Social media has served as one of the most useful ways to connect with friends and family throughout 2020. While most of today’s popular platforms have only been prominent in the UK since around 2005, ‘influencer’ now features in the top three career choices that children of 2020 aspire to. Looking to grow followers and attract users to your page? You will need to know which times and days are best for posting on social media to heighten your exposure and engagement. Here are the best and worst days and times to post. Facebook Facebook is the largest and most popular social media channel in the world, with nearly 170 billion users across the globe, including 32 million active UK users. User trends tend to centre around working hours, with people checking their news feeds throughout the working day or on their way to work. Social media managing platform, HootSuite, have concluded that these are the best and worst times to post: Instagram While Facebook may be the largest social media channel by active members and user numbers, its sister platform Instagram was the quickest growing one from 2017 to 2019, before being overtaken by TikTok. There are around 24 million Instagram users in the UK and, although TikTok is overtaking it in terms of active users, the ability to track where your users are coming from and the age, gender and location brackets on Instagram makes it arguably easier to grow your platform. According to data from Hootsuite and Sproutsocial, the dates and times to optimise user engagement are as follows: Youtube While Youtube engagement is highest in the evenings, posting in the afternoon is best as this allows Youtube to filter your video in time for people searching specific categories of video. Youtube has over 19 million users in the UK and is the second most dominant platform in the world. According to Search engine optimisation (SEO) forecaster, Edgy these are the best days and times to post. TikTok First launched in 2018, video sharing platform TikTok was the fastest growing social media app in 2019, having been downloaded over 738 million times (Hootsuite). The platform allows users to create videos of between 5 and 60 seconds long, using filters, effects and music. The main attraction might be the potential to go viral, creating memes and the discovery page of the site, which shows content viewers are likely to enjoy, making it easier to reach potential followers and gain traction quickly. The vast majority of TikTok influencers are not known celebrities, making it a hotbed of aspiring influencers. It is thought that despite the uncertain algorithms casting up any videos onto the ‘For You’ section of the site, there will be a best time and day for posting, but this has not been determined in the relatively short period since TikTok took off. However, data from Influencer Marketing Hub suggests that these are the best times and days to post: Twitter Twitter is arguably the most dependent on getting your timings right. for tweets to be seen by the largest audience, they need to be posted at the busiest period as Twitter tends to operate news feeds in chronological order for the most part. To maximise engagement, you also want to be posting about trending topics and using hashtags for people who are interested in your post to see it. According to SproutSocial and Hootsuite, these are the optimum times to share your content. Best days to post: