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Engage Update

Engage Publish: Best Time to Post, plus Validation Updates for Multiple Platforms

Related products: Engage AI
Engage Publish: Best Time to Post, plus Validation Updates for Multiple Platforms

Helping you optimize your posting schedule for maximum engagement. 

 

Best Time to Post

 

What is it?

Introducing Best Time to Post, an AI-powered tool designed to help you pick the optimal time to schedule and post social content. 

 

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What’s the value? 

  • Eliminate guesswork
  • Optimize content performance, maximize engagement

 

The timing of a social media post is crucial in ensuring its optimal visibility and engagement from fans. Best Time to Post takes the guesswork out of picking when to schedule content by using AI to suggest the most optimal times to maximize engagement. Our algorithm uses a collection of over 4.1 billion social posts across all time zones to provide you with precise suggestions for your social media posts, tailored to each day of the week and each social media platform.

 

How does it work? 

Meltwater regularly collects and synthesizes data on all social posts and their engagement both published from Meltwater and native social channels. This data forms the backbone of our algorithm, ensuring a wide-reaching and comprehensive understanding of social media interactions.

 

We refine this data to meet each social media channel's specific requirements. Engagement patterns on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube are each distinctly modeled. We are able to calculate the expected engagement for each hour of the day, providing a unique engagement model for each day of the week, per social channel.

 

Our refinement process extends further to normalizing the data for each specific day and different time zones. We develop separate models for each day of the week (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) and for each of the three major timezone clusters (EMEA, AMER, APAC). This allows us to compute the probability of engagement for each hour compared to the other hours on that same day.

 

This enables us to accurately capture the natural ebb and flow of social media engagement throughout the day, helping us identify peak hourly periods when your audience is most active and responsive. 

 

This empowers you with actionable insights to strategically time your posts for maximum impact and engagement. 

 

In Publish, under the Post Time drop-down, users must select Schedule date and time

 

Beside the date and time selector, will appear the new Best time option. 

 

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Clicking Best time will open a new pop-up, featuring a bar chart, and up to five (5) suggested times to schedule the post. 

 

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The bar chart features engagement rate averages per hour for the selected day. 

 

Below the chart is a link to a help center article, featuring further details and explanations of how this feature works. 

 

These recommended times are based on the average number of engagements across 4.1 billion pieces of collected social content. 

 

What if I select more than one social channel? 

The recommendation will take all selected social channels into account. This is based on the percentage of volume on those channels. Meaning, if Facebook has a higher engagement percentage than LinkedIn, naturally the recommendation will favor Facebook, to maximize engagement. 

 

Select a recommended time for your post, and click schedule to finish!

 

Validation Updates for Multiple Platforms

 

What is it?

Based on the latest APIs, we’ve updated the valid character counts and file sizes for TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook publishing. 

  • Facebook
    • Increased video max size to 3 GB
    • Increased image max size to 8MB
  • LinkedIn
    • Increased video max size to 5 GB
  • TikTok
    • Increased character count to 2200
    • Increased video length to 10 minutes

 

What’s the value? 

Updating the validation rules allows Engage to respect each platform's currently defined posting limitations (as defined by their API documentation). Staying current with these limitations eliminates user confusion and reduces the need for users to work inside the native platforms.

 

How does it work?

The new validation rules will automatically be applied and respected when users publish to the above platforms using Engage. In other words, users don’t need to do anything special.

 

Happy Friday!
Your idea is live in Engage! 

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

@Fleur H @Maria Dehne @Lawrence Dreyfuss 


Thanks for these updates, and the work behind them! 


Happy Friday!
Your idea is live in Engage! 

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

@Fleur H @Maria Dehne @Lawrence Dreyfuss 

Thanks @kelly.bebenek

A quick clarifying question: are the “best times to post” based on the average of all 4.1 billion posts analyzed, or are the recommendations tailored based on past performance on my specific social media accounts? For example, I imagine the best times to post for an alcohol brand might be different than for a kids toy company based on the user patterns of their specific followers. 


Hi @Lawrence Dreyfuss - after connecting with our Product team, I wanted to share the information that they gave me on this:

 

The Best Time to Post suggestions are based on all of our data for that channel - not specifically for your owned content.

 

The reason behind this is that it gives you more opportunity to expand your reach, as opposed to only targeting your current followers.  This also ensures that we have data for everyone using this feature - including those with low post rates or newly connected pages.

 

We’re looking into adding some improvements or even some type of grouping in the longterm to our algorithm (for example: "use owned data only if they have enough owned data, otherwise use all data" or "apply a category like 'auto' to all relevant companies then run on all data where company = auto"). We don’t have timelines for these enhancements yet, but we will be sure to keep mCommunity updated when we have more information to share.