If you’ve been consistently posting on social media, kudos to you because a lot of brands don’t even do that. Know what else a lot of businesses aren’t doing?
Many aren’t using social media analytics to see when their audience is most active on each platform.
Does this sound like you? It’s time to make a change in 2025.
By using insights into your audience’s behavior, you can determine the perfect time to post, how often to post, and what to post on social media.
The more you post to your audience’s preferences, the more likely you are to get engagements.
Sold yet? Read on to learn how to harness the power of social media insights to optimize your posting schedule in2025.
A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Insights to Optimize Your Posting Schedule in 2025
This guide will help you create a posting schedule that gets maximum engagement, whether you’re just growing your audience or already have an established social media presence.
The steps we cover will help you analyze your current audience and audit your content so that you can determine the best schedule for posts in advance.
But if you currently don’t have enough information to go on, we’ve got you covered, too.
We’ll show you how to experiment by getting the ball rolling and posting. After all, you can’t test something you haven’t done yet.
So, let’s get to it.
Step 1: Learn Your Audience
The very first step in creating an effective social media posting schedule is understanding your audience.
You’ll want to look at their demographics, which include their age, gender, location, occupation, and education level. Each of these factors is crucial to how they interact and engage with your brand, what types of content they prefer, and when they’re online.
You can use Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, LinkedIn Analytics, or X Analytics to see the demographics of your followers.
Psychographics is something else you’ll want to dive into. This could be your audience’s values, interests, attitudes, lifestyles, and hobbies. To measure psychographics, analyze user interactions, such as links, comments, shares, the topics they engage with, and the content they create.
Here are a few ways you can gather this data:
- Social listening tools can help you monitor brand mentions, analyze popular hashtags related to your industry, and identify trending topics.
- With built-in platform analytics and engagement metrics, you can uncover the number of likes, reactions, shares, retweets, and comments on your social media posts to understand what resonates with your audience and what makes them “tick.”
- You can use targeted surveys and polls on your social media platforms to directly gather data from your audience.
After diving into audience demographics and psychographics, you can start identifying their pain points. What are some of their challenges? What frustrates them? What questions do they tend to have?
To uncover these insights, monitor comments and DMs for common questions and complaints. Use social listening tools to track mentions of your brand, competitors, or industry issues. This will help you craft posts that provide solutions or answers, which increases audience trust and engagement.
Then, once you’ve gathered enough data on your audience, you can break them down into smaller groups based on shared traits like frequent buyers vs. casual browsers, active engagers vs. silent followers, new followers vs. long-term supporters, etc.
CRM tools like HubSpot or Salesforce are powerful tools for audience segmentation.
Once you’ve segmented your audience, you can start personalizing your content schedule. For example, you could post detailed product updates for loyal followers and content introducing your brand to new audiences.
Step 2: Understand Global and Local Audience Behavior
There are a whopping 5.22 billion social media users around the world!
Know what that means? It means you could be reaching people on the other side of the globe if you get social media marketing right.
How can you do this? Use insights to segment your audience by location and tailor your posting schedule accordingly.
Consider different time zones. Schedule posts for different regions. For each region, post during the times your audience is most active. Use one of the best social media scheduling tools out there, like Bulk.ly, to automate your post scheduling process during the most optimal times.
And don’t forget about local holidays, work schedules, and cultural norms that might influence online activity. Leave those days out of your posting schedule so you’re not shouting into the void.
Step 3: Audit Your Current Content
Do a social media content audit. This involves analyzing your existing content to understand which posts got the most engagement, reach, and conversions. Look at metrics, such as links, comments, shares, clicks, and impressions.
From there, you can identify your high-performing content so that you understand what your audience responds to.
Then, refine your social strategy and optimize your posting schedule by doubling down on content types that drive the most engagement.
Here’s what that that process looks like:
- Identify content categories and themes: Review your content to uncover recurring themes or categories. This could be promotional posts, educational content, or user-generated content (UGC). Understanding these categories will allow you to balance your content mix and ensure fresh content and variety in your social media posts.
- Analyze content timing and frequency: Look at your posting schedule and analyze when you post, how often, and what engagement looks like at different times. Do certain times of day or days of the week yield better results? Check your social media insights to see engagement data for each post based on time and date.
- Evaluate content quality and relevance: How great is your content? Is it relevant to your audience? Does your tone resonate with followers and represent your brand personality? Does your messaging and visual content align with your brand and goals? Get your team members or stakeholders together to review your content and gather their feedback on its relevance, quality, and impact. You can also gain audience feedback by monitoring conversations around your posts.
- Analyze audience engagement: Look beyond raw metrics to understand how your audience interacts with your content. Are there any specific types of posts that generate comments, shares, or other forms of engagement (e.g., polls, questions, etc.)?
- Identify content gaps: Look for any gaps in your content that you aren’t covering. This could be topics, themes, or types of posts that your audience might be interested in but you’re not currently addressing. Analyze competitor content to see what they’re posting that you aren’t. Use social media tools like Google Trends or BuzzSumo to find trending topics in your industry. Conduct surveys or ask for feedback from your audience to find out what they want more of.
- Review post copy and visuals: Check if you’ve optimized your captions, visuals, and hashtags for each social channel. Are they clear and compelling? Do they align with your brand voice? Do the visuals align with each social media platform’s dimensions?
- Track the performance of different content types: Determine which types of content get the most engagement and which ones fall flat. A well-designed marketing dashboard can provide a clear overview of these engagement metrics across different content formats. Review post analytics to compare engagement rates for different content types like photos, videos, carousels, Stories, or infographics. This helps you identify which content formats work best for your audience. You could even use the insights to experiment with formats that may not have performed well but could see better results with an optimized posting schedule.
- Evaluate your call-to-actions (CTAs): See how well your CTAs are performing. Are you prompting users to comment, share, visit your website, or follow your account? Are your CTAs clear and compelling? Look at your clickthrough rates and conversions to see if they’re actually working.
Step 4: Create a Content Calendar
Having a detailed content calendar can help you organize and plan your social media content strategy. To get started, figure out how often you want to post on each platform. This will likely depend on your audience’s behavior, your content types, and your resources.
Analyze your audience’s engagement patterns to determine the ideal frequency for each social media channel. Make sure you integrate relevant key dates, holidays, and events into your content calendar.
These can include national holidays, important cultural dates, industry events, or product launches.
Tip: Use an interactive content calendar. These digital calendars come with advanced features like collaboration tools that let multiple users plan, edit, and manage content creation.
Step 5: Adapt Your Posting Strategy to Each Platform
Different platforms have different best practices, audience expectations, and content preferences. Keep this in mind by tailoring your social media strategy to each one.
So, you created your social media calendar. Have you organized it to reflect the requirements of each platform (e.g., image size, post frequency, post type)?
Create a dedicated section in your calendar for each social network, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and TikTok.
It’s also a good idea to think about the different audiences that different social networks attract. For example, LinkedIn users are often professionals. On the other hand, Instagram’s audience tends to be younger and more visual-centric.
So, consider factors like age, location, interests, and behavior. Match this with your posting schedule to make sure you’re reaching your audience at the right time.
Step 6: Experiment with Different Posting Times
Using insights to fine-tune your posting schedule is critical for reaching your audience effectively.
For example, a business specializing in metal building ideas can use social media analytics to determine when its target audience, such as contractors, architects, or DIY enthusiasts, is most active online.
By identifying peak engagement times, the business can strategically share social media posts that showcase design inspiration, construction tips, or promotions.
Most social platforms give you insights into when your audience is most active. Don’t have an audience just yet? Review existing data, including any historical insights or best practices, to establish a baseline posting schedule.
It’s essentially the default posting schedule you create before experimenting with different times or making adjustments based on insights.
Ready to experiment? Get out there and start posting! Choose different times and dates for your experiments, including mornings, late evenings, mid-day, weekends, and weekdays. For example, if your initial data shows that 9 AM is a good time, try to experiment with 10 AM, 12 PM, or 7 PM on different days.
Spread out your test posts to avoid overlapping posts from other brands or content types. This allows you to assess the performance of each post individually.
On the other hand, if you already have enough data on your audience, use it. Look for patterns in user engagement, such as peak times (e.g., weekdays vs. weekends, morning vs. evening).
You can use the detailed analytics native to each social media network. You can also use a social media management tool to track the metrics of your social posts. Compare the performance of posts you made at different times using metrics like reach, engagement rate, and conversions.
When it comes to scheduling posts, here’s one other thing to focus on: platform-specific nuances. Each social media platform has unique algorithms and user behaviors. For example:
- Instagram’s users are typically most active Monday through Friday, from 9 AM to 4 PM.
- LinkedIn targets professionals. The platform gets the most engagement during the weekdays and business hours, from 9 AM to 5 PM.
- According to one study, the best times to post on TikTok vary. So, your situation will be unique based on your target audience’s viewing habits.
- Even though older demographics dominate Facebook, weekends and midday slots often perform well. For example, between 9 AM and 10 AM are the most optimal times.
- Short bursts of activity on X occur during major news events, which makes the platform ideal for real-time engagement. X’s users are also active during the weekdays, during and after work hours (mornings: 8 AM-10 AM, late afternoons: 5 PM to 6 PM)
Optimize Your Social Posting Today
So, you’ve read about six steps to start optimizing your posting schedule in 2025. For something that seems pretty complicated, not bad, right?
It’s all about experimenting and gathering data. Once you’ve done that, the rest will fall into place.
Now, you can start using your bulk scheduling tool to post away!
