How to know when your targeted audience is most likely to be online using social media?

How to know when your targeted audience is most likely to be online using social media?

The times you post to your social media pages can greatly effect the response you get from those posts and updates. Most people live normal lives which consist of getting up in the morning and going to work, going to lunch and then back to work, and then relaxing at home on the evening. As such, most people are online using social media in the morning, around lunchtime and then again in the early evening up until around 10 PM when they go to bed to start all over again the next day.

So the best time to post would be in and around those hours if you want to get the most response and engagement on your posts and updates. But not everyone's hours are the same due to the time zone differences. It can be 1:00 PM in San Francisco while it's 4:00 PM in New York. And then different countries times are 12 hours or more behind or in front. So while you would want to post when the majority of your fans or followers will be online, you have to take into consideration the time zone differences in other countries too.

Of course, if you are an international brand and have an international following, you're going to have followers from multiple different countries from all around the world anyway and each will have their own time zones and either be online or asleep at different times to your other fans. So you could just post regularly to it in your own time a few times a day and people would eventually see this in their timeline or as a notification depending on which social media site you're posting to. But in case the majority of your followers are from another country, you might get a better response rate posting or scheduling your posts and updates to be around the time that most of those are likely to be online. Otherwise the alternative is, that you're posting when they're asleep and that is just wasted energy and not very smart social media marketing.

Do you try to post to your social media pages at the times that your followers will most likely be online or do you just post regularly regardless in the hope people will see it in their own time?