Earlier this year, we wrote about which days are best for posting to Facebook for the hospitality industry.
A few months later, we reported on how to optimize your Twitter engagement and highlighted the best times to share content on the platform. We shared both of these findings during our recent webinar on How to Create the Perfect Hotel Social Media Plan, which is free to watch. What is consistent with both social platforms is that posts on weekends see a noticeable spike in engagement – 14.5% higher on Facebook and nearly 20% higher on Twitter.

While numerous studies have been done on how to optimize engagement on these social sites, many of the emerging platforms, from Pinterest to Google+, have been left out. Nevertheless, Saxum has put together a great infographic highlighting when each platform receives the most traffic. Below are some interesting findings from the report, which aggregates data from a variety of sources including TheNextWeb, Forbes and Mashable:

• Pinterest’s 25 million users are most active on the weekends, especially between 1pm and 4pm and the evening hours on Saturdays 
• Vine, which has 13 million active users, sees the most traffic between 10am and 12pm on the weekends
• Google+, which boasts 500 million users but only 11.9 active users, sees consistent traffic throughout the week, but does see a daily spike in traffic between 9am and 12pm
• Instagram is a unique platform of 130 million users that, according to this report, does not see a recurring pattern of traffic peaks and valleys throughout the week. Rather, traffic depends on your unique follower base. To figure out when to post, Statigr.am is an excellent resource to check out

What does this mean for hotels?

As with most things related to social media, these trends above should be treated as a guide for your engagement efforts but not an exact science. Also, these traffic statistics do not account for special events or holidays, like the Super Bowl for example, that will increase posting volume. That said, the prevailing finding here is that social media activity across nearly all platforms spikes on the weekends. Accordingly, if your property’s social media manager is not sharing content beyond the weekday, he/she is missing a valuable opportunity to increase audience engagement and interest in the property. Here are a few other best practices and tools hoteliers should use when determining the optimal times to engage are:

• Pinterest best practices include sharing visually appealing content and using an analytics dashboard to measure posting effectiveness
• Understand the nuances of Google+pages and leverage analytics site AllMyPlus to measure traffic and message impact
• Follow the examples of hotels on Vine by creating some of your own video content and tagging all of your videos with brand keywords to track audience engagement
• Repurpose your Instagram content across other social platforms and set up social media search filters so you can identify other posts about your hotel

Finally, start to experiment with other social media analytic tools once you become comfortable sharing content. Are you seeing higher engagement on the weekend? If not, what days and times are working best for you? Be sure to let us know!