automation to save even more time

As mentioned above, automated responses can help streamline customer care conversations.

Setting up other social media automation features like scheduling and chatbots saves you time, which is one of the biggest keys to productivity and organization.

Instead of posting or responding to every message manually in real time, you can rely on automation to lift some of the weight for you.

15. Automate social media analytics and reports

You can also reclaim more of your time by automating your social media analytics. Instead of starting from scratch every time you want to pull a report, set a reporting schedule to auto-populate your metrics of choice at a certain time period.

There are a variety of social media reports you can automate to make managing social media for your brand easier.

16. Monitor, adapt, track, repeat

Get comfortable with frequently monitoring your social platforms, tracking performance, making adjustments as needed and repeating the cycle. Social media is ever-changing, so your content and strategy will evolve throughout the year too.

17. Learn to say no and delegate tasks

Social media managers are familiar with burnout. They juggle a lot of responsibilities while facing nuanced brand concerns, including complex issues that might impact their mental health. Talk to your manager about burnout if you need to communicate your concerns. Practice communicating your priorities when you’re feeling overwhelmed or need to rely on your team for support.

Don’t be afraid to say “no” or ask for help. Think of delegating your workload as a part of managing your mental health.

Grow your social media management strategy

We’ve covered 17 social media management tips to help you achieve organization and maintain productivity. If you’re looking for even more tips, see our guide on how to build your social media marketing strategy.

The post 17 social media management tips for productivity and organization appeared first on Sprout Social.

It’s a question that has plagued marketers since the dawn of social media, and it’s an important one to ask. Having the “most posts” doesn’t always win. In fact, posting frequency can mean the difference between inspiring and annoying your audience. According to the Sprout Social Index™, 74% of consumers think just 1-2 posts a day is ideal for brands.

Figuring out the right number of posts to publish every day is a key part of your social media strategy, and it impacts your channel and workload alike. Our data science team analyzed posting frequencies across more than 30,000 Sprout Social customers to find the industry average for some of the biggest platforms you—and your audience—care about most.

How often to post on social media overall

Industry average: 11 posts per day

Don’t worry, social media managers—that average is across all platforms, not per channel.

Still, 11 posts per day is nothing to shake a stick at. It’s no wonder social media teams say bandwidth is one of their number one challenges this year.

Understanding how often to post on each platform can alleviate your workload by helping you prioritize which channels need more content. Find the average posting frequency for each channel, backed by data:

Table of Contents

• How often should you post on TikTok?
• How often should you post on Instagram?
• How often should you post on Facebook?
• How often should you post on LinkedIn?
• How often should you post on Twitter?
• How often should you post on Pinterest?
• What’s your ideal posting frequency?
• How we gathered data

Keep in mind—these are industry averages. Your posting sweet spot may depend on your audience and industry. Start with these averages—plus the best times to post on social media—and experiment to see what works best.

How often should you post on TikTok?

TikTok recommends: 1-4 times per day

While we don’t yet have our own data for how many times to post on TikTok (stay tuned), we would never leave you high and dry. Luckily, TikTok has provided their own recommendation of 1-4 posts daily.

The #ForYou feed is a non-stop fresh content machine. Posting several times a day can help you stay top of mind and “top of feed” for your audience. It’s also a great way to consistently test which sounds, themes, topics and hashtags work best.

Publishing several posts a day can get messy if they’re not spaced out. Create a TikTok schedule and schedule your posts ahead of time to stay organized. Using Sprout Social, you can even use optimal send times to schedule posts at peak engagement times.

Beyond posting frequency, here are a few other TikTok marketing tips to keep in mind:

• Find your niche: From #LearnOnTikTok to #BookTok, there are tons of topics on TikTok. Browse, brainstorm and test TikTok video ideas to see where your brand thrives.
• Less polish, more authenticity: Some 56% of users feel closer to brands that publish unfiltered, human content on TikTok.
• Use TikTok’s native features: Using the TikTok editor can help you look more natural on the platform.

How often should you post on Instagram?

Industry average: 1-2 posts a day

Instagram is the second-most downloaded app worldwide, only behind TikTok. With more than two billion monthly active users, Instagram remains incredibly popular. In fact, nearly 50% of consumers say that Instagram is one of the platforms they expect to use the most this year. And Pew Research found that 59% of people check the ‘gram daily, with 38% of those users checking the app multiple times a day.

As far as how many times to post on Instagram, 1-2 times a day is the average. But this can vary by industry. Entertainment media company Nerdist regularly posts three to five times a day.

Here are some tips to help you make the most of your daily posts and create content that resonates:

• Create content that makes people linger: The Instagram algorithm wants users to spend a few seconds on a post. Use a hook, like the one above, to grab attention. And take advantage of popular content types. Using Instagram Reels is the best way to grow. And carousel posts have the highest engagement rate per session.
• Get the timing right: Stay ahead in the feed by publishing during the best times to post on Instagram.
• Know what your audience wants: With Instagram prioritizing post popularity, engagements matter. Tap into your insights to understand what posts your audience engages with the most. If you’re a Sprout user, your Post Performance Report will pull your top Instagram posts, as well as top posts for all of your other channels.

• Tap into Instagram influencer marketing: About 58% of marketers plan to use Instagram for creator collaborations in the coming months.
• Use Stories: Half of Instagram users visit a website after seeing a brand promoted in Stories. Post on your Story and use interactive elements like stickers or direct people to your link in bio throughout the day to create engagement opportunities.

How often should you post on Facebook?

Industry average: 4-5 posts per day

With just under 3 billion monthly active users, Facebook dominates the digital space. Around 71% of consumers and 65% of marketers expect it to be one of the platforms they use the most this year.

Facebook remains a key place to invest energy. Its advertising capabilities can help you find and reach more of your audience. And it’s the go-to platform for 60% of consumers when they need customer service. The industry average of 4-5 daily posts is a lot. Stay organized by keeping a social media calendar and schedule Facebook posts.

Here are a few tips on staying ahead in the Feed:

• Tap into advertising: Facebook accounts for over a quarter of all digital ad spending. With organic reach dropping, use ads and boost posts to expand your reach.
• Experiment with video: In-Feed video content is the most popular type of video on Facebook. The Facebook Feed prioritizes the types of content people interact with most, so tap into video’s popularity.
• Understand what your audience wants to see: The algorithm weighs how often people interact with your posts, and post popularity. Look at your analytics to see what kinds of posts your audience likes the most to boost these factors.

Bonus tip: Encourage more engagement on your posts by knowing what your audience wants to see. Sprout’s Post Performance Report offers an easy way to quickly see your top posts by engagement, impressions and more.

How often should you post on LinkedIn?

Industry average: No more than one update a day

The world’s largest professional networking platform is a powerful place for your employer branding strategy and to share thought leadership. Although, it’s not “all business all the time”—“broetry,” anyone?

The average posting frequency on LinkedIn is once per day—and weekdays are the best days to post on LinkedIn. A recent LinkedIn algorithm change made the platform more sensitive to posts that can be considered spam and put a spotlight on posts that garner solid engagement. So make that one post count.

Here are some tips to maximize your daily post:

• Encourage employees to post: There’s a reason 68% of organizations say they have an employee advocacy program. Employee-shared content can see around 8x more engagement compared to content shared on brand channels.
• Post questions: But don’t ask people to respond by using reactions. A recent LinkedIn algorithm change will penalize you.
• Respond to comments: Responses reward those who comment. They also bump your content back up in the news stream.

How often should you post on Twitter?

Industry average: 3-4 Tweets per day

The birthplace of the hashtag remains a go-to platform for trends and emerging news stories—57% of Twitter users who get their news on the platform say it’s boosted their understanding of current events.

Things move fast on Twitter. Reportedly, the average lifespan of a Tweet is just 18 minutes. Following the industry average of 3-4 Tweets a day can help you avoid a single daily Tweet getting lost in the feed. And its conversational, “stream of consciousness” nature makes it an easy place to create lighthearted posts without sacrificing your voice or brand persona.

Try using a tool to help you Tweet more with less work. Sprout’s ViralPost, for example, takes the guesswork out of when to post. It tells you times to publish Tweets when more of your audience is online, helping you stay ahead in the feed.

With a lot of daily opportunities to post on Twitter, here are a few tips to get the most out of your Tweets and time:

• Repurpose Tweets on other channels: Sharing funny, relatable or meme-based Tweets on Instagram is a popular trend. It’s also a natural way to repurpose and cross-promote your content.

• Use trending hashtags: Hashtag holidays help you reach new people on the platform by joining a larger, potentially trending conversation. You don’t need to use them all—get creative, but be choosy.
• Take advantage of Retweets and quote Tweets: Not every Tweet you share needs to be original. Quote Tweet fans who love your brand, and Retweet industry experts.

• Pay attention to customer care: Whether you create a handle just for customer support or use your main account, Twitter is a go-to place when customers have questions. Using social listening can help you find Tweets mentioning your brand and uncover how customers really feel—even when they don’t tag you.

How often should you post on Pinterest?

Industry average: Not more than once per day

Good news—Gen Z has discovered Pinterest, and this demographic is on the rise on the platform 40% year over year.

The majority of Pinners go to the platform to start a new craft. Connect with your audience with how-tos and inspirational posts—especially if your brand is in the fashion, crafts, DIY, cooking or decorating sectors, which do well on Pinterest.

But with an industry average of one pin per day, here are a few tips to make that Pin count and to stand out:

• Use the right keywords: Some 97% of top Pinterest searches are unbranded. Meaning the platform is a go-to place for discovering new things first. Use keywords in your Pins to make it easier for searchers to find them.
• Create stunning visuals: Attract the eye with stunning visuals and photos. Free tools like Canva help you create infographics, images that pop and more.
• Pin regularly: The Pinterest algorithm prioritizes “fresh” pins—that is, new content over repins—as well as audience interactions. Keep up with Pinning on the platform to show the algorithm that you’re active and fresh.
• Explore trends: Use Pinterest trends for inspiration and to create content that resonates with trending topics.

What’s your ideal posting frequency?

At the end of the day, knowing how often to post on social media is just one part of your strategy. Your content still needs to be high-quality and relevant to your audience. But nailing the posting frequency that works for you can help you stand out without being spammy.

You know the answer to “how often should you post on social media?” Your next step is to experiment with these averages to find out what your frequency sweet spot is. As you test, use our free Best Times to Post tool to uncover the best times to post on key social media platforms.

How we gathered the data

We understand that these reports can raise questions about just where the data is coming from. That’s why we want to be clear about the data we pulled and how we got here.

First off, we were lucky enough to work with Sprout Social’s very own data science team to gather this information from our customers. Joel Booth, a Senior Data Scientist at Sprout, explained how it all works. “Sprout integrates with the different social media platforms via their API, which allows the application to receive messages on behalf of our customers,” Booth said. “Essentially, this is how we power features such as Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Reports.”

Now’s the time to test your content calendar. Are you posting at the right frequency for your audience? Start your free trial of Sprout Social and discover your best posting frequency on social media today.

The post How often to post on social media appeared first on Sprout Social.

With nearly 4 billion social media users across all platforms and the average person using several social platforms per month, there’s no doubt that social media presents opportunities for many businesses. In fact, 71% of consumers found themselves using social more than they have in years past, which means brands and marketers need to meet their audiences where they are. And when marketers meet consumers’ expectations on social media, the benefits extend to every area of the business.

We worked closely with our data science team to review findings and trends in social media usage over the past year from Sprout Social’s more than 30,000 customers and understand when their content was most and least frequently engaged with, broken out by platform and industry.

Use this data to help inform scheduling for your publishing calendar, or read on for ideas about how to integrate these findings into your own analysis of your specific account’s peak times for engagement.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning how to identify your best times to post globally across each network, start a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature with your profiles.

Try our Best Times to Post generator

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded in Central Time (CST). Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times.

• What are the best times to post on social media overall?
• What are the best times to post on Facebook?
• What are the best times to post on Instagram?
• What are the best times to post on TikTok?
• What are the best times to post on Twitter?
• What are the best times to post on LinkedIn?
• How to find your own best times to post on social media
• How we gathered the data

Best Times to Post on Social Media Overall

Each social platform has its own benefits depending on your goals, content type and audience. If you’re noticing your engagement isn’t where you want it to be, consider revisiting your social media goals and overall KPIs. Of course, knowing which days you get the most engagement helps you reach those goals as well.

While interpreting the data for each social network individually, we consistently noticed that the highest times of engagement were Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 9 or 10 a.m. Midweek mornings proved to be a successful time across most social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Best times to post on social media overall: Tuesdays through Thursdays at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m.
• Best days to post on social media: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on social media: Sundays

There’s more to posting on social media than this quick stat though. Each network saw varying ranges of engagement throughout the week and at remarkably different times. And once industries are factored in, engagement varies even more. So while Tuesdays through Thursdays at 9 or 10 a.m. are generally the best times to post on social, there are a few more factors to consider before you schedule any posts.

Read on for our findings by network.

Best Times to Post on Facebook

• Best times to post on Facebook: Mondays through Fridays at 3 a.m., Tuesdays at 10 a.m. and noon
• Best days to post on Facebook: Tuesdays through Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook: Saturdays

Facebook continues to be the most used platform by marketers worldwide but we’ve seen an interesting shift in when there’s the most engagement in 2022. While mid-mornings used to dominate more strongly in years past, it now appears early morning hours have taken the lead.

Compared to last year, there are a few more “off” times for Facebook when reviewing the data. Weekday very early mornings and mid-mornings still show more consistent engagement and have become much more opportune times for brands to get eyes on their content.

Keep in mind that the top times shown are recorded in US Central Time, so the high engagement shown in the early mornings in addition to the traditional US workday reflects Facebook’s significant global audience. What does this mean, exactly? Facebook continues to show opportunities in conducting a multi-location or international social media strategy.

Best Times to Post on Instagram

• Best times to post on Instagram: Mondays at 11 a.m., Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Thursdays and Fridays 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on Instagram: Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Instagram: Sundays

We’ve seen Instagram boom throughout 2020 and 2021 and watched it reach 2 billion monthly users as of early 2022. While the competition for short-form video content from TikTok is heating up, there’s no denying the staying power of Instagram, especially as it rolls out new features and enhances existing ones. Instagram Video has taken new life and expanded to 60 minute videos, and Reels have made it easier to create and discover videos on the app.

Similar to Facebook’s other popular app, Instagram’s top times to post expanded in 2021 compared to previous years. Midday engagement during weekdays became denser with top times ranging between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., while evenings and weekends still showed increased opportunities for engagement.

Instagram is still a platform for product discovery of brands, products or services. And new or expanding ecommerce features are shaping the way consumers use the app. In fact, 44% of users shop for products on the app weekly. Because the platform is built on sharing high-quality photos, it makes sense to expand the app to include ecommerce capabilities.

Brands shouldn’t sleep on Instagram though, if that’s where their target audience is. Use the platform to highlight products or showcase your brand’s unique design through infographics. There are endless opportunities to engage followers when posting various content on Instagram.

If you’re looking to amplify your Instagram strategy, use these best times to post, plus check out our guide on getting the most out of your Instagram presence.

Best Times to Post on TikTok

• Best times to post on TikTok: Tuesdays 2–3 p.m., and Wednesdays and Thursdays 1–3 p.m.
• Best days to post on TikTok: Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Worst days to post on TikTok: Sundays

TikTok has caused some disruption in the social app and marketing world over the last few years, and there’s no slowing it down. With the app now amassing over 1 billion users and the rise of TikTok influencers, we can say for certain that there is much more to come from the app. If you’re still trying to figure out what TikTok is, it’s a short-form video app where users can join the latest trends, discover new products and follow their favorite brands and content creators.

Best times to post on TikTok are new for Sprout to include this year. The highest engagement times on TikTok are Tuesdays 2–3 p.m., and Wednesdays and Thursdays 1–3 p.m. However, generally, mid-morning through the afternoon (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.) on Tuesdays through Fridays see high engagement on the app.

If you’re still learning how to make a TikTok, don’t fret. There’s still time to join the app and start engaging your target audience. So whether you’re B2B, B2C or a digital creator, your opportunities on TikTok are endless.

Best Times to Post on Twitter

• Best times to post on Twitter: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 9 a.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter: Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter: Sundays

Twitter has been the go-to platform for up-to-the-minute conversations and breaking news. And 2021 didn’t slow down with the COVID-19 pandemic going into its second year. Brands looking to participate in trending topics need to be timely but conscious of the brand’s values in the process.

Twitter peak times for engagement shifted significantly compared to last year, becoming much more concentrated during mid mornings and middays throughout the week. This could reflect greater attention to developing news and updates, as well as a desire for entertainment via viral Tweets and memes.

Remember that Twitter’s use extends beyond breaking news and viral content. Many brands use Twitter as part of their customer care strategy, as an alternative to calling customer support. This is particularly important for the platform as brands continue to build trust between their customers and proactively improve customer experience through social listening as well.

All of these focus areas means brands can have multiple, and sometimes competing, priorities on Twitter. The top times to post on Twitter we found above may help you determine when you should focus on prioritizing publishing new content versus devoting resources to customer support or consider a multiple Twitter account strategy.

Best Times to Post on LinkedIn

• Best times to post on LinkedIn: Tuesdays 10 a.m. to noon
• Best days to post on LinkedIn: Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Worst days to post on LinkedIn: Saturdays and Sundays

Unsurprising for this professional-focused social platform, LinkedIn engagement times continue to be consistent to the US workweek. High engagement hours are more concentrated midday and don’t extend too far out past the US workday hours, as it had in years past. You’re less likely to get eyes on your LinkedIn content on the weekend, where engagement drops significantly.

Considering how much LinkedIn content is centered around professional thought leadership and career growth, it makes sense that a majority of audiences are getting the most out of this content during their working day.

While LinkedIn continues to be more specialized than other social platforms, it’s also increasingly branching out in what types of audiences it attracts. With over 810 million members in 200 countries, LinkedIn is becoming equally important for a wide range of content creation. Businesses on LinkedIn are finding new ways to generate leads, find co-marketing partners, highlight company culture and attract talent, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. LinkedIn is also an ideal fit for employee advocacy and empowering employees to advance their personal brand or professional development as they publish content to their own profiles.

How to find your own best times to post on social media

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data on the top times to post across social networks. Still, as platforms evolve with how brands and consumers are using social, there are new ways to innovate interactions all the time. New content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

More tips for content scheduling and social strategies

• Building your social media marketing strategy for 2022
• How to craft an effective social media content strategy
• 20 social media ideas to keep your brand’s feed fresh
• Creating a 30-day social media plan

While posting at peak engagement times is a go-to strategy, a detailed analysis of your audience might reveal less busy times when your specific audience is active, but competitors are not. A tool like Sprout Social can help you dig into your own analytics and develop tailored findings for your accounts to complement the wide range of data across industries we’ve surveyed here.

With Sprout’s tools like post tagging and cross-channel reporting, you can separate different factors like network or types of media and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s very own ViralPost® algorithm uses the same types of data we’ve looked at across all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post for your individual account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option on our Professional and Advanced plans.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times that your own audience engages the most are identified based on your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing repeated analyses yourself.
Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social.

Start your free Sprout trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post across ten industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on Instagram 2022
• Best times to post on Facebook 2022
• Best times to post on Twitter 2022

How we gathered the data

We understand that these reports can raise questions about just where the data is coming from. That’s why we want to be clear about the data we pulled and how we got here.

First off, we were lucky enough to work with Sprout Social’s very own data science team to gather this information from our customers. Joel Booth, a Senior Data Scientist at Sprout, explained how it all works.

“Sprout integrates with the different social media platforms via their API, which allows the application to receive messages on behalf of our customers,” Booth said. “Essentially, this is how we power features such as Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Reports.”

Now’s the time to test your content calendar. Are you posting when your followers are most active? Start your free trial of Sprout Social and discover your best times to post on social media today.

Start your free Sprout trial

The post The best times to post on social media in 2022 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Now, with new features like Twitter Spaces and Twitter Communities, businesses and brands alike can further build relationships with followers. And as a platform for conversations and customer care, it’s important to understand how to use Twitter for business in a meaningful way.

If you’re interested in learning how to identify your best times to post on Instagram and other social profiles, start a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature with your profiles.

Try our Best Times to Post generator

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded in Central Time (CST). Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times.

• What are the best times to post on Twitter?
• What are the best times to post on Twitter by industry?
  • Consumer Goods
  • Education
  • Finance
  • Healthcare
  • Hospitality
  • Media
  • Nonprofit
  • Restaurants
  • Tech
  • Travel and Tourism
• How to find your own best times to post on social media
• How we gathered the data

Best Times to Post on Twitter

• Best times to post on Twitter: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 9 a.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter: Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter: Sundays

Twitter peak times for engagement shifted significantly compared to last year, becoming much more concentrated during mid mornings and middays throughout the week. This could reflect greater attention to developing news and updates, as well as a desire for entertainment via viral Tweets and memes.

Remember that Twitter’s use extends beyond breaking news and viral content. Many brands use Twitter as part of their customer care strategy, as an alternative to calling customer support. This is particularly important for the platform as brands continue to build trust between their customers and proactively improve customer experience through social listening as well.

All of these focus areas means brands can have multiple, and sometimes competing, priorities on Twitter. The top times to post on Twitter we found above may help you determine when you should focus on prioritizing publishing new content versus devoting resources to customer support or consider a multiple Twitter account strategy.

Best Times to Post on Twitter by Industry

Being armed with the best times to post on Twitter is a great start to any social media content calendar, it’s important to see how the data translates to your specific industry. With the help of our Data Science team, we were able to capture the best times to post on Instagram within ten industries.

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Consumer Goods

• Best times to post on Twitter for Consumer Goods: Tuesdays at 9.m., Wednesdays at 3 a.m.
  
• Best days to post on Twitter for Consumer Goods: Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Consumer Goods: Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays

Consumer goods industry covers a large portfolio of products, including food and non-food categories, ranging from food and beverages to clothing and footwear and everything in between. Despite a nearly 5% increase in the demand for consumer packaged goods in the US, social media engagement of consumer goods was relatively low.

Even though most weekdays saw some engagement on Twitter in the early morning hours around 3 a.m., the best times to post were Tuesdays at 9 p.m. and Wednesdays at 3 a.m. Weekends had the lowest engagement for this industry.

Consumer goods social media resources

• How to master social media for retail and win more customers
• How to set ecommerce social media up for success
• Mobile commerce: what it is and why you should care

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Education

• Best times to post on Twitter for Education: Mondays at 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Education: Mondays, Tuesdays and Sundays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Education: Thursdays and Saturdays

Higher education and educational institutions saw an interesting shift and a new day for engagement opportunities on Twitter compared to last year. Mondays continue to have the highest engagement this year and Sundays evenings have entered the arena starting around 4 p.m. This could be in anticipation of the week ahead.

From highlighting student life to sharing school updates, a social media strategy for education needs to fulfill multiple functions. Keep in mind that some schools manage multiple social profiles (per college, athletics, etc.) to meet these needs and effectively target distinct audiences at the right time.

Higher education social media resources

• University branding: How to build your school’s brand on social media
• Higher ed playbook: Using social to unite your university
• 12 Ways to use social media for education

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Finance

• Best times to post on Twitter for Finance: Tuesdays at 4 p.m., Wednesdays at 4 a.m., Fridays at 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Finance: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Finance: Mondays, Saturday, Sundays

Interestingly, top times on Twitter for financial institutions were highly varied, perhaps reflecting a global audience’s ready engagement with short updates on news and markets worldwide. Highest engagement times ranged from Tuesdays at 4 p.m., Wednesdays at 4 a.m. or Fridays at 11 a.m.

This may be due to the highly regulated nature of the finance industry or, after performing their own social testing, banks and financial businesses are focusing their efforts on other platforms, such as Facebook. The highly varied engagement times could perhaps reflect a global audience’s ready engagement with short updates on news and markets worldwide.

Finance social media resources

• 6 Social media tips for banks and financial institutions
• How social media drives cryptocurrency for users & brands
• Navigating social media compliance across regulated industries

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Healthcare

• Best times to post on Twitter for Healthcare: Mondays at 1—2 p.m., Tuesdays at 10 a.m. and noon, Wednesdays at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., Thursdays at 8 a.m. and noon—1 p.m., Fridays 8—9 p.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Healthcare: Tuesdays through Fridays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Healthcare: Saturdays and Sundays

Healthcare services and institutions have spent the last few years with an overwhelming challenge responding to global audiences. As the pandemic went into its second year and vaccines were being distributed, engagement with healthcare institutions on Twitter grew compared to last year.

Each weekday saw its own peak engagement time, varying at some point between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Healthcare businesses saw their engagement on Twitter expand to new times compared to last year. With the many healthcare news and updates in 2021, we can assume audiences were looking for answers to their questions or sharing their experiences.

Healthcare social media resources

• Social media and healthcare: how to prioritize what patients need
• Why healthcare orgs should invest in social listening, stat
• Supporting HIPAA Compliance on social: a cheat sheet

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Hospitality

• Best times to post on Twitter for Hospitality: Wednesdays at 8 p.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Hospitality: Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Hospitality: Tuesdays, Fridays, Sundays

Hotels and hospitality brands saw a major shift in Twitter engagement times. Engagement used to be more consistent throughout the week, but now we see less engagement during regular business hours and more engagement later in the evenings.

Current best time to post on Twitter for hospitality is Wednesdays at 8 p.m. The highest days of engagement for hospitality brands on Twitter are Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

Hospitality social media resources

• Sprout for travel and hospitality: Deliver a five-star experience on social
• Social Spotlight: Hilton’s pandemic strategy proves the business value of social
• How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
• When to create separate social media accounts for your multilocation business [Free Worksheet]

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Media

• Best times to post on Twitter for Media: Mondays at 10 a.m., Tuesdays 9 to 11 a.m., Wednesdays 10 a.m. to noon
• Best days to post on Twitter for Media: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Media: Saturdays

Engagement for media or journalistic industry accounts was consistent from early weekday morning hours through the afternoons. In fact, this industry saw higher engagement on Twitter compared to last year, with engagement expanding through all hours of the day.

We see high Twitter engagement for the media industry Mondays at 10 a.m., Tuesdays 9 to 11 a.m., Wednesdays 10 a.m. to noon. We also see strong engagement Mondays through Fridays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Media social media resources

• Social media and journalism: how to effectively reach the public
• How to supercharge your media relations strategy with social
• 9 visual journalists changing the way we tell stories with data

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Nonprofit

• Best times to post on Twitter for Nonprofits: Mondays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Tuesdays 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Wednesdays 9 a.m. to 1p.m., Thursdays 10 a.m. to noon, Fridays 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Nonprofits: Every day but mostly Mondays through Fridays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Nonprofits: None

Nonprofits saw stronger engagement on Twitter compared to last year. Our data for the best times to post on Instagram for nonprofits shows solid engagement throughout the week, especially in the mornings to early afternoons, as well as the weekend. The best times for nonprofit engagement on Twitter are Mondays through Fridays between 9 a.m. and noon.

Even with this consistent audience engagement, it’s important for nonprofits to test their own best times to post. Whether it’s through AB social testing or using Sprout’s Optimal Send Times feature, you can find what works best for your organization and test which platforms your target audience is on the most.

Nonprofit social media resources

• How Sprout Social helps not-for-profits transform awareness into action
• A strategic guide to social media for nonprofits
• Turning moments into momentum: How nonprofits can leverage #GivingTuesday year-round

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Restaurants

• Best times to post on Twitter for Restaurants: Mondays at noon
• Best days to post on Twitter for Restaurants: Mondays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Restaurants: Sundays

In 2021, restaurants continued to deal with online orders, curbside or delivery services, outdoor seating, and limited indoor dining. Communicating changes with employees and diners was important as local ordinances fluctuated throughout the year.

Twitter engagement for restaurants and bars shifted in terms of days of highest engagement. Last year showed Wednesdays had the highest engagement, but this year we see a shift to noon on Mondays. Keep in mind that different platforms offer a unique way for businesses to connect with their customers. Offering unique promotions and updates suited for each platform will keep your restaurant in mind for potential customers.

Restaurant social media resources

• The complete guide to social media for restaurants & bars
• Social media marketing for franchise businesses
• How to effectively run a multi-location review management strategy
• Social Spotlight: How Tim Hortons puts people first in its social strategy

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Tech

• Best times to post on Twitter for Tech: Thursdays at noon, Sundays at 3 p.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Tech: Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Tech: Tuesdays

In the last year alone, tech companies – including SaaS, software and B2B – have seen growth in social media engagement on both Facebook and Twitter. Social platforms are incredibly effective for staying in touch with current customers, allowing brands to create a community around their products and offer meaningful customer care.

It might be surprising to see that software and tech had a large number of engagement times on Twitter. However, it’s a perfect fit for tech companies and B2B brands to respond to customer care on Twitter in real-time. Compared to last year, engagement on Twitter nearly doubled and expanded to all days of the week. Best times to engage with customers for the tech industry are Thursdays at noon, Sundays at 3 p.m., but every day shows promise with moderate or high engagement times.

Tech social media resources

• How to put together a top-tier SaaS marketing strategy
• 5 stats for social media marketers in the software industry
• 4 overlooked B2B market research methods for understanding your customers

Best Times to Post on Twitter for Travel and Tourism

• Best times to post on Twitter for Travel & Tourism: Wednesdays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
• Best days to post on Twitter for Travel & Tourism: Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Twitter for Travel & Tourism: Saturdays and Sundays

Travel and tourism industries saw a drop in engagement on Twitter as many travel restrictions were lifted in 2021. Whether it was participating in “virtual” tourism, local exploration or discovering new destinations, our data shows that audiences were less responsive to engagement efforts by travel and tourism brands.

On Twitter, there was primarily higher engagement on Wednesdays throughout the US workday and the highest engagement being at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m

Travel and tourism social media resources

• How to set up a travel social media marketing strategy
• Hello from the outside: Exploring the great outdoors while staying close to home
• The ultimate social media for museums guide

How to find your own best times to post on social media

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data on the top times to post across social networks. Still, as platforms evolve with how brands and consumers are using social, there are new ways to innovate interactions all the time. New content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

More tips for content scheduling and social strategies

• Building your social media marketing strategy for 2022
• How to craft an effective social media content strategy
• 20 social media ideas to keep your brand’s feed fresh
• Creating a 30-day social media plan

While posting at peak engagement times is a go-to strategy, a detailed analysis of your audience might reveal less busy times when your specific audience is active, but competitors are not. A tool like Sprout Social can help you dig into your own analytics and develop tailored findings for your accounts to complement the wide range of data across industries we’ve surveyed here.

With Sprout’s tools like post tagging and cross-channel reporting, you can separate different factors like network or types of media and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s very own ViralPost® algorithm uses the same types of data we’ve looked at across all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post for your individual account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option on our Professional and Advanced plans.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times that your own audience engages the most are identified based on your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing repeated analyses yourself.
Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social.

Start your free Sprout trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post on social media and across ten industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on social media
• Best times to post on Instagram
• Best times to post on Facebook

How we gathered the data

We understand that these reports can raise questions about just where the data is coming from. That’s why we want to be clear about the data we pulled and how we got here.

First off, we were lucky enough to work with Sprout Social’s very own data science team to gather this information from our customers. Joel Booth, a Senior Data Scientist at Sprout, explained how it all works.

“Sprout integrates with the different social media platforms via their API, which allows the application to receive messages on behalf of our customers,” Booth said. “Essentially, this is how we power features such as Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Reports.”

Now’s the time to test your content calendar. Are you posting when your followers are most active? Start your free trial of Sprout Social and discover your best times to post on social media today.

Start your free Sprout trial

The post The best times to post on Twitter 2022 appeared first on Sprout Social.

For brands who want to take advantage of Facebook’s large audience and opportunity for maximum visibility, it’s important to know when your audience is most active, especially for your industry. With 71% of consumers using social more than they have in years past, brands and marketers need to meet their audiences where they are. And when customers’ expectations are met on social, it benefits every area of a business.

If you’re interested in learning how to identify your best times to post on Instagram and other social profiles, start a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature with your profiles.

Try our Best Times to Post generator

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded in Central Time (CST). Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times.

• What are the best times to post on Facebook?
• What are the best times to post on Facebook by industry?
  • Consumer Goods
  • Education
  • Finance
  • Healthcare
  • Hospitality
  • Media
  • Nonprofit
  • Restaurants
  • Tech
  • Travel and Tourism
• How to find your own best times to post on social media
• How we gathered the data

Best Times to Post on Facebook

• Best times to post on Facebook: Monday through Friday at 3 a.m., Tuesdays at 10 a.m. and noon
• Best days to post on Facebook: Tuesdays through Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook: Saturdays

We’ve seen an interesting shift in when there’s the most engagement on Facebook in 2022. While mid-mornings used to dominate more strongly in years past, which would align with the US workday and people using the app on their commutes to school or work, it now appears early morning hours have taken the lead.

Weekday very early mornings and mid-mornings still show more consistent engagement and have become much more opportune times for brands to get eyes on their content. But there are a few more “off” times for Facebook when reviewing the data, including late evenings or early mornings on the weekends.

Keep in mind that the top times shown are recorded in US Central Time, so these high engagement times shown in the very early mornings plus the traditional US workday reflects Facebook’s significant global audience. What does this mean? Facebook continues to show opportunities in conducting a multi-location or international social media strategy for brands.

Best Times to Post on Facebook by Industry

Being armed with the best times to post on Facebook is a great start to any social media content calendar, it’s important to see how the data translates to your specific industry. With the help of our Data Science team, we were able to capture the best times to post on Instagram within ten industries.

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Consumer Goods

• Best times to post on Facebook for Consumer Goods: Fridays at 10 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Consumer Goods: Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Consumer Goods: Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays

Consumer goods social media resources

• How to master social media for retail and win more customers
• How to set ecommerce social media up for success
• Mobile commerce: what it is and why you should care

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Education

• Best times to post on Facebook for Education: Mondays from 8 to 10 a.m., Tuesdays at noon, Wednesdays at 9 a.m., and Fridays from 9 to 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Education: Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Education: Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays

There was no slowing down for universities, higher education and educational institutions on Facebook. Opportunities for engagement started midmornings and went throughout the day on weekdays, but also saw moderate engagement Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings.

From highlighting student life to sharing school updates, a social media strategy for education needs to fulfill multiple functions. Keep in mind that some schools manage multiple social profiles (per college, athletics, etc.) to meet these needs and effectively target distinct audiences at the right time.

Higher education social media resources

• University branding: How to build your school’s brand on social media
• Higher ed playbook: Using social to unite your university
• 12 Ways to use social media for education

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Finance

• Best times to post on Facebook for Finance: Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 11 a.m., Thursdays at 10 a.m. and noon
• Best days to post on Facebook for Finance: Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Finance: Saturdays and Sundays

For social engagements with financial institutions, we noticed an interesting shift on Facebook. While in years past we saw a consistent engagement extended throughout the majority of the US workday, we continue to see a more concentrated engagement time this year. High engagement are Tuesdays through Fridays between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., which follow a more typical pattern of activity around the US workweek.

Finance social media resources

• 6 Social media tips for banks and financial institutions
• How social media drives cryptocurrency for users & brands
• Navigating social media compliance across regulated industries

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Healthcare

• Best times to post on Facebook for Healthcare: Mondays at 10 a.m., Tuesdays at 10 and 11 a.m., Fridays at 10 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Healthcare: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Healthcare: Saturdays and Sundays

Healthcare services and institutions have spent the last few years with an overwhelming challenge responding to global audiences. As the pandemic went into its second year, vaccines were being distributed, and virtual learning was still in session for students, engagement with healthcare institutions, especially on Facebook, grew compared to last year.

Similar to last year, the most engagement on Facebook for healthcare was between 9 and 11 a.m. However, engagement expanded to include the afternoons most weekdays until about 3 p.m. With the many healthcare news and updates of 2021, we can assume audiences were looking for answers to their questions.

Healthcare social media resources

• Social media and healthcare: how to prioritize what patients need
• Why healthcare orgs should invest in social listening, stat
• Supporting HIPAA Compliance on social: a cheat sheet

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Hospitality

• Best times to post on Facebook for Hospitality: Wednesdays at noon
• Best days to post on Facebook for Hospitality: Wednesdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Hospitality: Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, Sundays

Hotels and hospitality brands saw a significant shift in Facebook engagement times. Engagement used to span across most of the US workday, but we see a huge decline in Facebook engagement data. This could be because of the continuing limitations of travel or a shift in platform preferences.

The current best time to post on Facebook for hospitality is Wednesdays at noon.. There is some Facebook engagement throughout the week and the highest days of Facebook engagement are Wednesdays and Fridays. Hospitality brands appeared to have shifted their social media priorities to Instagram, but that doesn’t mean Facebook should be abandoned either.

Hospitality social media resources

• Sprout for travel and hospitality: Deliver a five-star experience on social
• Social Spotlight: Hilton’s pandemic strategy proves the business value of social
• How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
• When to create separate social media accounts for your multilocation business [Free Worksheet]

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Media

• Best times to post on Facebook for Media: Fridays from 5 to 9 a.m., Sundays at 7 a.m. and 9 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Media: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Media: Mondays

Engagement for media or journalistic industry accounts was higher during US morning hours throughout the week. This could reflect a tendency for audiences to check in for longer, single sessions rather than quick visits throughout the day. However, we see solid Facebook engagement for the media industry Tuesday through Sunday mornings from 5 a.m. through 9 a.m., and the highest engagement specifically on Fridays and Sunday mornings.

Media social media resources

• Social media and journalism: how to effectively reach the public
• How to supercharge your media relations strategy with social
• 9 visual journalists changing the way we tell stories with data

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Nonprofit

• Best times to post on Facebook for Nonprofits: Fridays at noon
• Best days to post on Facebook for Nonprofits: Mondays, Tuesdays Wednesdays, Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Nonprofits: Saturdays

Nonprofits’ engagement on Facebook shifted significantly this year. Our data for the best times to post on Facebook for nonprofits shows solid Facebook engagement throughout the week during US business hours as well as weekend mornings, but the best times for engagement are Fridays at noon.

Even with this consistent audience engagement, it’s important for nonprofits to test their own best times to post. Whether it’s through AB social testing or using Sprout’s Optimal Send Times feature, you can find what works best for your organization and test which platforms your target audience is on the most.

Nonprofit social media resources

• How Sprout Social helps not-for-profits transform awareness into action
• A strategic guide to social media for nonprofits
• Turning moments into momentum: How nonprofits can leverage #GivingTuesday year-round

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Restaurants

• Best times to post on Facebook for Restaurants: Tuesdays at noon, Thursdays at 1 and 2 p.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Restaurants: Thursdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Restaurants: Sundays

In 2021, restaurants continued to deal with online orders, curbside or delivery services and limited indoor dining. Communicating changes with employees and diners was important as local ordinances fluctuated throughout the year.

Facebook engagement for restaurants and bars were unevenly distributed but saw higher engagement closer to the weekends. Keep in mind that different platforms offer a unique way for businesses to connect with their customers. Offering unique promotions and updates suited for each platform will keep your restaurant in mind for potential customers.

Restaurant social media resources

• The complete guide to social media for restaurants & bars
• Social media marketing for franchise businesses
• How to effectively run a multi-location review management strategy
• Social Spotlight: How Tim Hortons puts people first in its social strategy

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Tech

• Best times to post on Facebook for Tech: Tuesdays at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., Wednesdays at 11 a.m., and Fridays at 9 a.m., 11 a.m. and noon
• Best days to post on Facebook for Tech: Wednesdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Tech: Sundays

In the last year alone, tech companies – including SaaS, software and B2B – have seen growth in social media engagement on both Facebook and Twitter. Social platforms are incredibly effective for staying in touch with current customers, allowing brands to create a community around their products and offer meaningful customer care using tools like Facebook Groups.

Tech social media resources

• How to put together a top-tier SaaS marketing strategy
• 5 stats for social media marketers in the software industry
• 4 overlooked B2B market research methods for understanding your customers

Best Times to Post on Facebook for Travel and Tourism

• Best times to post on Facebook for Travel & Tourism: Wednesdays at 9 a.m. and Fridays at 10 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Travel & Tourism: Tuesdays through Fridays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Travel & Tourism: Saturdays and Sundays

Travel and tourism industries still saw a solid amount of engagement on Facebook as many travel restrictions were lifted in 2021. Whether it was participating in “virtual” tourism, local exploration or discovering new destinations, our data shows that audiences responded to engagement efforts by travel and tourism brands.

On Facebook, there was significant engagement midday and midweek, especially on Wednesdays and Fridays, as people are getting ready for their weekend destinations.

Travel and tourism social media resources

• How to set up a travel social media marketing strategy
• Hello from the outside: Exploring the great outdoors while staying close to home
• The ultimate social media for museums guide

How to find your own best times to post on social media

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data on the top times to post across social networks. Still, as platforms evolve with how brands and consumers are using social, there are new ways to innovate interactions all the time. New content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

More tips for content scheduling and social strategies

• Building your social media marketing strategy for 2022
• How to craft an effective social media content strategy
• 20 social media ideas to keep your brand’s feed fresh
• Creating a 30-day social media plan

While posting at peak engagement times is a go-to strategy, a detailed analysis of your audience might reveal less busy times when your specific audience is active, but competitors are not. A tool like Sprout Social can help you dig into your own analytics and develop tailored findings for your accounts to complement the wide range of data across industries we’ve surveyed here.

With Sprout’s tools like post tagging and cross-channel reporting, you can separate different factors like network or types of media and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s very own ViralPost® algorithm uses the same types of data we’ve looked at across all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post for your individual account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option on our Professional and Advanced plans.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times that your own audience engages the most are identified based on your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing repeated analyses yourself.
Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social.

Start your free Sprout trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post on social media and across ten industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on social media
• Best times to post on Instagram
• Best times to post on Twitter

How we gathered the data

We understand that these reports can raise questions about just where the data is coming from. That’s why we want to be clear about the data we pulled and how we got here.

First off, we were lucky enough to work with Sprout Social’s very own data science team to gather this information from our customers. Joel Booth, a Senior Data Scientist at Sprout, explained how it all works.

“Sprout integrates with the different social media platforms via their API, which allows the application to receive messages on behalf of our customers,” Booth said. “Essentially, this is how we power features such as Sprout’s Smart Inbox and Reports.”

Now’s the time to test your content calendar. Are you posting when your followers are most active? Start your free trial of Sprout Social and discover your best times to post on social media today.

Start your free Sprout trial

The post The best times to post on Facebook 2022 appeared first on Sprout Social.

If not, it’s time to learn!

We know: scheduling posts on Instagram used to be a huge headache.

Thankfully, times have changed. Recent updates to the platform and a new wave of third-party apps make it easier than ever to schedule posts on Instagram.

But doing so isn’t as simple as queuing up a bunch of posts and walking away.

In this guide, we’ll cover why you should schedule Instagram posts, how to do it and best practices for automating your campaigns.

Why should you schedule Instagram posts, anyway?

Businesses have begged for scheduling features on Instagram for years.

But why are so many marketers eager to queue up their content? Below are some of the biggest benefits of scheduled Instagram posts.

1. Develop a more comprehensive content strategy

Food for thought: Instagram stats highlight that different types of content (think: carousels, images, Stories and videos) all receive different rates of engagement.

Similarly, brands need to diversify their content strategies and not just post the same type of content over and over.

When you schedule posts on Instagram, you give yourself time to actually assess your content calendar.

And when you don’t have to rush to publish Instagram posts, you have time to gather the various assets you need to create fresh, compelling content.

Want to spend a few days workshopping a storytelling post or editing a video? No problem.

2. Free up your schedule to interact more with followers

If nothing else, scheduling Instagram posts can free up some serious time in your schedule.

That means more opportunities to interact with followers and reply to comments.

Even the best Instagram scheduler can’t do the legwork of building relationships with customers. When you stick to a schedule and post consistently, you can dedicate more time to engagement.

3. Better time management means higher quality posts

Think about the effort that goes into any given post or campaign.

Writing captions. Tweaking images. Tagging.

And that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Writing Instagram posts last-minute is a recipe for burnout. By scheduling posts on Instagram, you can batch your time appropriately and craft more meaningful posts.

4. Create seamless marketing campaigns beyond Instagram

Your marketing campaigns shouldn’t be siloed.

From organic and paid social to email and beyond, all of your channels should be on the same page in terms of creatives, landing pages and promotions. This creates a better customer experience.

Through social scheduling, you ensure that your posts fire off at the right time. If you’re using a social media management tool such as Sprout Social, you can actually sync all of your social channels (think: Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest) so you don’t have to publish manually or in real-time.

5. Encourage collaboration and brainstorming

Again, scheduling encourages brands to begin working on posts well in advance.

This means marketers and colleagues have time to hash out the best captions and creative assets.

Useful for both social teams and marketers looking for feedback from clients or influencers, collaboration and Instagram scheduling go hand in hand. Coupled with a social media approval process, it’s a cinch to get multiple sets of eyes on your content before it goes live.

“Can you schedule Instagram posts directly from the app?”

The short answer? Yes.

There are two ways to set up basic Instagram scheduling within the platform, albeit not from the mobile app itself.

The first (and perhaps most straightforward) is through Creator Studio for Instagram. Below is a quick breakdown of how it works and what desktop scheduling looks like:

The second way to schedule posts on Instagram natively is through Facebook Business Suite. Not unlike Creator Studio, the platform lets you upload your imagery, write out captions and preview your scheduled content before it goes live. A nice upside of Business Suite is that you can post via mobile.

How to schedule Instagram posts from Creator Studio

Ready to start scheduling Instagram posts? First, connect to your Instagram Business Account from your Creator Studio dashboard. Then follow these steps:

• Step 1. In Creator Studio, click Create Post, then click Instagram Feed. (If you have multiple Instagram accounts, you’ll be able to specify which one.)
• Step 2. Write your caption and include your mentions and hashtags (up to 30 each).
• Step 3. Now click Add Content and pick the images or videos you want to share. You can add images directly from your Facebook Page or upload them from your computer.
• Step 4. Tag any accounts you want to include, then click Save.
• Step 5. Now you can either click Publish to share your post immediately, or click the arrow next to Publish and select Schedule. Then choose the time and date for publication and click Schedule again.

How to schedule Instagram posts using Sprout Social

Scheduling Instagram posts natively is straightforward, but how about when you have a larger social strategy across multiple platforms to plan and schedule?

With a dedicated social media publishing tool like Sprout, you can do so much more.

Cross-posting. Team collaboration and permissions. In-depth analytics. The list goes on.

We make it so easy to upload to your feed, add a Carousel or Story imagery, finalize your content and schedule it whether you’re on desktop or mobile.

Below is a precise, step-by-step process of how to schedule Instagram posts on Sprout.

Step 1. Pick your images or video

The first step to scheduling Instagram posts is picking the image(s) or video to post. If you’re not 100% sure what you should publish, check out our in-depth guide on Instagram post ideas.

Using Sprout’s Publishing tools you can quickly upload your Instagram image in Compose. And, you can do more than post to Instagram. The fully integrated feature lets you schedule posts to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok and Instagram at the same time.

Step 2. Polish your Instagram post

After you upload your Instagram picture, it’s time to edit your image. You can edit images in Compose with an integrated Image Editor tool:

Here you can crop, add effects and overlays, change lighting and adjust the focus. Creativity counts on Instagram—avoid posting poorly edited images to your profile.

After you finish fine-tuning your image, you can tag other Instagram users directly in your photo or add hashtags to the first Instagram comment.

Users recognize and appreciate polished content. To increase your shares, likes and comments, make sure your posts go through a thorough round of edits before going live.

Step 3. Select the appropriate Instagram account and post type

Once you’ve edited your content, select what account you wish to post to. Note that you can manage multiple Instagram accounts in Sprout when scheduling your content. This makes it much easier to select your preferred Instagram account along with other social networks connected to your Sprout account.

Many businesses need to publish to multiple Instagram accounts. Managing the publishing for these accounts requires the content creator to receive content approval, coordinate the post’s timing and ensure that someone is logged into the correct account to publish the post.

Luckily with Sprout, your social media team has several options to publish Instagram content.

Keep in mind, mobile publishing is only required for Story and Carousels. While not required for grid posts, you can select a mobile publisher if your workflow prefers it.

Step 4. Stage your post for publishing

After your content is edited and approved, you can click Send to publish it immediately, or move the post to Draft, Queue, Schedule, or Submit for Approval. Let’s take a look at each option:

• Draft: Not sure if your post is ready to go live quite yet? Want to create multiple “backup” Instagram posts for the future? Draft is a great spot to park your unfinished content or items that still need approval.
• Queue: The Sprout Queue is ideal for edited posts ready to go live—especially if you’re not sure when to post your content. When you queue your Instagram posts, Sprout picks the best time to publish within the window you specify.
• Schedule: Use the schedule feature when you want to publish your Instagram posts at a specific time. This is great for when you’re launching an Instagram contest and want the post to go live right when it starts. It’s also helpful if you’re scheduling an Instagram post as a part of a larger campaign, and need content to go out at a specific time of the day. Plan finished content for the future and see your scheduled posts in Sprout’s Publishing Calendar.
• Submit for Approval: Choosing an approver ensures your content is properly edited, grammatically correct, timely and on-brand. Select specific approvers to review your content before it goes live.
• Send: If you don’t need approval and are ready to publish right away, click Send.

Step 5. Schedule your Instagram Story or Carousel post (mobile publishing workflow only)

For those scheduling or submitting an Instagram Story or Carousel through Sprout, you’ll receive a mobile notification at the selected time or immediately after clicking Send. Because Instagram’s API doesn’t allow for other platforms to post Stories or directly to its network, Sprout developed a notification system that takes the pain out of scheduling Story content.

To receive these alerts, you have to select “Allow Notifications” on your mobile device. All alerts for scheduled content are sent out to the appropriate users. From the notification, you can easily open Sprout’s mobile app to send the image and caption to Instagram.

When the Instagram Publisher receives the notification to post a Story post or Carousel, they can tap on the notification to open the Sprout app. From there, they’ll see the media, Story Notes and Link Stickers, as well as which Instagram account the post is going to. Tapping Continue to Instagram opens the Instagram app with the appropriate profile.

Then, the Instagram Publisher can paste the Story from their clipboard. Take a final look at the content and tap Share to publish.

And boom! The process of using Sprout is quick and simple for brands looking to schedule Instagram Stories and posts.

5 tips and best practices for scheduling Instagram posts

We’ll say it again: You can’t just queue up your posts months or weeks in advance and expect your Instagram to grow on autopilot.

Below are some key considerations for brands looking to leverage Instagram scheduling for the first time.

1. Optimize your post timing to maximize engagement

A nice added bonus of scheduling is that your business isn’t beholden to “business hours.”

Based on our research on best times to post on social media, there’s a correlation between time of day and engagement:

Although these numbers aren’t the be-all, end-all of follower activity and vary based on your time zone, they’re eye-opening in terms of when the average Instagram user is active:

Marketers using Sprout social as their Instagram scheduler can increase engagement with our ViralPost algorithm that optimizes post timing. Rather than guess or decide when to post via trial and error, you’ll know exactly when to post, based on real follower engagement data.

2. Take extra care when crafting your captions

It’s no secret that Instagram captions represent valuable real estate when it comes to engagement.

They shouldn’t be treated as an afterthought. For each post, consider:

• Which Instagram hashtag are you using? How many? Are they in your first comment (see below)?
• Do you need to tag any accounts?
• Did you write an appropriate call-to-action?
• How does this caption compare to your most recent one(s)?

Much like your content strategy needs to be diverse, the same rings true for your Instagram captions.

When you schedule posts in advance, you have time to put your captions under the microscope and ensure there’s some variety. Likewise, you can confirm that you’re using the right hashtags and aren’t missing any key details before your post goes live.

3. Keep a close eye on your content calendar

Piggybacking on the point above, scheduling based on a defined content calendar encourages both variety and consistency in terms of your posts.

As you queue up your posts, ask yourself:

• Are we hitting the appropriate publishing frequency (think: daily, four times a week)?
• Is there enough variation in our content schedule (think: video versus carousel versus photo)?
• How are we promoting this content to encourage engagement (think: Stories, questions in CTA)?
• Are there opportunities to cross-post this content to other networks (like Facebook)?
• Have the appropriate stakeholders reviewed this post before it goes live?

The answers to all of the above ensure more thoughtful, goal-driven posts that are poised to perform well. Below is a quick snapshot of what a content calendar looks like in the Sprout app:

4. Block off time to engage with customers

Despite popular belief, scheduling Instagram posts doesn’t make your presence more “passive.”

Quite the opposite, honestly.

Yet again, scheduling frees up your schedule to interact with customers in real-time.

Mind your notifications and make sure your comment section never gathers cobwebs. Be proactive and make a point to respond to social customers ASAP for the sake of satisfaction and loyalty.

5. Know when to hit “pause” on your scheduling

Whether due to a brand emergency or a bigger crisis management effort, sometimes you need to put a stop to your scheduled content.

Failure to do so could come off as insensitive or result in otherwise poor engagement when your followers’ minds are elsewhere. For example, publishing promotional content during certain holidays, on somber occasions or in the wake of tragedies is not the best for your brand’s reputation.

This speaks to how Instagram scheduling is so much more than putting your brand on autopilot. As a side note, Sprout has built-in features to pause scheduled posts and resume them when the time is right.

Ready to schedule posts on Instagram yourself?

If you want to build a better Instagram presence and free up more time in your busy day, you need to start scheduling.

Doing so might seem simple, but making the most of Instagram scheduling means understanding the key details of any given post and how to best engage followers.

With the tips above and tools like Sprout, you can create a compelling content calendar that does exactly that. If you haven’t already, make sure to take a trial of Sprout Social today to see our full suite of social media features in action.

The post How to schedule Instagram posts (and why you should) appeared first on Sprout Social.