B2B social media: what is the best time to post?
As a B2B brand, what is the best time to post on social media and which platform do you use for your content distribution? LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram alone have different types of users. In this article, we dive deeper into the world of social media and give you some tips on how to ensure your content reaches your target audience as efficiently as possible.
First of all, it is important to distinguish between B2B and B2C companies. The target audience of B2C companies often makes quicker decisions and is less loyal. Therefore, it is important to continuously bring content to attention and stimulate impulse purchases.
B2B companies, on the other hand, have a more complex purchasing process, also known as the buyer journey. A potential customer first researches a particular topic or service. As a B2B entrepreneur, this is your chance to become visible and stay visible. Because if your potential customer has a problem, and your service is the solution, you want your brand to stand out above your competitors. To stay top-of-mind with potential customers, we advise our B2B clients to maintain a bi-weekly content distribution schedule.
Is it only about the frequency of content distribution? The answer is no. Recent research shows that the timing of distribution affects the amount of interaction on social media. The more interaction, the greater the reach. This means that the reach of your content is smaller if you distribute at times when there is little interaction. Reason enough to stick more or less to the successful days and times.
LinkedIn: best time for your post
Of all social media, LinkedIn is seen as the most professionally oriented platform. Logically, you see the least activity on this platform during the weekend. The platform mainly focuses on expanding the network of professionals and increasing business visibility. Of the Dutch users, 47% are between 20 and 39 years old and 37% between 40 and 64 years old.
In principle, anything can be shared on LinkedIn, from articles to video content. Clearly non-business content is generally not appreciated by many users. But what time and on which day should you share your business content?
Because LinkedIn is mainly used during office hours, you would expect a post around office hours to have the greatest reach. However, research shows a remarkable finding: most interaction appears to be at 7:00 PM. See this as an opportunity and explore the results of a late LinkedIn post.
LinkedIn best practice: link to your own website
Make sure you always link to your own page in your post and make your target audience curious enough so that readers want to read or view the content on your website.
Many articles report that posts with a link perform worse on LinkedIn than posts without a link. By this, they mean that the reach of your post is lower. They therefore recommend sharing the link only in the comments. We disagree with this. Marketing on an external channel like LinkedIn naturally aims to reach many people and have a big impact. But by directing people to your own website, you have much more control and insight. There you can have people sign up for a newsletter, offer a special call-to-action, or draw attention to other interesting articles or content. You can see what works and what doesn’t. On LinkedIn, you remain a slave to the algorithm and, like Facebook, LinkedIn can suddenly decide that you have to pay to reach your target audience. Then you will be glad you have built your own channel.
Using Instagram in B2B
Instagram is especially popular for sharing photo and video content. We previously wrote an article about the power of video marketing. This makes the platform more limited for you as a business entrepreneur, because potential customers cannot be directly referred to the desired page on your website. Additionally, your target audience may not even use Instagram, as the largest percentage of users is 15-25 years old. If you still want to use this platform, we advise you to first carefully consider what message you want to convey with video marketing.
Over the past period, the best time to post on Instagram has shifted. Whereas most interaction last year was at the beginning of the evening, the time has now shifted to the afternoon. The peak is seen around 5:00 PM.
Facebook is the most used social media platform in the Netherlands. And although the platform is used by almost all age categories, with the largest group of users being the older half of the Netherlands, there is another remarkable fact about the users. The lower the education level, the more time is spent on Facebook.
For example, figures show that 52% of American users get daily news from Facebook. If you are, for example, a recruiter looking for new employees for logistics work, Facebook is a great platform. However, if you are looking for highly educated professionals, chances are you will not reach your target audience via Facebook.
The best time to post on Facebook is close to Instagram and has remained fairly stable over the past years. There are two daily peaks, around noon and at 7:00 PM. It seems that interaction mainly takes place outside office hours.
The importance of content
All in all, we can conclude that each platform targets a more or less specific audience and that different types of content are distributed on different platforms. Think of LinkedIn mainly for publishing whitepapers, articles, or blogs. Facebook is a suitable platform for running campaigns, and Instagram is excellent for sharing photo and video content.
The fact remains that the quality of your content is the most important. Yes, it helps if you post on the days and times when most interaction is seen. However, more important is how well your message comes across to your target audience. The better your content is, the more likes, comments, and shares your post will get. So think carefully about how to make the reader curious with your content and look at it critically yourself. Less is more, as long as it is of good quality.