You may not have any gigs right now, but you’ve got tons of time on your hands to promote your band/music on social to engage fans and build your audience to better rebound and attract ticket buyers to a show when COVID-19 restrictions lift and music venues reopen. So, naturally your question right now may be, “When are the best times for artists to now post on social?”

If you are asking yourself this question, it’s a savvy one. With people self-isolating and working from home during COVID-19, social media use has increased. According to the data insights company Kantar, global social media use has increased by 61% over normal usage rates. So, it’s a great time to take advantage of a more active social audience. Yet usage patterns have shifted from pre-COVID-19 patterns.

The New Best Times to Post on Social

While your fans may engage with your posts at unique times (discovered through your channel metrics), recent data from Sprout Social shows the overall new best times to post on three big channels:

  • Facebook: Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from 10-11 a.m. are optimal times to post. Indeed, posts made on any day at 11 a.m. showed a peak.
  • Instagram: Monday, Tuesday, and Friday at 11 a.m. and Tuesday at 2 p.m. are optimal times.
  • Twitter: While Friday from 7-9 a.m. appears to be an optimal time to tweet, overall engagement patterns on Twitter have remained about the same as pre-COVID-19 patterns.

How Often You Should Post

Consistency is the general rule for building engagement. Sporadic posts (depending on their nature) can give people the impression that you’re only sporadically interested in them, or only choose to communicate when you want to promote or sell them something. In terms how often you should post, studies generally agree on the following:

  • Once per day on Facebook (to a maximum of two posts per day)
  • Once per day on Instagram is optimal (to a maximum of three posts per day)

For Twitter, there’s no real consensus on frequency. While some maintain that three to five tweets per day is optimal, other studies support that the more you tweet, the more value you get from Twitter.

The Channel With the Most Followers

On April 30th, 2020, the data and statistics company Statista reported that, because of COVID-19 self-isolation and global work-from-home policies, Facebook now has 2.6 billion active monthly users—more than double the monthly active users on Instagram.

Choosing which channel to use is, of course, up to you. But if you’re a band or artist who’s decided to ignore Facebook, or a young band that’s decided that Facebook is irrelevant because it’s for old people, please read our blog Why NOT to Ignore Facebook to Promote Your Band before you make any final decisions. Informed decisions are always the best decisions.

Will the Above Findings Guarantee You Consistent Results?

No. Social channels are constantly shifting landscapes of variables, meaning it’s impossible to get top engagement numbers ever single time you post. There will be ups and downs, like playing shows. Sometimes, you’ll kill it. Sometimes, few people will show up. The goal of engagement on social is an overall strategy. As long as you’re getting generally good engagement on a fairly consistent basis, you’re doing well with your social promotion.

For more information to help you through this challenging time, we invite you to read:

From all of us here at Royal City Studios, stay safe out there. Stay positive, and keep making awesome music.