How to plan Social Media Posts to Different Timezones? Checking your audience country on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram

October 25, 2020
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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.

countries where Postfity has most clients

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! 

  1. 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:

page views by country FB

So far so good.

Only that...you need 100 unique viewers in one week to see any data:

page views unavailable

...and you cannot view country views for a date range longer than 7 days:

FB page views by country

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:

  1. Go to Google Analytics > Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals
Google Analytics FB referral traffic

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):

top 5 on FB in a month

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:

Linkedin on GA
Twitter GA

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:

Twitter analytics

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:

Instagram-Activity-Analytics

...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:

Facebook

Main countries: US, Poland, Canada, UK, India

LinkedIn 

Main countries: UK, Poland

Twitter 

US, Canada, UK, India

Instagram

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:

  1. Facebook and Instagram - US and Canada
  2. Facebook and Instagram - London
  3. Facebook and Instagram - Poland
  4. Linkedin & Twitter - US and Canada
  5. Linkedin & Twitter - London
  6. 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:

Timezones Postfity

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!

Try Postfity for FREE for 30 days now!

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