As a social media manager, you have your content calendar, inputted all that is necessary and put up your post yet no engagement, reaction or response to the target of your posts. What could be the reason?

Chances are, you are putting up your post at the wrong time. Knowing when to engage your audience and maximize post reach is an essential part of social media marketing. Knowing your target audience especially by location, interest and post motives all make up an engaging social campaign with the desired effect and reach.

By Nigerian standards, there are times for engagement in the social media spaces, politics hold the highest engagement across all the social platforms and could trend or become a topic on space even by midnight. Take the case of the DSS sting operation on top judges that happened recently, as early as 4am DSS was trending and had over 4,500K tweets in an operation that took off barely three hours earlier. How do you engage a sporting post? A social hippy event?, a scandal? etc.

Here are best times (in Nigeria) to post across our leading social media platforms.

Twitter:

With much 140 character words on post on TL’s, the average life span of a post in Nigeria is less than 30mins. According to twitter analyst Wiselytics, while facebook post reaches 75% of its potential engagement in five hours, tweets achieve that in three hours or less. The best time to engage on twitter in Nigeria is:

Weekdays: 6:15 am – 2pm and 5pm -7pm

Weekends: 8am -12 pm and 3pm -9pm

Most social media analyst in Nigeria thinks it’s the best time to get the optimum for your tweets. Twitter reaches it optimum in Nigeria on weekends (especially sports related) but Mondays (7am -8:45am) sees a lot of outpouring on views on twitter.

Facebook

While it could be said that because of the huge users of facebook in Nigeria and the ‘un-understanding’ of twitter it means Facebook engages more with Nigerians than other but then the longetivity of posts (max of 2,00 words) makes Facebook often times a boring avenue to socialize.  The average elite in Nigeria goes on facebook and spends less than 30 mins and they are out. Best time to post of facebook and get an engaging crowd?

Weekends: 9am -5pm and 7pm -1am

Weekdays: 4am – 9am and 6pm -9pm

On facebook the most effective period to post are weekends especially Saturdays, Monday’s have the lowest post reaction on facebook.

Instagram

 Instagram posts appear in feeds “based on the likelihood [the audience] will be interested in the content.” That means that photos and videos with lots of comments and Likes have a better chance of appearing near the top of your followers’ home streams. But even though content no longer appears in a strictly chronological order, you still want to post on Instagram when you have the best chance to hit a large audience out of the gate.

To do this, think about your target persona and what their typical day looks like. Are they the type of person who would check Instagram as soon as they wake up? If so, when would that be? Where do they live and work?

In Nigeria, the best to get out of audience on Instagram are weekends, Friday night, Saturday all days and Sundays after services.

Post on instagram and hit your target audience on weekends and get the reach you expect.

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