Planning posts to different timezones is a must if you have a business located in one geographical area (e.g. Europe), while the majority of your social media audience and customers are based in completely different timezones. This can also happen when you have your headquarters in different countries - as one of our customers Alvanon, which has their head offices in London, Hong Kong and New York, while their marketing manager is based in NY, found out. At Postfity, we learnt it hard way as well - with most of our users and followers based in the US, Australia and UK, while we're working out of Central European Timezone - we had to come up with a system that would allow us to plan social media posts to the times when our audience is most active, and when we - are asleep.
How did we do it? With Postfity of course. Here's how you can solve your problem of how to schedule posts to different timezsones on social media!
- Segment Your Audience By Country and Check When They are Most Active
First of all - in order to know when to post, you need to know where your social media followers come from, and when they are most active.
Contrary to expectations - checking that on social media themselves, e.g. Facebook page insights, is not so easy.
Checking Your Audience Location on Facebook Page
On Facebook, you can go to your Page insights, and check page views by country:
So far so good.
Only that...you need 100 unique viewers in one week to see any data:
...and you cannot view country views for a date range longer than 7 days:
Which in practice means: if you have fewer than 100 organic views on Facebook Page in any given 7 day time period, you won't be able to see any results by country on your Facebook page insights ????.
In reality, with organic reach between 2-6%, it's very difficult to have so many views in 7 says for a smaller page.
Fortunately, there's a hack you can use when you're posting links to your blog on your Facebook page - check referral traffic from Facebook in your Google Analytics!
Here's how to do that:
- Go to Google Analytics > Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals
Use the 'secondary dimension' menu and select 'users' > 'country'
You will then see which countries send you the highest rates of referral traffic from Facebook (and other social networks):
Repeat the same for other social networks by typing in 'Twitter', 'Instagram', 'Pinterest', 'Linkedin' or whatever else you're using to drive organic traffic to your website:
Checking the country of your audience on LinkedIn
Checking the countries your audience comes from is a bit easier on LinkedIn: go to Admin View > Analytics > Visitor Demographics > select: Data for: Location
Checking your Audience Country on LinkedIn and Instagram
Unfortunately, this is not the case for Twitter analytics, which are very limited:
For Twitter - again, you may be better off using Google Analytics to find out where your audience comes from.
On the other hand, checking where most of our followers come from and when they are active is super-easy on Instagram:
...this applies to business accounts only, though. If you have a personal Instagram account, you cannot check your insights at all.
Now that we know where our audience comes from for each platform, what do we do next?
Planning posts for different timezones
First of all, you need to divide your top-10 audience sources by timezones for each social medium you're carrying out marketing activities for.
For us, that would be:
Main countries: US, Poland, Canada, UK, India
Main countries: UK, Poland
US, Canada, UK, India
Poland, India, Norway
Judging by this, we can sort our audiences by 4 different timezones:
- US/Canada
- UK
- Central European Time (Poland, Norway)
- India
Knowing this, and knowing when people are most active on the different social media platforms (check our 'best time to post on social media' guide!) - let's recap:
Facebook - 9 AM, 1 PM, 3 PM
Twitter - 12 PM, 3 PM, 5-6 PM
LinkedIn - 7-8 AM, 12 PM, 5-6 PM
Instagram - 9-11 AM
We pick 'common times' to make life easier and decide on the following posting times:
Facebook & Instagram - 9 AM
Linkedin & Twitter - 12 PM
Group your accounts in Postfity accordingly:
- Facebook and Instagram - US and Canada
- Facebook and Instagram - London
- Facebook and Instagram - Poland
- Linkedin & Twitter - US and Canada
- Linkedin & Twitter - London
- Linkedin & Twitter - Poland
Then, we go to Postfity account, choose the right social media group (1-6) and select the right timezones to post on each of them:
Repeat the procedure for each account group.
And that's it!
Thanks to using a social media scheduler with different timezone planning you can easily leverage the times when your audience is most active - in different timezones!
