Why "best time to post on social media" infographics are not helpful

Type “the best time to post on social media” into a Google image search and this is what you are faced with.

The business world loves their Best Time To Post infographics. It’s understandable. The world of social media marketing is overwhelming; it’s not enough now to have Facebook and Twitter, Instagram is just as big a player and if you’re B2B you need to be using LinkedIn and probably SlideShare and are people really saying Snapchat is the next big social media platform?
When you’re trying to navigate the tricky world of social media marketing, all you want is someone to tell you what to you and when to do it. Which takes us to the number of “best time to post on social media” infographics. While its tempting to take the advice of these infographics and do your Facebook posts 12-3pm on a Thursday and LinkedIn 7-9am on a Wednesday, the unfortunate truth is this is not . As an article from Content Marketing by Shovi says:
“Here’s the sad truth about “best time to post” infographics: they look at the fan base of whatever data set they’re using, pick out the times that represented the highest engagement (comments, “likes”, etc.), and report it as gospel to everyone.

Context

When planning your own social media marketing strategy, there are external factors you need to take into account.
Are you asking your followers a question? Are you asking them to read an article? To buy your product? With each social media post you should not only consider the time most of your followers will be online but what they are doing when they are online.
For example, on the morning commute your followers may be up for reading a blog post but clicking though to your shopping cart to make a purchase is perhaps best later in the evening when there’s more time for consideration.
Also, the infographic which advises the best time to post on Twitter is between 1-4pm is only taking into the account the businesses who are marketing to one time zone. There’s four time zones in the USA alone never mind the rest of the world.

Create your own analytics

There are number of analytic tools that can help you figure your own best time to post on social media. Facebook and Twitter have their own insights, and tools such as Sprout Social and HootSuite also provide analytics and reports. Experiment with different posts at different times and study the results to see what works best for you.
And when you’ve learned what does, please don’t be tempted to turn it into an infographic.