The question of how often to post on social media is one that has been discussed and debated for as long as I’ve been on social media. It’s easy to get confused by conflicting advice. When I teach classes, I recommend that students test for themselves. Use the data contained within Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights to track, test and monitor your optimal engagement times.

When you are starting out it can be useful however to turn to established sources to help guide your initial tests.

Hubspot is always a reliable source and has recently published a guide to online posting based on their own experiments.

Here’s a summary of the data. To delve deeper into the findings, read the Hubspot post.

When’s the Best Time to Post on Twitter?

According to Hubspot’s experiment, time generally doesn’t matter. Post on Twitter whenever is convenient for you. Your focus should be on content, not on the time of day. Similarly, Hubspot report that for most tweets, there’s no difference in the day of the week that you post.

Key Takeaway: On Twitter, publishing more is better. This makes sense because we know that fewer than half of all Twitter users check the site more than once per day. Every time your tweet gets posted, it will be seen by people people who may have missed it the first time. In addition, sharing a tweet at different times on different days, can help you find the optimum posting times for your posts.

Recommended Reading: Should you repeat your tweets? Facts and figures from 1M tweets

When’s the Best Time to Post on LinkedIn?

The median number of clicks doesn’t vary at all, but the 95th percentile of posts does show a dropoff with posts that are published late in the evening — after 5 p.m. or so. Posts published Mondays, Saturdays and Sundays don’t perform as well as posts published Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Once you publish more than 5 times per week (i.e. once per work day) the return on investment drops substantially.

Key Takeaway: Tuesdays and Wednesdays are especially good times to publish on LinkedIn.

When Is the Best Time to Post on Facebook?

Here the findings are less clear-cut and Husbspot suggest you focus on the content, not the time of day or day of the week when publishing. While there isn’t an ideal day to post on Facebook, it’s slightly better to post on Sundays, and there’s a natural dip in post frequency and engagement on Friday and Saturday.

Key Takeaway: Similar to LinkedIn, once you publish more than five times per week (for most companies, that’s once per workday) the return on investment drops substantially.

So there you have some useful data with which to experiment with. But do remember to do your own testing, and track and monitor engagement levels as you go.