Scheduling your social media posts is important for so many different reasons. It allows you to reach your target audience at the times they’re online, even if that time isn’t convenient for you. If something comes up—like illness–scheduling allows for posts to continue going up even when you’re out of commission. If potential customers go to view your page and they see it’s inactive, that’s direct business that you’re losing out on. But how do you know when to post? That’s where analytics come in.

Most social media platforms have analytic suites that will tell you how your posts perform, as well as actions that people took as a result of your post. There’s other details that these analytics tell you as well. For one, they can tell you what your audience demographic is. Are your followers men or women? Young or old? What pages do they like besides yours?

This is all info that you can use to influence what kind of content you produce to ensure the best results. The other key detail that analytics will give you is when people are online. Is there a spike in active followers at night? Then you may want to start posting later in the day so those people can see. Facebook and Instagram will actually give you post time recommendations when you go to schedule a post ahead of time.

Social media can be a time consuming task to undertake for your business. Scheduling out posts can actually shorten the process by a fair amount of time. Taking out a couple of hours at the beginning of the month to put together a few posts and then scheduling them throughout the month makes the process much more bearable, promise.