User-generated content (UGC) is often used by brands to showcase their customers and influencers, and if you’re wondering where to find it, check out how to listen and monitor on Instagram.

UGC is a common reason brands, like yours, need to be able to repost on Instagram.

And, to actually bring others’ content in your feed, you need to know how to repost on Instagram.

• How to repost a Story on Instagram
  • Repost Instagram Stories you’re not tagged in
  • Repost a Story on Instagram that you’re tagged in
  • Share someone else’s Instagram post to your Story
• How to repost an Instagram post
  • Repost your own post on Instagram
  • Repost your own post on Instagram with Sprout Social
• Best practices for reposting on Instagram
• Stay on top of Instagram best practices
• Start reposting content on Instagram

How to repost a Story on Instagram

There are many reasons you might want to repost a Story on Instagram. You might have been mentioned, and you want to share with your audience. Or, another account’s Story might be promoting a local event and you want to get the word out.

Whatever the reason, let’s walk through how to share someone’s story to your story on Instagram, as well as how to share an Instagram post to your Story. You have three different options here, so let’s get started.

Repost Instagram Stories you’re not tagged in

First, let’s walk through how to repost Instagram Stories you’re not tagged in, as this is a different process from Stories you are tagged in.

Instagram’s native tools will only allow you to repost an Instagram Story that you have been tagged in.

However, if someone has shared a Story and you want to help spread the word, you still have options.

First, screenshot the Story. There are two ways you can do this—with the account’s branding and without the account’s branding. If you want the name of the original poster of the Story to appear, open the Story and take a screenshot.

It’ll look like this:

However, if you don’t want the top bar to showcase the name of the brand and the rest of the Stories interface, you can hold the screen to get all of those details to disappear. Your screenshot will look like this:

You can then choose to crop the image so the extra space above and below the photo don’t appear when you repost the Story.

Once the Story looks the way you want it to, you’ll go through the motions as if you’re posting a new Instagram story.

Open the Instagram app, swipe to the right or tap the plus sign in the bottom navigation bar to get started. Make sure “Story” is selected from the different post types, then swipe up to select the screenshotted Story from your camera roll.

Make any additions you want to—tagging the original poster, adding content, etc.—then tap “Your stories” at the bottom to post it to your Instagram Story. You might consider using third-party Instagram apps to also spice up your Story design.

Your reposted Story will now appear on your profile for your audience to view.

Repost a Story on Instagram that you’re tagged in

Now let’s cover how to repost a Story on Instagram that you’re tagged in. If you’ve been tagged in an Instagram Story, the app makes this process incredibly easy.

First, you’ll be notified via direct message that you’ve been tagged in a Story, like so:

From there, you can easily tap “Add to your story.” Or, if you open up the Story to view it, you’ll be met with the same call-to-action:

From there, you’ll be taken to the Story creation interface, where you can add your own GIFs, stickers, tags, drawings, what have you, before reposting the Story to share with your own audience.

Keep in mind that someone may have turned off the setting that allows you to share their Stories even if you are mentioned. If you don’t have access to the “Add to your story” button, you’ll have to follow the steps in the last section to repost the Story.

Share someone else’s Instagram post to your Story

Another way to repost to your Instagram Story is by sharing someone’s Instagram post to your Story. This process is also incredibly easy and can be done in just a couple of steps.

Once you find an image you want to share—i.e., you want to spread the word about something or you’re sharing an influencer’s post that mentions your brand—simply tap the paper airplane icon directly beneath the post. You’ll find it by the like and comment icons.

From there, tap “Add to story” from the bottom bar on your screen.

The Story creation interface will open, allowing you to move the post or Reel to the position you want it to sit on the screen, add any additional content and repost. Instagram image posts also let you choose between a couple of different designs if you tap on it while editing the Story.

Then, tap “Your stories” to share with your audience. When someone sees your Story, they can click the embedded item and it’ll take them directly to the original post.

If you’re not seeing the ability to share an Instagram post to your Story, there are a couple of reasons for that.

First, the account you’re trying to share from may be private, removing the option for you to publicly share one of their posts. Second, they simply may have turned that option off. And finally, it could just be that your Instagram app is in need of an update.

How to repost an Instagram post

Now that we’ve covered how to repost Instagram Stories, let’s talk about reposting to your Instagram feed. You might want to reshare an old post to get more attention on it or refresh your audience’s memory about an upcoming sale or event. Regardless, let’s cover two different ways to do this.

Repost your own post on Instagram

A screenshot is one of the simplest ways to repost your own Instagram post, although it takes a few manual steps:

1. Find the post that you want to repost.
2. Take a screenshot on your phone.
3. Crop the screenshot down to the photo, taking out unnecessary elements like the rest of the app or your phone’s status bar.
4. Create a new Instagram post with the fresh photo, and as always, be sure to appropriately credit and seek permission to repost.

Note: This method is limited by your phone model’s resolution. If you have an older model, your photo may display blurrier to someone using a newer model.

Repost your own post on Instagram with Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s Instagram integration offers both a repost function and auto-publishing. You can do this on the desktop app or the mobile app.

To repost an Instagram post via the Sprout Social mobile app, follow these steps:

1. Find the post you want to repost.
2. Tap the paper airplane icon right below the post.
3. Tap Copy Link from the bottom row of options.
4. Open the Sprout Social app.
5. Tap the in-app notification If you’ve copied an Instagram link, tap here to repost! It’ll open up a prompt.
6. Tap Got it.
7. Tap Schedule or Queue or Repost Now. The account’s name, username and first few caption lines are copied over.
8. Edit to suit your brand’s voice. The Instagram post is automatically published.

You can also repost Instagram content from Sprout’s Smart Inbox for posts you are mentioned or tagged in. Click the overflow menu on the post you’re tagged in, and then click Repost from the available message actions.

The beauty of using Sprout for your reposting efforts is that you can save posts as drafts or schedule it to go out at a future date. There’s no need for you immediately repost the photo unless you need to.

Best practices for reposting on Instagram

Now that you know how to repost on Instagram, we’ll cover some best practices. We don’t recommend reposting whatever you want without obtaining permission and providing credit. Be thoughtful and be kind.

1. Know what you should (and shouldn’t) repost on Instagram

This goes without saying, but not everything on Instagram is worth a repost. The first step in reposting Instagram content is having a clear understanding of what makes sense for your brand to repost, and what really doesn’t.

A few things that make sense to repost include:

• Content that mentions your business
• Content that mentions local events in your area that you’re a part of or simply want to repost
• Content that shares information that your audience would find useful or interesting

Things that don’t make sense to repost include:

• Content posted by competitors, especially if it’s promoting your competitors
• Content that has nothing to do with your business

2. Ask for permission and give credit

Instagram policy states that the original photographer owns the rights to the photo. Using their photo without permission is a violation of this policy. Original photographers can file an intellectual property violation against you, which may lead to post deletion or account disablement with repeat offenses. For more information on what copyright on Instagram means, review their help page.

There are a couple of ways to ask for permission:

• In a comment: post under the photo and ask if you can repost with credit
• Send the post as a DM to the account and ask for permission
• Go a step further and add a link to your terms of use like Airbnb does

Source: Instagram

3. Keep true to the original photographer

This means you should keep edits at a minimum. Try not to crop or add filters in a way that would take from the original work. Additionally, pay attention to the original caption. If there’s a caption that was written to emotionally match the photo, don’t just take the photo and write about your upcoming sale.

Source: Instagram

A simple line like The Sill does above is a great way to give credit to the original poster.

4. Mix up original and reposted content

A feed that features only reposted content is essentially a meme/repost account. If you’re a brand with services and products, original content should still be the cornerstone of your approach to Instagram. Using UGC in your strategy should be more about highlighting your customers’ feedback and uses of your product.

5. Keep it on brand

You want the items you repost to still be relatively on brand. For example, if you have a brand color of green and it shows up throughout your account’s feed, then you wouldn’t want to repost something that is mostly bright pink.

For captions, if you’re quoting the original post, you’ll want to make sure that it still positively reflects your brand and its voice. Check out the user profile to ensure that they’re also a good account to repost from. While it’s not a formal endorsement, reposts still work as a boost for the creator.

While The Day Designer shares mostly original content, the planner brand sprinkles in some reposted photos and Reels as well. You’ll notice that the visual feel of their feed is still relatively the same, though.

Stay on top of Instagram best practices

Instagram is an incredibly fast moving network that adds new features and options for marketers all the time. Read these guides for more tips on the must-know best practices:

• Best times to post on Instagram
• Get more authentic Instagram followers with these 10 tips
• 9 Instagram post ideas to spice up your account
• 13 Ways to increase your Instagram engagement rate
• 39 Instagram story ideas to boost engagement for your brand
• How to schedule Instagram posts: Your complete guide
• How to use Instagram for business: A complete guide

Start reposting content on Instagram

The post How to repost on Instagram step-by-step (for Stories and posts) appeared first on Sprout Social.

These tools allow you to automate social media tasks that would’ve taken you hours to get through. So you can focus on other tasks like analyzing data or coming up with better strategies to grow your social media presence.

In this article, we’ll walk you through the best social media automation tools—free and premium. You’ll learn features, use cases and who would benefit the most by using them.

• What is social media automation?
• Top social media automation tools
• Automate your social media success

What is social media automation?

Put simply, social media automation is using tools and software to schedule, manage, and sometimes even interact with people on social media without you having to do it all manually.

It helps keep your online presence active and engaging, even when you’re not directly overseeing these automated actions.

Social media automation automates repetitive social media tasks and intelligently optimizes content delivery, engagement strategies, and audience targeting.

Not to mention, the use cases of social media automation are ever expanding.

At the moment, social media automation predominantly includes scheduling social posts ahead of time or republishing popular articles.

As such, automation helps you stay on top of your social media calendar and publishing schedule.

Many social media automation tools even come with analytics features that suggest the best times to post on social media. This saves you the extra step of strategically deciding the best time to schedule and automatically publishes your posts when your audience is most likely to engage.

In addition to social media automated posting, you can use automation for effective chatbot marketing. Depending on which tool you use, social media automation can easily curate customer responses to ensure timely interactions.

Let’s get into some of the best social media automation tools of 2024 to see which ones can best serve your needs!

Top social media automation tools

1. Sprout Social

It’s no surprise that Sprout Social is our favorite solution to automate social media tasks. We developed it with your best interests in mind to unlock the potential of your social media strategies.

Here are three areas of our tool that will help you automate your social media efforts:

Social management

Sprout’s social management features focus on publishing, scheduling and reporting to aid your day-to-day social media activities.

Key features:

• Content Creation & Management: Schedule up to 350 posts and campaigns with a content calendar that spans all your social media networks. This feature also recommends proven times to post and generate engagement.
• Conversation Management: Get messages from all your social media networks in a Smart Inbox and reply from one platform. You can delegate these messages to specific team members and automate canned responses.
• Data Reporting: Analyze your performance across all your social media networks. Create custom reports and see graphics of your growth.

Customer care

Sprout Social’s customer care features help you better the experience of your customers or social media audience with your brand. With us, you can build stronger relationships and provide a responsive service.

Key features:

• Bot Builder: Create chatbots to automate your customer support. This feature helps you provide information 24/7 for Twitter and Facebook.
• Social CRM: Generate customer profiles and add relevant information to help your customer support team. Check conversation history from customer profiles to provide a custom experience. Sprout integrates with Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot so you can work across platforms to track the end-to-end customer experience.
• Review Management: Get notifications from Google My Business, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook and Glassdoor. This helps you manage your reputation on social media and other online platforms from one dashboard.

Sprout Social Listening and Analytics

Sprout Social’s Listening and Analytics tools give you business-critical insights to help you make strategic decisions. Get deep insights and data about the general sentiment around your brand, topics your audience is interested in and specific keywords you want to monitor.

Measuring performance data across your social networks, and integrating listening data, enables you to get the big picture of your brand’s health quickly. Plus, you can automate reports using the graphs and charts Sprout creates for you. With this, you can see what people are saying without having to manually search each social platform.

Key features:

• Competitor Reports: Compare your metrics against your competitors to understand your brand’s health. This feature allows you to filter topics by competitor, content type and sentiment, helping you identify trends to benchmark your social media performance. Sprout does the work for you, gathering the insights that matter to you and cutting out the need to manually audit each competitor’s social performance.
• Paid Performance Report: Analyze your social media advertising across networks. Instead of monitoring performance within each platform’s ad dashboards, Sprout pulls your data into one place so you can easily see how your paid efforts are performing. You can select the accounts and campaigns you want to include during a specific period. The reports give you metrics and graphics for Paid Video Views, Paid Web Conversions, Paid Engagement and Paid Impressions. All of these can easily be repurposed into a report for stakeholders, enabling you to focus on making strategic and timely optimizations.
• Social Listening: Rather than digging through millions of online conversations manually, quickly get business-critical insights from thousands of unfiltered thoughts, opinions and feedback to impact your current strategy and guide future action.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, mid-size brands, small businesses and agencies that want a full package of tools to make data-driven strategic decisions, build lasting relationships with customers and grow their social media presence.

Free or premium? Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial or a demo. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

2. Sendible

Image Source: Sendible

Sendible is one of the social media automation tools that has all the features you need to run your social media daily activities.

Key features:

• Publishing: Schedule a month’s worth of posts either individually or in bulk. With this tool, you can create content queues to maintain a consistent publishing schedule.
• Collaboration: Add clients and team members to create workflows with approval and custom permissions.
• Analytics: Get insights about the social media networks that drive the most traffic to your website. Find optimal posting times and top-performing posts. Generate and automatically send reports to your clients.

Who is this for? Agencies, brand managers or social media marketers that manage social media presence for clients or their own.

Free or premium? Sendible offers a free 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

3. Agorapulse

Image Source: Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media automation tool for those just starting to grow their social media presence. It comes with all the basic features to manage and automate social media activities.

Key features:

• Social Inbox: Manage your messages with the Inbox Assistant, which organizes or labels your items. With this feature, you can create canned responses to address the same questions multiple times.
• Social Publishing: You can use the AI Writing Assistant to enhance your social copy. Then schedule and approve content with your team and clients. Agorapulse also offers a mobile app to publish on the go.
• Social Listening and Reporting: Use parameters to focus on conversations about your brand and competitors. Get custom reports of gained or lost followers and social media interactions.

Who is this for? Freelancers, agencies, small businesses and enterprise organizations that want to manage their social media presence from one platform.

Free or premium? Agorapulse offers a 30-day free trial or a demo. Additionally, it offers an individual plan with limited functionalities for free.

4. ContentStudio

Image Source: ContentStudio

ContentStudio simplifies social media publishing with AI-generated captions and images. Plus, this tool covers the basics of scheduling and analyzing social media posts.

Key features:

• Publishing & Scheduling: Schedule and approve content with your team or clients. You can also use the Chrome extension to share content with your audience easily.
• Analytics: Get demographic information from your followers and publishing behavior data from competitors. You can schedule weekly or monthly reports to automatically deliver into your inbox.
• Social Inbox: Categorize your conversations and assign them to the right team member. You can reply to messages with canned responses and see if a teammate is already replying in real time.
• Discover: Search high-performing content and analyze it so you know what topics are trending. Then automatically share your favorite curated content across various channels. Then automatically share your favorite curated content across various channels.

Who is this for? Agencies, brands or marketers that want to grow their social media presence while boosting productivity.

Free or premium? ContentStudio offers a 14-day trial or a demo. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

5. Brand24

Image Source: Brand24

Brand24 is a social media automation tool that focuses on checking the general sentiment around your brand. With this, you can manage conversations with your clients and better their experience with your brand.

Key features:

• Discussion Volume Chart: Check graphs of your brand mentions online. When you spot a peak, you can analyze if it’s the result of your social media efforts or a sign of an issue that needs investigating.
• Sentiment Analysis: Brand24 uses AI to determine if online brand mentions are positive, negative or neutral. Set up alerts so you can act if you receive a negative mention.
• Data Exporting: Automate the generation of reports on PDF, Excel and even infographics.

Who is this for? Solopreneurs, agencies and enterprise companies that want to track their online reputation.

Free or premium? Brand24 offers a free 14-day trial. Then, it becomes a premium tool.

6. Oktopost

Image Source: Oktopost

Oktopost is a social media automation tool that comes with integrated AI to save time and simplify social media management. The platform lets you scale B2B social media with a People Database to get more leads.

Key features:

• Social Publishing: Create multiple social media posts in seconds with AI. Then approve or reject these posts using workflows with tier permissions.
• Employee Advocacy: Oktopost lets you filter your posts by topics so your team can share content they care about on their social media.
• AI-powered Social Listening: Monitor your brand mentions across major social media networks and websites. You can also get information about influential profiles that address relevant topics.
• Social Analytics: Oktopost adds UTM parameters to every link you share. This assists you with your analytics by letting you attribute success to specific activities.

Who is this for? B2B companies that want to scale their social media presence and show its impact on business goals.

Free or premium? Oktopost offers a demo, becoming a premium tool after.

7. Loomly

Image Source: Loomly

Loomly is a social media automation tool that offers content management features for both organic and promoted posts. And, it provides live optimization tips for your content.

Key features:

• Social Publishing: Schedule auto-generated posts from your RSS feeds to keep your calendar filled. Get step-by-step guidance to create organic and promoted content on Loomly. Then receive notifications (email, Slack, push or Microsoft Teams) every time a team member edits or comments on your content.
• Ad Campaigns Creation: Create campaigns and boost sponsored posts from Loomly and schedule the date you want them to go live.
• Analytics: Analyze all your social media posts, even the ones that weren’t posted from Loomly. Get insights with automated UTM codes added to your URLs.

Who is this for? Enterprise companies, agencies and small businesses that want a simple and easy-to-use tool to manage their social media presence.

Free or premium? Loomly offers a free 15-day trial. After that, it becomes a premium tool.

Automate your social media success

Social media offers a lot of opportunities to understand, entertain and communicate with your audience. But often, managing your presence across various platforms can seem like a lot for one person or even a small team.

That’s why it is imperative to use social media automation tools. These tools help with social media automated posting to save time on publishing. They also enhance customer care with timely responses.

Sprout’s automation tools make it easier to manage your presence across leading platforms including X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook. If you want the full experience of managing your social media accounts, customer support and deep insights into your audience, sign up for a free 30-day trial from Sprout Social.

The post 7 effective social media automation tools to use in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

With over 1 billion members in 200 countries and regions, businesses have a large audience and employee advocates to extend their reach. With the right LinkedIn marketing strategy, combined with these optimal posting times, you could see improved engagement.

Learn how to identify your best times to post globally on LinkedIn a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded globally (not by Central Time), meaning you should be able to publish with the times provided in any timezone and see positive engagement results. Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times. We recommend testing with your own accounts to find the most optimal send times.

• When is the best time to post on LinkedIn?
• What is the best day and time to post on LinkedIn?
• What is the best time to post on LinkedIn by industry?
  • Hospitals & Healthcare
  • Restaurants
  • Schools & Education
  • Travel & Hospitality
• How to find your own best times to post on LinkedIn
• How Sprout gathered the data

When is the best time to post on LinkedIn?

• Best times to post on LinkedIn Company Pages:
  • Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to noon
  • Thursdays at 10 a.m.
• Best days to post on LinkedIn Company Pages: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on LinkedIn Company Pages: Weekends

Unsurprising for this professional-focused social platform, LinkedIn engagement times are consistent with general business hours. High engagement hours are more concentrated midday and don’t extend too far out past the workday hours. Businesses are less likely to get eyes on their LinkedIn marketing efforts on the weekend when engagement and usage drops.

Because LinkedIn content is centered around professional thought-leadership and career growth, it makes sense that a majority of audiences engage with this content throughout their working day. By midday, there’s buzz on the platform, and the best times to post on LinkedIn are Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 10 a.m. and noon and Thursdays at 10 a.m..

Yes, LinkedIn is a business and employment-focused platform, but it’s more than a job board and networking platform. LinkedIn provides a platform for professional storytelling and advocacy, from both employees and employers alike. Contributors of all levels can share their subject-matter expertise, create conversations that challenge business-as-usual, and uplift professional voices around the world.

Businesses on LinkedIn are finding new ways to generate leads, find co-marketing partners, highlight company culture and attract talent. Because of these additional business opportunities LinkedIn provides, it makes sense that posting and engagement match with the business hours.

Best times to post on LinkedIn for hospitals & healthcare

• Best times to post on LinkedIn for Hospitals & Healthcare:
  • Most weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., but especially
  • Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to noon
  • Thursdays from 2 to 4 p.m.
• Best days to post on LinkedIn for Hospitals & Healthcare: Weekdays
• Worst days to post on LinkedIn for Hospitals & Healthcare: Weekends

Hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers use social media for more than navigating healthcare crises. Social media is used by hospitals and healthcare providers to educate the public, help patients feel more comfortable with healthcare visits and doctors’ appointments, promote their programs for aspiring physicians and establish themselves as pillars in the community.

The best times to post on LinkedIn for healthcare and hospitals saw a shift in hours that users are engaging with their content. Hospitals, healthcare and clinics see average to above average engagement concentrated to reflect the traditional workday, starting around 9 a.m. through around 6 p.m. Posting on LinkedIn weekdays during those times should result in positive engagement, but the best times to post on X for hospitals and healthcare are Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to noon and Thursdays 2 to 4 p.m. for peak engagement.

Hospital and healthcare social media resources

• A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media
• The power of social listening for healthcare organizations
• How to realize the ROI of social media in healthcare
• Supporting HIPAA Compliance on social: a cheat sheet

Best times to post on LinkedIn for restaurants

• Best times to post on LinkedIn for Restaurants:
  • Wednesdays at 10 a.m. and from noon to 3 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 9 to 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on LinkedIn for Restaurants: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on LinkedIn for Restaurants: Weekends

Online orders and delivery service apps saw an increase in use over the last few years, innovating the way restaurants interact with their audiences. And restaurants saw over 2x more engagements on X than last year’s analysis. Target audience and platform goals factor into how businesses connect with their customers. Many restaurant businesses used LinkedIn to promote job fairs, individual employment positions, as well as panels at national industry conferences.

Those in the food and beverage restaurant industry see most of their engagement concentrated to the business hours during weekdays. The best times to post for restaurants on LinkedIn for peak engagement are generally Wednesdays from noon to 3 p.m. and Thursdays from 9 to 11 a.m.

Restaurant social media resources

• Franchise Marketing Guide: Social Media Best Practices for Franchisors and Franchisees
• Social Spotlight: How Tim Hortons puts people first in its social strategy
• How Classic Culinary Brand America’s Test Kitchen Connects With New Consumers

Best times to post on LinkedIn for schools & education

• Best times to post on LinkedIn for Schools & Education:
  • Tuesdays at 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on LinkedIn for Schools & Education:
  • Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on LinkedIn for Schools & Education:
  • Sundays

Universities, higher education institutions and schools saw an increased engagement on LinkedIn compared to last year. The 134,000 schools listed on LinkedIn might manage multiple social profiles (per college, athletics, etc.) to meet these needs and effectively target distinct audiences at the right time.

Opportunities for engagement are concentrated to a traditional business during weekdays, and virtually nonexistent over the weekends. Most days on LinkedIn see above average engagement between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. However, there was on specific time that appears to be the best time to post on LinkedIn for education and schools: Tuesdays at 11 a.m.

From highlighting student life to sharing school updates, a social media strategy for schools needs to fulfill various purposes: from engaging with students past, present and future, to keeping a pulse on brand health.

Schools and education social media resources

• 15 ways to use social media for education
• University branding: How to build your school’s brand on social media
• Higher ed playbook: Using social to unite your university

Best times to post on LinkedIn for travel & hospitality

• Best times to post on LinkedIn for Travel & Hospitality:
  • Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 3 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from noon to 4 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 1 to 4 p.m.
• Best days to post on LinkedIn for Travel & Hospitality: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on LinkedIn for Travel & Hospitality: Saturdays and Sundays

Travel and hospitality industries shifted their concentration on LinkedIn to reflect a traditional business day; a trend that seemed to happen across most industries on LinkedIn.

The best times to post on LinkedIn for travel and hospitality are Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Wednesdays from noon to 4 p.m., and Thursdays from 1 to 4 p.m.

Travel and hospitality social media resources

• Social media and hospitality: How 3 brands are serving 5-star experiences
• Sprout Social helps keep NJ TRANSIT’s social strategy on track
• How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
• How to set up a travel social media marketing strategy

How to find your own best times to post on LinkedIn

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data. And as platforms evolve, how brands and consumers use social will evolve with them, or vice versa. Staying aware of new content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

How to find your best time to post on LinkedIn with Analytics

While you may be ready to jump in and post at these provided peak engagement times as part of your strategy, consider pairing this data with your own LinkedIn data analysis. You may discover that your specific target audience is active near the peak times we’ve outlined or hours earlier. If you use a LinkedIn analytics tool, it should contain a host of relevant data.

To find your best times to post with native LinkedIn Analytics for your LinkedIn business page, follow these steps:

1. Login to LinkedIn and go to your LinkedIn business page admin view.
2. Click on Analytics.*
3. In the Analytics tab, select which metrics you want to view: Content, Visitors, Followers, Leads, Competitors or Employee Advocacy.

* Note: Only users with Admin or Analyst roles assigned to them for the business page can access page Analytics.

How to find your best time to post on LinkedIn with Sprout Social

A social media management tool like Sprout Social can help you drill into your own analytics and develop tailored findings for your brand accounts across all networks, holistically and individually. Gain competitive insights by comparing your performance to your competitors, to find new opportunities for engagement.

With features like post tagging and cross-network reporting, you can separate different factors like post author or types of content, and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s patented ViralPost® technology uses the same data we’ve used to look at all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post tailored for your individual account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option available in all plans. Our proprietary machine learning feature isn’t new, but we’re constantly learning and improving our product to help brands surface insights faster. Our goal is to help people who use our product work more effectively.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times offered are based on when your own audience engages the most using your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing the repeated analysis yourself and allowing you more time to craft great content.

Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social or request a personalized demo and try it for yourself.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post across eight industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on Social Media 2024
• Best times to post on Facebook 2024
• Best times to post on Instagram 2024
• Best times to post on TikTok 2024
• Best times to post on Twitter 2024

The post Best times to post on LinkedIn in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

It’s important to understand how posting on TikTok at the right times can be a huge benefit to your TikTok marketing strategy. Global users on average spend 23.3 hours per month on the platform, meaning there is an opportunity to engage with a consistent audience. Keep an eye out for emerging trends or subcultures on the platform and test your own content.

Learn how to identify your best times to post globally on TikTok with a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded globally (not by Central Time), meaning you should be able to publish with the times provided in any timezone and see positive engagement results. Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times. We recommend testing with your own accounts to find the most optimal send times.

When is the best time to post on TikTok?

• Best times to post on TikTok:
  • Tuesdays from 4 to 6 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 9 to 11 a.m., noon, and 2 to 6 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 9 to 11 a.m. and 2 to 6 p.m.
  • Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m.
• Best days to post on TikTok: Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Worst days to post on TikTok: Sundays

As the youngest digital platform on this list, TikTok has grown significantly and made waves in half as many years as the others on this list. With the app now amassing over 1.5 billion active global users who spend an average of 23 hours on the app every month, TikTok has competitive power against other platforms.

The best times to post on TikTok are Tuesdays and Fridays from 4 to 6 p.m., Wednesdays, Thursdays mornings from 9 to 11 a.m. and Thursdays from 2 to 6 p.m. Afternoons are when the highest engagements are on the platform; users are looking to fill their afternoon entertainment boost. However, generally, mid-morning through the afternoon (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) on Tuesdays through Fridays see above average engagement on the app.

With TikTok trends changing quickly, it’s important to understand how trends start, evolve and influence. Once you understand how these forces, moments or signals work, you can create a better TikTok trend strategy to implement rather than participating reactively.

Best times to post on TikTok for hospitals & healthcare

• Best times to post on TikTok for Hospitals & Healthcare:
  • Mondays from 5 to 8 p.m.
  • Tuesdays at 4 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.
  • Thursdays at 2 p.m.
• Best days to post on TikTok for Hospitals & Healthcare: Mondays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on TikTok for Hospitals & Healthcare: Sundays

Hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers use social media for more than navigating healthcare crises. Social media is used by hospitals and healthcare providers to educate the public, help patients feel more comfortable with healthcare visits and doctors’ appointments, promote their programs for aspiring physicians and establish themselves as pillars in the community.

The best times to post on TikTok for healthcare and hospitals nearly tripled compared to the year prior. Hospitals, healthcare and clinics see average to above average engagement Mondays through Thursdays starting at 10 a.m. and extending as late as 6 p.m. However, the best times to post on TikTok for hospitals and healthcare are Mondays from 5 to 8 p.m., Tuesdays at 4 p.m., Wednesdays from 2 to 5 p.m. and Thursdays at 2 p.m.

Hospital & healthcare social media resources

• A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media
• The power of social listening for healthcare organizations
• How to realize the ROI of social media in healthcare
• Supporting HIPAA Compliance on social: a cheat sheet

Best times to post on TikTok for restaurants

• Best times to post on TikTok for Restaurants:
  • Tuesdays from 3 to 5 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 3 to 6 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 3 to 6 p.m.
• Best days to post on TikTok for Restaurants: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on TikTok for Restaurants: Mondays

Online orders and delivery service apps saw an increase in use over the last few years, innovating the way restaurants interact with their audiences. And restaurants saw over 2x more engagements on TikTok than last year’s analysis. Target audience and platform goals factor into how businesses connect with their customers, such as offering unique promotions or updates.

Those in the food and beverage restaurant industry see most of their engagement concentrated to the lunch hour during weekdays. The best times to post for restaurants on TikTok are Tuesdays through Thursdays between 3 and 5 p.m., generally.

Restaurant social media resources

• Auntie Anne’s Bari’s TikTok Bootcamp [Webinar]
• Franchise Marketing Guide: Social Media Best Practices for Franchisors and Franchisees
• Social Spotlight: How Tim Hortons puts people first in its social strategy
• How Classic Culinary Brand America’s Test Kitchen Connects With New Consumers

Best times to post on TikTok for schools & education

• Best times to post on TikTok for Schools & Education:
  • Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Best days to post on TikTok for Schools & Education:
  • Thursdays
• Worst days to post on TikTok for Schools & Education:
  • Saturdays and Sundays

Universities, higher education institutions and schools saw a significant increase in high engagement times on TikTok compared to last year’s analysis. Keep in mind that some schools manage multiple social profiles (per college, athletics, etc.) to meet these needs and effectively target distinct audiences at the right time. 

High opportunities for engagement for schools reflect a typical school day plus evening hours. Tuesdays through Fridays see consistent engagement from around 10 a.m. until about 5 p.m.However, the hours with the highest engagement and therefore the best time to post on TikTok for schools are Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

From highlighting student life to sharing school updates, a social media strategy for schools needs to fulfill various purposes: from engaging with students past, present and future, to keeping a pulse on brand health.

Schools and education social media resources

• 15 ways to use social media for education
• University branding: How to build your school’s brand on social media
• Higher ed playbook: Using social to unite your university

Best times to post on TikTok for travel & hospitality

• Best times to post on TikTok for Travel & Hospitality:
  • Fridays at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
• Best days to post on TikTok for Travel & Hospitality: Thursdays and Fridays
• Worst days to post on TikTok for Travel & Hospitality: Sundays and Tuesdays

Travel and hospitality industries once again doubled their engagement on TikTok relative to last year. Hospitality businesses pivoted their strategies as the post-pandemic spike in travel continues, and they saw a return on their efforts throughout most of the day.

The best times to post on TikTok for travel and hospitality businesses are a bit sporadic throughout the week but are above average beginning around midday nearly every day of the week. However, the day with the highest engagement and the best time to post on TikTok for travel and hospitality is Fridays at 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.

Travel and hospitality social media resources

• Social media and hospitality: How 3 brands are serving 5-star experiences
• Sprout Social helps keep NJ TRANSIT’s social strategy on track
• How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
• How to set up a travel social media marketing strategy
• How to manage multiple social media accounts

How to find your own best times to post on TikTok

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data. And as platforms evolve, how brands and consumers use social will evolve with them, or vice versa. Staying aware of new content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

How to find your best time to post on TikTok with Analytics

While you may be ready to jump in and post at these provided peak engagement times as part of your strategy, consider pairing this data with your own TikTok analytics. You may discover that your specific target audience is active at different times.

To find your best times to post with native TikTok analytics via desktop, follow these steps:

1. Login to your account at tiktok.com.
2. Hover over your profile icon, then click Business Suite.
3. Then, select Analytics in the left-hand navigation.

How to find your best time to post on TikTok with Sprout Social

A social media management tool like Sprout Social can help you drill into your analytics and develop tailored findings for your brand accounts across all networks, holistically and individually. Gain competitive insights by comparing your performance to your competitors, to find new opportunities for engagement.

With features like post tagging and cross-network reporting, you can separate different factors like post author or types of content, and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s patented ViralPost® technology uses the same data we’ve used to look at all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post tailored for your account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option available in all plans. Our proprietary machine learning feature isn’t new, but we’re constantly learning and improving our product to help brands surface insights faster. Our goal is to help people who use our product work more effectively.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times offered are based on when your audience engages the most using your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing repeated the analysis, and allowing you more time to craft great content.

Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social or request a personalized demo and try it for yourself.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post across eight industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on Social Media
• Best times to post on Facebook
• Best times to post on Instagram
• Best times to post on LinkedIn
• Best times to post on Twitter

The post Best times to post on TikTok in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Remember: with Instagram as a discovery platform of trends, brands, products or services, it’s important to get high-quality photos and content in front of potential consumers’ eyes at the right time.

Learn how to identify your best times to post on Instagram with a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded globally (not by Central Time), meaning you should be able to publish with the times provided in any timezone and see positive engagement results. Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times. We recommend testing with your own accounts to find the most optimal send times.

When is the best time to post on Instagram in 2024?

• Best times to post on Instagram:
  • Mondays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  • Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.
  • Fridays at 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on Instagram: Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Instagram: Sundays

Where Facebook was the most-used platform by marketers worldwide, Instagram comes in second at 80%. Interestingly, Instagram ties with Facebook for the social media platforms that offer marketers the highest ROI at 29%. This is because social media continues to evolve with ecommerce and offering frictionless experiences to users. And even though the competition for short-form video between Instagram and TikTok continues to heat up, Reels still generate more likes and saves than static Instagram posts.

The best times to post on Instagram are weekdays generally between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., with Tuesdays and Wednesdays engagement times extending to 4 p.m. We recommend scheduling posts Tuesdays through Thursdays between 10 and and 3 p.m. for optimal engagement. It’s wise to test these benchmarks against your current metrics too.

Instagram has grown a long way since its photo-only days. The app, which has 2 billion monthly active users, is a platform to share images, videos, Reels and live streams, just to name a few creative content types. It is also an avenue to collaborate and partner with other brands and provides a stream of revenue through its ecommerce capabilities.

The Instagram algorithm is unpredictable. To be successful on the platform is a balance of consistently posting high-quality content that will engage and entertain your audiences. That’s a lot to ask for with each piece of content published. But using that as a guiding post can help with your Instagram marketing strategy.

Best times to post on Instagram for hospitals & healthcare

• Best times to post on Instagram for Hospitals & Healthcare:
  • Mondays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
  • Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
  • Fridays from 11 a..m. to 3 p.m.
• Best days to post on Instagram for Hospitals & Healthcare: Tuesdays through Fridays
• Worst days to post on Instagram for Hospitals & Healthcare: Sundays

Hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers use social media for more than navigating healthcare crises. Social media is used by hospitals and healthcare providers to educate the public, help patients feel more comfortable with healthcare visits and doctors’ appointments, promote their programs for aspiring physicians and establish themselves as pillars in the community.

The best times to post on Instagram for healthcare and hospitals nearly tripled compared to the year prior. Hospitals, healthcare and clinics see average to above average engagement every day starting at 8 a.m. through most of the day, as late as 10 p.m. However, the best times to post on Instagram for hospitals and healthcare are predominantly Mondays through Fridays between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. For more specific time frames, see the table above.

Hospital and healthcare social media resources

• A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media
• The power of social listening for healthcare organizations
• How to realize the ROI of social media in healthcare
• Supporting HIPAA Compliance on social: a cheat sheet

Best times to post on Instagram for restaurants

• Best times to post on Instagram for Restaurants:
  • Mondays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
  • Tuesdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
  • Fridays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Best days to post on Instagram for Restaurants: Weekdays
• Worst days to post on Instagram for Restaurants: Weekends

Online orders and delivery service apps saw an increase in use over the last few years, innovating the way restaurants interact with their audiences. And restaurants saw over 2x more engagements on Instagram than last year’s analysis. Target audience and platform goals factor into how businesses connect with their customers, such as offering unique promotions or updates.

Those in the food and beverage restaurant industry see most of their engagement concentrated to the lunch hour during weekdays. The best times to post for restaurants on Instagram are Mondays through Fridays between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., generally.

Restaurant social media resources

• Franchise Marketing Guide: Social Media Best Practices for Franchisors and Franchisees
• Social Spotlight: How Tim Hortons puts people first in its social strategy
• How Classic Culinary Brand America’s Test Kitchen Connects With New Consumers

Best times to post on Instagram for schools & education

• Best times to post on Instagram for Schools & Education:
  • Wednesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.
• Best days to post on Instagram for Schools & Education:
  • Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Instagram for Schools & Education:
  • Sundays

Universities, higher education institutions and schools saw a significant increase in high engagement times on Instagram compared to last year’s analysis. Keep in mind that some schools manage multiple social profiles (per college, athletics, etc.) to meet these needs and effectively target distinct audiences at the right time. 

High opportunities for engagement for schools reflect a typical school day plus evening hours. Mondays through Fridayys see consistent engagement from 10 a.m. until about 6 p.m. However, the hours with the highest engagement and therefore the best time to post on Instagram for schools are Wednesdays from 2 to 4 p.m. and again at 9 p.m.

From highlighting student life to sharing school updates, a social media strategy for schools needs to fulfill various purposes: from engaging with students past, present and future, to keeping a pulse on brand health.

Schools and education social media resources

• 15 ways to use social media for education
• University branding: How to build your school’s brand on social media
• Higher ed playbook: Using social to unite your university

Best times to post on Instagram for travel & hospitality

• Best times to post on Instagram for Travel & Hospitality:
  • Wednesdays from noon to 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
  • Sundays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Best days to post on Instagram for Travel & Hospitality:
  • Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Instagram for Travel & Hospitality:
  • None; all days receive moderate engagement

Travel and hospitality industries once again doubled their engagement on Instagram relative to last year. Hospitality businesses pivoted their strategies as the post-pandemic spike in travel continues, and they saw a return on their efforts throughout most of the day.

The best times to post on Instagram for travel and hospitality businesses saw average engagement between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. nearly every single day of the week. However, two days saw the highest engagement and are the best times to post on Instagram for travel and hospitality: Wednesdays from noon to 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.

Travel and hospitality social media resources

• Social media and hospitality: How 3 brands are serving 5-star experiences
• Sprout Social helps keep NJ TRANSIT’s social strategy on track
• How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
• How to set up a travel social media marketing strategy
• How to manage multiple social media accounts

How to find your own best times to post on Instagram

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data. And as platforms evolve, how brands and consumers use social will evolve with them, or vice versa. Staying aware of new content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

How to find your best time to post on Instagram with Insights

While you may be ready to jump in and post at these provided peak engagement times as part of your strategy, consider pairing this data with your own Instagram analytics. You may discover that your specific target audience is active at different times.

If you have a creator or business account already, find your best times to post with Instagram Insights following these steps:

• From your profile, tap ≡ in the top right corner.
• Tap Insights.
• Tap the metrics underneath the Overview section or specific content you’ve shared for more details. From here, tap Total Followers and scroll to see their most active times.

How to find your best time to post on Instagram with Sprout Social

A social media management tool like Sprout Social can help you drill into your analytics and develop tailored findings for your brand accounts across all networks, holistically and individually. Gain competitive insights by comparing your performance to your competitors, to find new opportunities for engagement.

With features like post tagging and cross-network reporting, you can separate different factors like post author or types of content, and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s patented ViralPost® technology uses the same data we’ve used to look at all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post tailored for your account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option available in all plans. Our proprietary machine learning feature isn’t new, but we’re constantly learning and improving our product to help brands surface insights faster. Our goal is to help people who use our product work more effectively.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times offered are based on when your audience engages the most using your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing the repeated analysis and allowing you more time to craft great content.

Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social or request a personalized demo and try it for yourself.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post across eight industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on Social Media 2024
• Best times to post on Facebook 2024
• Best times to post on LinkedIn 2024
• Best times to post on TikTok 2024
• Best times to post on Twitter 2024

The post Best times to post on Instagram in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

With the help of our Data Science team, we analyzed nearly 2 billion social media engagements across 400,000 social profiles across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and X. And even more, we’re able to provide an analysis of when the best time to post on Facebook is.

As the third most visited website worldwide after Google and YouTube, and boasting nearly 3 billion monthly active users, there’s no denying the power of Facebook. Because of the large engagement opportunity, it’s important to understand how posting on Facebook at the right times will benefit your social media content strategy.

Learn how to identify your best times to post on Facebook with a free trial of Sprout Social and test our ViralPost® feature.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

Disclaimer: Data from Sprout Social include users from various plan types, industries and locations. All time frames are recorded globally (not by Central Time), meaning you should be able to publish with the times provided in any timezone and see positive engagement results. Number of engagements represents total engagements a brand received on the specific channel during that hour time frame. Industry-specific data includes mid- to high-level engagement times. We recommend testing with your own accounts to find the most optimal send times.

When is the best time to post on Facebook?

• Best times to post on Facebook:
  • Mondays from 9 a.m. to noon
  • Tuesdays from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5 p.m.
  • Fridays from 9 to 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook: Mondays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Facebook: Sundays

It’s true: Facebook is still the most used platform by marketers worldwide at 89%, and by monthly active users at 3.05 billion (yes, billion). The impact Facebook has on our social media use as consumers and marketers is still ever present. Compared to last year, high engagement periods on Facebook are still within mid-mornings during weekdays and matching general business hours.

Optimal send times for Facebook are Mondays through Fridays starting mostly at 9 a.m. until early afternoon, generally 2 p.m. What does this mean for marketers? Most users are taking a quick break in their routines for Facebook, making it the best time to schedule posts for target audiences to interact with.

With a solid Facebook marketing strategy, businesses connect with the right audiences with their content, whether it’s keeping audiences informed of products or sharing access to exclusive deals. Remember, engagement is a combination of how often you post on social media and what content types you post.

Best times to post on Facebook for hospitals & healthcare

• Best times to post on Facebook for Hospitals & Healthcare:
  • Most weekdays between 9 a.m. and 8 p.m., but especially:
    • Tuesdays from 5 to 7 p.m.
    • Wednesdays at 5 p.m.
    • Thursdays at 10 a.m. and 5 p.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Hospitals & Healthcare: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Hospitals & Healthcare: Sundays

Hospitals, clinics and healthcare providers use social media for more than navigating healthcare crises. Social media is used by hospitals and healthcare providers to educate the public, help patients feel more comfortable with healthcare visits and doctors’ appointments, promote their programs for aspiring physicians and establish themselves as pillars in the community.

The best time to post on Facebook for healthcare and hospitals is more concentrated than last year. Most weekdays see solid engagement around 9 a.m. on weekdays. Yet, peak posting times on Facebook for hospitals are Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays at 5 p.m.

Hospital and healthcare social media resources

• A healthcare team’s guide to HIPAA compliance on social media
• The power of social listening for healthcare organizations
• How to realize the ROI of social media in healthcare
• Supporting HIPAA Compliance on social: a cheat sheet

Best times to post on Facebook for restaurants

• Best times to post on Facebook for Restaurants:
  • Mondays at 11 a.m.
  • Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
  • Fridays at 11 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Restaurants: Most weekdays, especially Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Restaurants: Sundays

Online orders and delivery service apps saw an increase in use over the last few years, innovating the way restaurants interact with their audiences. And restaurants saw nearly 2x more engagements on Facebook than last year’s analysis.

Those in the food and beverage restaurant industry see consistent engagement between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. almost every single day, especially weekdays. The best times to post for restaurants on Facebook though are just before or around lunchtime: Mondays at 11 a.m., Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Wednesdays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., and Fridays at 11 a.m.

Different networks offer a unique way for businesses to connect with their customers. Offering unique promotions and updates suited for each social platform will keep your restaurant in mind for potential customers.

Restaurant social media resources

• Franchise Marketing Guide: Social Media Best Practices for Franchisors and Franchisees
• Social Spotlight: How Tim Hortons puts people first in its social strategy
• How Classic Culinary Brand America’s Test Kitchen Connects With New Consumers

Best times to post on Facebook for schools & education

• Best times to post on Facebook for Schools & Education:
  • Mondays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Fidays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
  • Saturdays from 9 to 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.
  • Sundays at 9 a.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Schools & Education:
  • All weekdays, especially Wednesdays through Friday
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Schools & Education:
  • Sundays

Universities, higher education institutions and schools saw a significant increase in high engagement times on Facebook compared to last year’s analysis. Keep in mind that some schools manage multiple social profiles (per college, athletics, etc.) to meet these needs and effectively target distinct audiences at the right time. 

High opportunities for engagement for schools reflect a traditional workweek. Mondays through Fridays from either 9 or 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. are the best times to post on Facebook for schools and education institutions. Don’t discredit the weekend either: Saturdays from 9 to 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., and Sundays at 9 a.m. saw significant engagement for this industry.

From highlighting student life to sharing school updates, a social media strategy for schools needs to fulfill various purposes: from engaging with students past, present and future, to keeping a pulse on brand health.

Schools and education social media resources

• 15 ways to use social media for education
• University branding: How to build your school’s brand on social media
• Higher ed playbook: Using social to unite your university

Best times to post on Facebook for travel & hospitality

• Best times to post on Facebook for Travel & Hospitality:
  • Mondays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
  • Tuesdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
  • Wednesdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
  • Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
  • Saturdays from 8 to 11 a.m.
  • Sundays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• Best days to post on Facebook for Travel & Hospitality: Tuesdays through Thursdays
• Worst days to post on Facebook for Travel & Hospitality: Fridays

Travel and hospitality industries saw a concentrated shift for engagement on Facebook. Compared to the year prior, hospitality businesses pivoted their strategies as the post-pandemic spike in travel continues, and they saw a return on their efforts throughout most of the day.

The best times to post on Facebook for travel and hospitality brands are most every day: Mondays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Tuesdays through Thursdays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Weekends also see some significant engagement on Saturdays from 8 to 11 a.m. and Sundays 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

In general, on Facebook, there is significant engagement midday nearly every day of the week for travel and hospitality, as people are preparing for their weekend destinations.

Travel and hospitality social media resources

• Social media and hospitality: How 3 brands are serving 5-star experiences
• Sprout Social helps keep NJ TRANSIT’s social strategy on track
• How Loews Hotels & Co succeeds at scale with Sprout Social’s all-in-one platform
• How to set up a travel social media marketing strategy
• How to manage multiple social media accounts

How to find your own best times to post on social media

Social marketers can plan content more effectively when they’re armed with data. And as platforms evolve, how brands and consumers use social will evolve with them, or vice versa. Staying aware of new content formats and trends might help you reach your audience in unexpected ways, or even find new segments and personas you weren’t focusing on before.

How to find your best time to post on Facebook with Insights

While you may be ready to jump in and post at these provided peak engagement times as part of your strategy, consider pairing this data with your own Facebook data analysis. You may discover that your specific target audience is active at different times.

To find your best times to post with Facebook Insights, follow these steps:

1. On either mobile or desktop, log into your Facebook Page account (not personal profile).
2. In the top right corner, click on your profile picture (you may see the three horizontal lines on mobile)and select Professional dashboard.
3. To find all posts published within a specific time frame, select:
   1. Content (on desktop).
   2. Insights (on mobile).
4. To find your Facebook posts with the highest engagement on desktop:
   1. Adjust the time span filter from the last 90, 60, 28 or 7 days.
   2. Adjust the sorting filter by Engagement
   3. Your most engaged post will appear in descending order.
5. To find your Facebook posts with the highest engagement on mobile:
   1. Select See all next to Performance then Engagement
   2. Scroll to Recent Content and select See all.
   3. Similar to desktop, you can filter the date range and by Engagement.
6. With this list, check your top engaged posts and find trends with the day, time and content types (e.g., text only, image, video).

How to find your best time to post on Facebook with Sprout Social

A social media management tool like Sprout Social can help you drill into your analytics and develop tailored findings for your brand accounts across all networks, holistically and individually. Gain competitive insights by comparing your performance to your competitors, to find new opportunities for engagement.

With features like post tagging and cross-network reporting, you can separate different factors like post author or types of content, and drill down into how your posting time influenced your social success.

Sprout’s patented ViralPost® technology uses the same data we’ve used to look at all our customer accounts to determine the best time to post tailored for your account. ViralPost® algorithmically determines the results for our Optimal Send Times feature, a publishing option available in all plans. Our proprietary  machine learning feature isn’t new, but we’re constantly learning and improving our product to help brands surface insights faster. Our goal is to help people who use our product work more effectively.

With Optimal Send Times, the specific times offered are based on when your audience engages the most using your publishing history. ViralPost® also continually updates and refines to save you time from doing the repeated analysis and allowing you more time to craft great content.

Want to see it in action? Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Sprout Social or request a personalized demo and try it for yourself.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

If you’re looking for more of our findings from this year’s study of our customer data, see what we learned about the best times to post across eight industries on these networks:

• Best times to post on Social Media 2024
• Best times to post on Instagram 2024
• Best times to post on LinkedIn 2024
• Best times to post on TikTok 2024
• Best times to post on Twitter 2024

The post Best times to post on Facebook in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Having a basic understanding of social media statistics gives you an idea of the type of people who use the social media platform, if they fit into your audience and what people expect from brands on each platform.

Throughout this article, we’re covering Pinterest statistics like demographics, behavior, business stats and more.

The post 24 must-know Pinterest stats for marketers in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

With the right tools, social media management becomes more manageable. You can use these tools to do everything in one place–from scheduling posts to analyzing your performance. It becomes easier to stay on top of tasks with features to collaborate with team members and set alerts.

This post rounds up some of the top social media management platforms in the market to help you decide on the best option for your team. Let’s take a look.

Table of contents:

• What is a social media management tool?
• Best social media management tools overall
• Social media management tools for agencies
• Social media management tools for small teams
• Social media management tools for dedicated platforms
• Social media management tools for publishing
• How to select the best social media management tool for your business

What is a social media management tool?

A social media management tool is a software solution that lets you manage all aspects of your social media in one place. That means you can perform multiple social media tasks without having to switch to a different platform. This includes tasks related to creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, engaging and collaborating.

Most social media management tools let you manage more than one social media profile across several networks. As such, they play a vital role in executing your social media marketing strategy.

Best social media management tools to use

The best social media management tool for you depends on what you need. Factors like the size of your operation and the platforms you use will influence this decision.

Agencies may need a tool that lets them manage multiple social media profiles for their clients. Meanwhile, small teams may look for something with robust collaboration features. Others may only need a tool to help them manage a specific social media platform. On the other hand, some may want to focus on automating their publishing.

Based on these unique needs, we’ve handpicked some of the best social media management tools to consider.

1. Sprout Social
2. Zoho Social
3. HubSpot
4. Sendible
5. Pallyy
6. SocialPilot
7. Buffer
8. Keyhole
9. Sprinklr
10. eClincher
11. Tailwind
12. X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck)
13. Preview
14. PromoRepublic
15. Hootsuite
16. Coschedule
17. MeetEdgar
18. Later

Best social media management tools overall

1. Sprout Social

Can’t blame us for giving ourselves the top spot, right? Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool to manage all aspects of your social media strategy.

Sprout offers integrations with all the major social networks. This includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. So you can work across your entire presence in a single dashboard.

Plus, you can also manage reviews from sources like Google My Business, Trustpilot and Facebook. It even lets you create shoppable posts integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs.

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy tool gives it an added advantage over other social media management platforms. This lets you create a curated feed of content for your employees to share across their social networks. So you can take your employee advocacy efforts up a notch and amplify your brand reach.

Features:

• Social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, reporting and more in one easy-to-use dashboard
• ViralPost feature to publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage
• Smart Inbox that compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms
• Hashtag tracking to identify the most popular and relevant hashtags to boost visibility
• Custom URL tracking to get a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions

2. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a tool that boasts features “built for every social media feed.” The platform allows you to start discussions, share reports, create team roles and encourage feedback. This makes it easy to get everyone on board with your updates, strategies and performance insights.

In addition to scheduling, the platform has its own optimized timing features similar to Sprout. You can customize your content for each network and schedule them to go out at the right time.

The platform’s Inbox keeps track of all your conversations in one place. So you don’t have to switch between multiple platforms to manage your customer interactions.

Features:

• An instant integration with the Zoho CRM and the ability to monitor customer interactions
• Social listening dashboards to track brand reviews, social mentions and branded keywords
• Ability to collaborate with teammates within the platform via chat, audio and video calls

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading customer platform with powerful social media management features. Its centralized social inbox lets you keep track of all your social interactions in one place. You can further gain contextual information on these conversations with a CRM integration. That way, you have the insights to enhance and personalize the customer experience.

The platform helps you organize your efforts by tagging marketing assets and content. So you can associate your posts with specific campaigns and measure their effectiveness.

Additionally, it comes with all the essential features you need in a social media management software solution. This includes tools for publishing and scheduling as well as keyword monitoring and social media reporting.

Features:

• Keyword monitoring streams to identify important interactions and prioritize the right conversations
• AI-powered social media post generator to simplify publishing
• Best time to post suggestions to optimize scheduling

Social media management tools for agencies

4. Sendible

Sendible has done a great job of niching down for agencies and large brands. It offers client dashboards and automated client reporting features for agency users. Collaboration tools and user management capabilities make the platform ideal for multiple users.

Additionally, it offers a number of helpful integrations to make social media management as easy as possible for users.

Features:

• An all-in-one dashboard that makes it easy to see your overall social media performance at a glance
• Collaboration tools that allow your team to create content and then send it to the client or team leader for approval
• Presentation-ready reports to showcase social media ROI to clients
• A mobile app that lets you monitor and manage your social media accounts on-the-go

5. Pallyy

Pallyy is a unique social media management tool specifically targeted at agencies. This software helps agencies plan and schedule clients’ social media posts all in one place. The platform features a Kanban-style workflow and a visual planner where you can plan your grids. Additionally, you can easily access media files from the media and folders library.

Features:

• Integration with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest and TikTok
• Visual planners make it easy to prepare content across platforms and grids, especially when aesthetics is a priority
• Folders to better organize your media files
• Shareable content calendars where clients can leave comments and approve posts

Social media management tools for small teams

6. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a straightforward social media management solution for those just starting out. It provides all the essential publishing and scheduling features that you need in a social media tool. The platform simplifies content creation with an AI Assistant. This helps you generate engaging captions based on the latest trends and audience preferences.

SocialPilot offers in-depth analytics reports to guide better strategies. The content performance and audience insights help you understand what people are engaging with. You can analyze growth patterns to continue creating great content.

Features:

• Integration with several major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
• Ability to customize and optimize posts for multiple social networks in a single composer
• Bulk scheduling for up to 500 posts to help you save time

7. Buffer

Buffer is another social media management tool that’s ideal for small businesses and startups. It offers a completely free plan for your first three social media channels. This makes it the perfect option for setting up your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

The platform simplifies content creation with an AI Assistant that generates new ideas. It even lets you store ideas so you can build on them later. A direct integration with Canva, DropBox and OneDrive makes it much easier to import content to edit and share on social.

Features:

• Social media publishing tools that allow you to easily schedule out all the social media content you’ve created for each channel
• A social media engagement dashboard that lets you respond to all mentions or messages online in one place
• Analytics and reporting to give you a bird’s eye view of how your social media efforts are performing
• Landing page builder to create a customized experience

8. Keyhole

Keyhole is unique from most of the tools on this list in that it’s an influencer tracking and marketing software as well. It performs in-depth analytics to help you vet and compare influencers. The profile analytics help you zero in on influencers who manage to drive authentic engagements.

After your campaign goes live, the tool measures the performance of each influencer and their impact on your campaign goals.

Features:

• Automated social media reports that are shareable and presentation-ready within seconds
• Several reporting features, including brand reporting, campaign reporting, hashtag reporting and influencer reporting

9. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management platform with features to manage your socials. It supports your essential social publishing needs with an editorial calendar and a digital asset manager. The engagement dashboard lets you view comments, mentions and messages in one place.

A unique Sprinklr feature is the user-generated content (UGC) management capabilities. You can use it to organize content from fans and repost them to amplify brand reach.

Features:

• Sprinklr AI to speed up content generation
• Custom approval workflows to streamline team collaboration
• Customer service and consumer intelligence integrations for a unified customer experience management

10. eClincher

eClincher markets itself as a social media management platform that highlights a commitment to 24/7 customer support. Like most tools on this list, eClincher features a cross-network social publishing tool. It comes with a visual calendar, a dedicated messaging inbox and a publishing queue. Plus, it features brand monitoring across social, news, blogs and more, complete with sentiment analysis.

Features:

• Provides 24/7 customer support for its users so they can “strategize, optimize and measure ROI”
• Team collaboration with drafts, comments, notifications, tagging and assigning messages

Social media management tools for dedicated platforms

11. Tailwind

Tailwind started out as a tool to address a hole in the market for Pinterest scheduling. So it initially focused on automating Pinterest marketing for brands. It has since expanded to cover Instagram and Facebook. But the platform continues to stand out when it comes to managing Pinterest.

The visual calendar helps you plan and organize all your social media posts in one place. You can apply filters to view only your Pins to see how your Page would look. The platform then auto-publishes these Pins to catch your audience when they’re most responsive.

Features:

• Post ideas to make sure you always have Pinterest content in the pipeline
• Automatic personalized designs to create on-brand posts every time
• Hashtag finder to discover popular and hyper-relevant hashtags to boost your engagement

12. X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck)

X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck) is an X-owned management tool to monitor conversations on the platform. It gives you real-time visibility to monitor multiple timelines on a single screen. So you can easily jump in on the right conversations and engage with your audience.

Since its rebranding to X Pro, the tool is now a part of X Premium subscription. As such, you can access plenty of premium features not available to regular users. This includes the ability to share longer content and download videos among many others.

Features:

• Ability to create longer posts to share in-depth information and messages
• A dedicated Highlights tab to showcase your best posts on your profile
• Reply boost so your responses show up more prominently

13. Preview

Preview is a mobile app that lets you visually plan out your Instagram feed. The tool is perfect for creating a feed that’s based on a specific Instagram feed aesthetic. You can upload as many photos and videos into the app so you can preview your feed before you publish.

Features:

• Upload photos, videos and carousels to the Preview app to get an idea of what it would look like live on Instagram
• Schedule your content right within the Preview app so it’ll publish when you’re ready
• Plan out Reels and Stories as well as your regular Instagram feed so you know how everything will fit together

14. PromoRepublic

PromoRepublic is a unique tool on this list as it markets itself as a local marketing platform. Having a localized social media management tool makes it easier to target local audiences. You can create hyper-localized ads targeting audiences on Facebook and Instagram.

Through its local SEO tool, businesses will be able to grow foot traffic and web traffic. You can even manage customer reviews and feedback right within the dashboard.

Features:

• Best for small businesses, franchises and businesses who want to grow awareness in local audiences
• Dynamic fields to automatically localize content across thousands of local pages
• Content labeling to see what social content resonates in specific locations

Social media management tools for publishing

15. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool with powerful publishing features. It comes with a visual calendar to plan out your content and easily fill gaps. If you ever run out of things to post, you can use the tool to generate an endless stream of content ideas. The tool even provides suggestions on the best time to post so you can schedule your posts for the highest engagement.

Check out our list of Hootsuite alternatives if you’re looking to take your social media management in a different direction.

Features:

• Publish and schedule social media posts on a variety of platforms
• Manage incoming messages and mentions and respond to them in a single inbox
• Monitor online conversations around your brand and industry to stay on top of trending topics

16. CoSchedule

CoSchedule began as a content marketing company and has since brought social media management and calendars into its fold. It helps you organize your social media publishing efforts with a social calendar to visualize your entire content plan. The Best Time Scheduler ensures that your posts go out when people are most likely to engage.

Features:

• Social Message Optimizer to craft powerful messages for your social posts
• AI Social Assistant to generate ideas and social messages instantly
• Predefined social sharing templates so you don’t have to create a publishing plan from scratch
• ReQueue automatically creates recurring social posts from your best content

17. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media management tool that helps teams automatically curate their social media feeds. This is perfect for solopreneurs or businesses with small teams. Startups, where team members wear a lot of hats, will benefit from the features available with MeetEdgar.

Features:

• Repurpose content and give it new life by automatically republishing it at a later date
• Scheduling tools that let you set the optimal times for MeetEdgar to schedule your content
• Real-time content insights to see what performs best so you can optimize your strategy

18. Later

Later is a social media management tool that assists with publishing and content creation. You can organize your social content strategy with a visual planner and a media library. The Best Time to Post recommendations make sure that you’re reaching your audience at the right time on TikTok and Instagram.

Features:

• User-generated content discovery using tags and mentions
• Instagram Hashtag Suggestions tool to generate fresh and relevant hashtags
• Caption Writer tool to automatically craft powerful social media captions

How to select the best social media management tool for your business

When investing in a new tool for your business, you want something that adds value to your marketing tech stack. So it’s important to carefully weigh your options to ensure that you’re making the right choice. Here are some factors to help you narrow down the ideal social media management software for you.

Integration

The first thing to consider is whether it has a social media integration for the platforms you use. It should integrate with all the major networks so you can manage them all in one place.

Scheduling

Publishing is one of the most vital aspects of social media management, so you need a tool to simplify the process. Look for one that comes with features for scheduling social media posts and best time to post suggestions. Bulk scheduling capabilities are a plus if you have to schedule hundreds of posts each month.

Collaboration

Whether you work with a small team or with clients, you need a tool that supports seamless collaboration. Look for one that has a shared publishing calendar along with multi-user support and message approval workflows.

Social listening

A core aspect of social media management is being able to track and engage with relevant conversions. So you need a tool with social listening capabilities to monitor specific keywords and tags in addition to brand mentions.

AI capabilities

While not a necessity, AI marketing capabilities give you an added advantage. You can find social media tools that offer AI-powered features, especially when it comes to content creation. Being able to generate ideas and captions in an instant will help you speed up the process of creating new social posts.

Reporting

The easier it is to highlight your performance and KPIs, the better. Whether you’re reporting to clients or presenting data to stakeholders, in-depth social media reporting is a must-have.

Additionally, reporting can help highlight what’s working and what’s not in terms of your social presence. So make sure the tool can monitor the social metrics that matter most to your business.

Cost

Whether or not you can get by with totally free social media management software really depends on your business’s size and scope. For solo businesses and up-and-coming agencies, free or freemium tools might serve as a stepping stone toward paid ones.

But oftentimes, “you get what you pay for” rings true. That’s why it’s important to assess which features matter most to your business and what your non-negotiables are.

Take care to consider the overall cost of social media marketing when deciding on your budget for a social media tool.

Adaptability

Another major consideration is how well the tool can adapt to changes in your social media planning. Does it have a built-in editor in case you decide to create more visual content? Can you get hashtag ideas in case you want to start adding more hashtags? Make sure it has all the features you might possibly need so it can quickly adapt to your latest social media plan.

Scalability

One crucial factor is the ability to scale along with your needs. Almost in line with the previous factor, scalability helps you ensure that the tool can support your business growth. At the bare minimum, it should offer the option to add more users and social profiles.

Manage social media like a pro

The right tool helps you manage your social media like a pro. It streamlines publishing and allows you to manage all your social media interactions in one place. More importantly, it enables you to collaborate seamlessly with your team and clients.

After going through our list, take some time to weigh your options before you make the final move. And remember, you can get a first-hand look at Sprout’s automation, collaboration and reporting features with a free 30-day trial.

The post Top 18 social media management tools for businesses in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.

With its popularity growing exponentially with audiences of all ages and demographics, it’s crucial that businesses and brands maximize their reach on the short-form video app. One way to make that happen is by having a consistent TikTok posting schedule.

TikTok offers a free scheduling feature, but it’s limited to desktop use only. That’s where Sprout Social steps in, offering a solution for scheduling TikTok posts on both desktop and mobile.

Below we explain everything you need to know about scheduling TikTok posts—whether it’s with TikTok’s video scheduler feature on desktop or with Sprout Social. We’ll also review how Sprout’s mobile scheduler will make scheduling and publishing even more convenient.

Table of contents:

• How to schedule TikTok posts with TikTok’s Video Scheduler (desktop only)
• How to schedule TikTok posts using Sprout Social (on mobile)
• How to schedule TikTok posts using Sprout Social (on desktop)
• Tips for creating your TikTok schedule

How to schedule TikTok posts with TikTok’s Video Scheduler (desktop only)

Much to the joy of social media managers, TikTok launched their Video Scheduler back in spring of 2021 for Creator and Business accounts. This feature makes it possible to schedule content from 15 minutes to a maximum of 10 days in advance.

Here’s how you can schedule TikTok content natively:

Step 1: Log into TikTok on a web browser

The scheduler is only available on desktop, so have your computer handy. Login and click the +Upload button in the top right corner.

Pro tip: Be sure to do your research on TikTok marketing best practices before you start exploring the scheduler. Understanding the fundamentals of developing a marketing strategy for the app will set you up for TikTok scheduling success.

Step 2: Upload and prep your post

In the upload video window, you can do everything you normally do before publishing. Add captions, TikTok hashtags, mentions, choose a cover image, run a copyright check and pick your settings.

Step 3: Schedule TikTok posts

Once a video is scheduled, you can’t make edits. So take time to do a thorough typo and settings check before hitting schedule. When you’re ready, click the toggle next to Schedule Video so it turns green. Two boxes will appear where you can set your publishing date and time. The time zone defaults to your computer’s, so double-check your settings.

Step 4: Do a quick double check

Mistakes happen. Cut out Murphy’s law and make sure your content is scheduled at the right time. Find scheduled posts in the Drafts section of your Profile.

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Once you click Schedule, sit back and relax—your TikTok posting schedule has officially been created.

You’ll get a push notification when your post goes live, as long as you’ve enabled notifications.

How to schedule TikTok posts using Sprout Social (on mobile)

Only having desktop publishing natively isn’t great for those who prefer using mobile devices or need to schedule posts while on the go. But with Sprout Social, you can schedule TikTok videos directly from your mobile device.

This flexibility means you can plan and maintain content for your TikTok schedule from anywhere, ensuring you never miss opportunities to engage with your audience. The ability to create and schedule TikTok videos from the same device is also an easy way to streamline your marketing workflow.

Below we break down the steps on how to set up a TikTok Schedule on a mobile device using Sprout.

Step 1: Log into Sprout on your web browser and start composing your post

Begin by logging into Sprout Social in your favorite web browser on your desktop.

Tap the blue notepad and pencil icon in the top right to compose your post. You can also select Publishing on the left side bar and click on the day you want to post.

Pro tip: Schedule your posts within the weekly or monthly calendar to get a birds-eye view of scheduled posts across your platforms and accounts. Seeing the calendar from this perspective will prevent inconsistent scheduling or accidentally publishing overlapping posts.

Step 2: Choose the TikTok account you want to schedule a post on

You might be juggling several TikTok accounts if you work in social media marketing. Sprout makes it easy to oversee multiple accounts from a single location.

When you navigate to the New Post window, you’ll find a dropdown menu in the compose box. From here, simply click on the account you wish to post on.

Step 3: Designate specific team members to be your Mobile Publishers in the Sprout Social mobile app

Mobile Publishers are assigned to post content to Instagram and TikTok using Sprout’s mobile app. Sprout’s mobile publishing features create a workflow of scheduling your posts in the mobile app. Then, the assigned Mobile Publisher(s) will publish the content to your Instagram or TikTok account based on the time/day you specify.

Remember, your team will need to pick who’s going to publish on mobile before you schedule a post.

There are a few actions to take if you want to appear in the Mobile Publisher list in the compose window:

• Download the Sprout Social app on a mobile device
• Enable push notifications for the app
• Enable the publishing reminders option in the notification preferences screen of the app

Once you have a mobile user set up and ready to go, you can create your post by uploading a video to Sprout via desktop. Then, you can add the final touches to your post such as:

• Writing an engaging description or caption–it’s optional to include mentions and hashtags
• Choosing whether to open engagement with followers by allowing comments, duets or stitches
• Designating the Mobile Publisher for your post
• Selecting a day and time for scheduling the post

Once you’ve done all the above, you can click send or schedule.

Step 4: Open Sprout on your mobile device to finalize your post

The next step is in the hands of the designated Mobile Publisher for your scheduled post. But that’s not quite the end of it. The Mobile Publisher will finish the mobile publishing process.

First, you’ll tap on the publishing notification from Sprout that will appear at the scheduled time.

Then, you’ll be able to review the post content one last time. If no changes need to be made, tap Continue to TikTok to move forward with publishing.

You’ll then see a list of publishing reminders to review. If all looks good, simply tap Ok, I’m ready to post.

For iOS users, your uploaded video will download to your device and your caption will be saved to your clipboard. After that, the TikTok app will open.

Step 5: Use TikTok to publish your scheduled post

You’re almost there. The mobile publishing process will be completed within the TikTok app.

If you use an Android device, your video will automatically load when TikTok opens.

If you’re an iOS user, you will have to select the video from the camera roll. You’ll also have the option to polish up the video by adding any effects and options before tapping Next. After that, you will paste the prepared caption from your clipboard.

At this point, take a final review for any typos or errors. Are you happy with how your post appears? If so, tap Post to publish your video. You’re all done.

Step 6: Review your scheduled content on the go

Social media marketing moves fast, so it’s easy to schedule posts at the wrong time of day or on a completely different platform than you intended.

By having the Sprout app on your mobile device, you can check and confirm that your scheduled posts and recently published posts are perfect while on the go.

From misspelled words to overlapping postings, Sprout enables you to catch the little things before–or quickly after–they are live.

Sprout also makes it possible to add edits on the fly. This is especially helpful since TikTok’s Video Scheduler doesn’t allow changes to the video, captions or scheduled time once a post has been scheduled for publishing. So be sure to take advantage of that feature to create more time and space in your schedule for more important tasks in your workday.

Curious to see how scheduling TikTok posts on mobile will level up your social media marketing strategy? Sign up for a 30-day free trial of Sprout’s TikTok management tools to try it yourself.

How to schedule TikTok posts using Sprout Social (on desktop)

TikTok’s scheduler is great for a quick set-it-and-forget-it post. But chances are, TikTok is one of many channels you’re managing.

Using a dedicated social media publishing tool like Sprout Social empowers you to see and schedule all of your posts in one unified place.

TikTok was one of our most-requested features. And we’ve made it easy to schedule posts, with no limit to how soon or how far in the future you can post your content.

Follow these easy step-by-step instructions to create your TikTok schedule using Sprout’s desktop option.

Step 1: Log into Sprout on your web browser and create your post

Start by logging into Sprout Social in your favorite web browser on your desktop.

To create a post, tap the blue notepad and pencil icon in the top right. Or, click Publishing on the left and click on the day you want to post.

Pro tip: According to The Sprout Social Index™, the majority of content consumers think posting 1-2 times a day is the sweet spot for brands.

To avoid over-posting or double-posting, schedule in the weekly or monthly calendar view. This gives you a high-level look at your upcoming posts across platforms to avoid over-scheduling in a given day or time period.

Step 2: Select the right TikTok account

Agencies, social media managers and creators alike may be balancing multiple TikTok accounts.

With Sprout, you can manage multiple handles in one place.

Once you’re in the New Post window, select the dropdown in the compose box and choose the account you want to publish on.

If you want to repurpose your short-form video on platforms beyond TikTok, select your Twitter handles, Facebook Pages and more in that same dropdown.

Step 3: Upload your video content and prep your post

Time for the fun part. Upload the video you want to use. Then, in the compose window, polish and prep your post by:

• Creating an engaging caption
• Including any mentions and hashtags you want to use—these become interactive once your video is published
• Choosing how your audience can engage with your video—will you allow comments? Duets? Stitches?

In this step, you can also use Sprout’s unique features to keep your social campaigns and team processes organized.

For example, set a Message Approval Workflow to streamline team collaboration and communication.

Is your post part of a larger content campaign? Select a campaign to keep everything organized.

And internally tagging your content makes it easy to categorize posts based on business objectives, post themes and more.

Combined, these features help keep your TikTok marketing campaigns and cross-platform marketing campaigns visible—for you and your team.

Step 4: Choose the best time to post

Scheduling TikTok posts through Sprout enables you to publish at your preferred time. Identifying the best time to post matters, but it can also feel like a mystery.

The best posting times on TikTok for you to engage with users can vary depending on your target audience. However, below is a visualization which shows the best engagement times based on data averages collected worldwide.

Step 5: Schedule TikTok posts, or save them for later

Once you and your team are feeling good about your post, you have a few options as far as how to schedule:

• Save it, or schedule it, as a draft: Still have pending reviews? Want to keep it as a backup post or calendar placeholder? Saving your content as a draft is a great way to give yourself more editing time.
• Auto-schedule with the queue: Ready to post but don’t have a time in mind? The Sprout Queue is a feature that enables you to choose the best time to publish based on audience activity within a time window you set.
• Submit for approval: It always helps to have a second editing eye on your posts. When you set an Approval Workflow, the “schedule” button will change to a “submit” button, and you can submit your post to the approver for their review.
• Publish immediately: Ready to post right now? Select this option to send your post out into the world right away.

Step 6: Double check your scheduled content

It’s all too easy to think you scheduled a post for noon, only to realize it was published at midnight.

While TikTok’s Video Scheduler does not allow you to edit scheduled posts before they go live, Sprout does. Take some time to do a quick typo and time check.

Scheduling in advance gives you plenty of editing room while also leaving more time in your schedule to dedicate to enhancing your strategy.

Tips for creating your TikTok schedule

You’re almost ready to start scheduling. As you fill your content calendar, it’s important to think about how your TikTok schedule fits into your larger social strategy. With 39% of marketers predicting the app will be one of the platforms they use the most, refining your team and content strategy as you post is key if you want to keep up.

Here are a few tips and best practices to keep in mind:

Maintain a shared, unified content calendar

Managing multiple platforms and posts can result in a lot of moving parts and silos.

Maintain a content calendar to see your scheduled posts across all of your social platforms in one, centralized place. This keeps you organized, helps you track whether you’re over—or under—posting and creates an easy-to-share resource for your team.

Create a calendar of your own, or use Sprout’s social media calendar as an all-in-one content calendar and scheduler.

Track your best posting times

The TikTok algorithm is quite different compared to most social media platforms, so you really need to have a TikTok-specific posting strategy if you want your content to be seen on the app.

According to TikTok, recency is a factor in determining which videos show up in the coveted For You Page—one of the best places to get discovered and grow on the platform.

While it’s important to post both frequently and consistently in addition to keeping your TikTok video ideas fresh, the key is to be online when your audience is most active.

We already mentioned that Sprout has data to help identify when you should schedule posts for maximum engagement opportunities.

You can take it a step further and track your posting times. Do any of your peak times surprise you? What posting times and days can you experiment with?

You can also do this on TikTok. To identify when your TikTok audience is most active in the app:

1. Tap the three-line icon at the top right of your Profile view
2. Tap Business Suite
3. Tap Analytics
4. Tap Followers at the top of the screen
5. Scroll down to Follower activity to identify what days of the week and times your audience is most active

Your best posting times might be at odd, outside-of-working-hours time blocks—all the more reason to schedule your content ahead of time.

Set a smooth approval process for you and your team

Whether you’re a solo social media manager or part of a team, having another pair of eyes is always helpful.

Defining a structured review process for your TikTok content—and all of your content—helps maintain quality control while limiting the amount of cooks in the kitchen.

Sprout makes this easy by providing you with built-in, customizable Message Approval Workflows. Create and select different workflows for specific posts or platforms to easily streamline your approval and collaboration process.

Measure the success of your profile and posts

Measuring and tracking your TikTok marketing strategy, posts and posting times is crucial if you want to turn creative content into meaningful business insights—on TikTok, and beyond.

Regularly look at TikTok analytics to see what you’re doing right, and where you need improvement. Don’t be afraid to experiment and test until you find out what works for you.

With Sprout, analyze how your TikTok profile and content is performing—on its own, and compared to your other social profiles. Use the Cross-Network Reports like Profile and Post Performance to turn the metrics that matter most into insights that can fuel your strategy and create a deeper connection with your audience.

To truly make informed decisions and optimize your strategy, you need to analyze your TikTok performance over time—not just over days or weeks. If you are a creator beginning to see a lot of success with TikTok you may be in a position to earn money from your account.

While TikTok only offers 60 days of data, Sprout doesn’t limit your TikTok data after you’ve connected your platform. Meaning you can analyze your profile’s growth and success quarter over quarter, year over year.

Engage with your audience often

Once your posts are live, remember to regularly engage with your audience in TikTok comments.

After all, it’s called “social” media for a reason. Engaging with your audience strengthens your connection with them, and shows you’re listening.

Engaging with your audience is crucial across platforms. Streamline this process by using a tool like Sprout’s Smart Inbox to keep up with comments across TikTok, Twitter and more—all in one place.

Lighten the load and schedule your TikTok posts now

Scheduling your TikTok content ahead of time ensures your content and publishing is “always on,” while also allowing you to disconnect and sign off.

You’re well-equipped to create your TikTok schedule—now all you need is to get started, and to breathe easy.

If you’re ready to streamline your TikTok scheduling process, and your social strategy as a whole, then you’re ready for Sprout Social.

Try Sprout free for 30 days to see how it can power better insights for your social strategy and business.

The post Schedule TikTok posts from mobile and desktop appeared first on Sprout Social.

Nowadays, there are much more efficient ways to publish and schedule social media content. If you take advantage of a Facebook publishing tool, you will be empowered to have a tool semi-automate your social media management tasks. With capabilities like batch uploading your posts for the month, creating a weekly or monthly schedule, and built-in tools that make content publication easy, your time will be freed up for tasks that your business needs you to focus on instead.

Throughout this article, we’re going to address three key benefits of using a Facebook publishing tool and introduce you to 12 useful options for your business.

• Why you should use a Facebook publishing tool
• 12 Facebook publishing tools for your brand
• Find the right Facebook publishing tool for your needs

Why you should use a Facebook publishing tool

How can a Facebook publishing tool help you? And why is spending time to discern the right one for your business worth it?

We’ve got three reasons why.

Efficiently schedule your posts ahead of time

Scheduling your Facebook content ahead of time is a much more efficient way to publish your content. Instead of logging in every day to manually publish your content at sporadic times, we recommend batching content tasks together in advance to make your content publishing process most efficient.

Batching is a time management tactic that groups similar tasks together as a way to work on them more quickly and decrease potential distractions. When it comes to your Facebook content, we recommend batching content tasks together like so:

• Content ideation – Plan a set time for content idea of the posts you plan to create and eventually publish. This step you’ll want to do the furthest in advance so you can set yourself up for the next two stages of the content process.
• Content creation – After the content ideation is complete, we recommend knocking out the creation of the content you plan to schedule and publish all at once or through a few content creation sessions.
• Content scheduling – Lastly, once the content is produced, we recommend scheduling those posts in one sitting using a Facebook publishing tool.

If your Facebook content process has more steps than the ones above, you can add those in. But it’s best to focus on each task at once, first creating an entire week’s worth of content, then scheduling that week’s worth of content.

And using a Facebook publishing tool makes scheduling out your content even easier. Some of the tools in our list allow you to set your planned weekly schedule first so that you don’t have to select a date and time manually. Other tools allow you to choose automated optimal times based on your audience.

Streamline your reporting

Most Facebook publishing tools give you access to your posts’ analytics, which provides you with key data for metrics like reach, engagement rate, and more. Use the analytics feature provided through third party Facebook publishing tools to draw insights for your social media reporting. Discover your top-performing posts so you can create more like them. And identify posts that don’t resonate as much with your audience so you can remove them from your strategy.

Facilitates team collaboration

If you work with a team to create and schedule your Facebook content, publishing tools can make the process even easier. Find a tool that facilitates social media collaboration, allowing junior social media managers to create content to then send to senior managers for approval and publication.

Or, have your social media team input the content and captions for each post to then send to the graphic design or video team to add in the assets once they’ve been created.

12 Facebook publishing tools for your brand

Looking to improve efficiency, reporting and collaboration amongst your team? Check out the top 12 Facebook publishing tools below to find the perfect option for your business.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social sits at the top spot of our list for a reason. Yes, we’re going to toot our own horn. Sprout Social is a comprehensive and easy-to-use Facebook publishing tool—but it’s also so much more than that.

With Sprout Social, you can get access to Facebook features like:

• Publishing
• Reporting and analytics
• Monitoring
• Customer service
• Competitor analysis

But you can also get access to those features and more for every other social media platform you plan to use in your strategy. Take advantage of our publication features while also getting an all-in-one tool that fits all of your social media management needs.

Plus, make Facebook publication as easy and seamless as possible. Input your caption, upload your media, then let Sprout’s AI tool find optimal publication times based on when your audience is most likely to be online.

Our Facebook publication-specific features include:

• Optimal posting times
• Team collaboration tools
• Visual social media calendar
• Content suggestions for inspiration
• URL tracking

Pricing: Starting at $199/month. Sign up for a free 30-day trial today!

2. Social Champ

Social Champ is another social media management tool that works on a number of networks—Facebook, of course, included. With Social Champ, you can add multiple social media accounts to your dashboard and manage your presence on all of them from one place.

Facebook scheduling features include:

• The ability to save and manage hashtags
• Analytics and reporting
• Automation
• A social media inbox
• The ability to add the first comment to your Facebook post

Pricing: Free forever account option. Paid plans start at $26/month.

3. SocialBee

SocialBee is another Facebook publishing tool with a number of features to offer. Its visually appealing content calendar can help keep your social media team organized each time you schedule another batch of content.

SocialBee’s Facebook management features include:

• Integrations with design and content creation apps
• Content calendar with scheduling capabilities
• AI assistant for help creating content
• Analytics and reporting
• Social inbox

Pricing: Starting at $24/month.

4. Keyhole

Keyhole is a Facebook publishing and analytics tool focused on helping agencies manage all of their client accounts in one seamless dashboard. Keyhole also has an arsenal of social media management tools, making sure its agency users can easily manage all aspects of their clients’ social media.

The Facebook publication tools available in Keyhole’s suite include:

• Optimal posting times
• A calendar view for organization
• Full-scale social media analytics
• The ability to collaborate with teammates or clients

Pricing: Starting at $79/month.

5. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is another great option for keeping all of your digital content scheduled out and organized. Famous for its calendar view, CoSchedule focuses on helping marketing teams make sure they’re never missing a day of content.

Facebook publishing features available with CoSchedule include:

• An easy-to-use drag-and-drop social calendar
• The functionality to track social media messages
• AI social assistant to help writing captions
• Social message optimizer to help improve your engagement

Pricing: Free account option. Paid plans start at $19/month.

6. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media management tool that supports more social networks than just Facebook, making this a great option for brands with a complex online presence. More than that, Agorapulse boasts additional features that help users offer great social media customer service.

Agorapulse’s Facebook publishing features include:

• Team collaboration
• Visually appealing social content calendar
• Multi-platform publishing
• UTM tracking
• Asset management

Pricing: Starting at $49/month.

7. Post Planner

Post Planner is a simple and easy-to-use social media publishing tool. With a name like Post Planner, you can safely assume that the ability to plan out your social media content sits at the core of this tool’s functionality.

Post Planner’s Facebook publishing features include:

• The ability to create multiple posts at once
• The ability to optimize your posts for each platform’s requirements
• Post previewing
• Saved captions
• Evergreen content recycling

Pricing: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $7/month.

8. eClincher

eClincher is a social media management platform that also has features that assist with local SEO, business listing management and tools for businesses with franchises or multiple locations. That means this is a great option for franchise businesses needing help with more than just social media.

eClincher’s Facebook publishing features include:

• Digital asset library
• Content curation tools
• Hashtag management
• Multi-platform publishing
• Team collaboration

Pricing: Starting at $65/month.

9. Loomly

Loomly is a social media management platform that also offers team collaboration features, helping its users to collaborate effectively as they implement their social media strategies. Access a number of useful features with a visually appealing interface.

Some of the Facebook publishing features that Loomly offers include:

• Visually appealing content calendar
• Team notifications and collaboration tools
• A feed of post ideas to get inspiration
• Asset management
• Automated and manual publishing options

Pricing: Starting at $32/month.

10. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a social media management and analytics tool that can be a great option for organizing, publishing and scheduling your Facebook content. Access collaborative tools, AI features, publishing capabilities and more.

To help you publish your Facebook content, SocialPilot has features like:

• An AI assistant to help with your content creation
• A content library to store your assets
• Smart scheduling that accounts for different audience time zones
• Bulk scheduling to make publication even easier

Pricing: Starting at $25.50/month.

11. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a tool that started years ago as one of the only Instagram analytics tools and has come a long way based on demand to offer a suite of social media management tools for nearly every social media platform.

The Facebook publishing features that Iconosquare offers include:

• Image cropping tools
• Post approval
• Media library
• Cross-platform publishing

Pricing: Starting at $49/month.

12. Emplifi

Emplifi is the last option on our list, but still a solid choice for a social media management and publication tool. Emplifi can help you publish and schedule your content, as well as manage your online community, keep an eye on your brand’s reputation and even work with influencers.

With Emplifi, get access to Facebook publishing features like:

• AI caption composer
• AI-powered posting time recommendations
• Post approval workflows
• Digital asset library
• Presets, templates and drafts for easy content creation

Pricing: Book a demo to get a customized quote based on your needs.

Find the right Facebook publishing tool for your needs

Ramp up your Facebook marketing strategy by planning ahead and staying organized. One of the best ways to do that is by putting together the perfect arsenal of tools for your needs.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one Facebook publishing tool, give Sprout Social a try. Sign up for a 30-day free trial to test drive our software and see if we have what you need.

The post 12 Facebook publishing tools for your brand in 2024 appeared first on Sprout Social.