Answering questions about your social media strategy
The Answers tab within your analytics dashboard shares when, what, and how often to post to maximize your reach and engagement rate.
⭐️ This feature is on our paid plans. Looking for basic analytics?
🎥 Learn more about your analytics in this video.
In this article:
Finding your report
- Start by clicking Analyze at the top of your Buffer dashboard (not available on mobile).
- Select the channel you'd like to analyze on the left-hand side of your dashboard.
- Choose a profile or Page from the drop-down.
- Click Answers.
- Choose the date range you'd like to view.
Diving into your report
Overview
If you're looking for some quick answers about the best time to post, the best type of post and the best frequency in which to post, this chart gives you these answers at a simple glance.
When is the best time to post?
This chart shows you your best times to post to maximize your reach. Your predicted reach for each hour is calculated using data from your previous posts and your follower’s online activity. In order to determine these times, we use the data from when your followers engaged on your past posts. For example, if you're only posting on Mondays at 8am, the best time to post would be likely show as Monday around 8am because that's probably when your followers would see and engage with your post.
Therefore, the way to ensure that Buffer is providing you with the very best information is to experiment posting on different days and at different times for a while so you can see when your followers are engaging with your posts.
The three recommended times are spread throughout the week to maximize your reach for the week. You can hover over each column in the chart to see the predicted reach of that hour.
Times shown are based on your browser's timezone. If we're unable to obtain your browser's timezone, the timezone will default to UTC.
📝 Good-to-Knows
We can generate the best times to post if:
- The profile has at least 100 followers.
- We have data for at least 5 posts on the profile.
- If there are 7 days worth of data for followers of the profile.
- Your account is on a paid subscription (this chart is unfortunately unavailable for trialists at this time).
- This chart is only available for Instagram at the moment. If you would like to get your best time to post for other channels, feel free to add it to our Suggestion Board (or perhaps upvote a similar suggestion) so our Product team can gauge the demand.
Which day gets the most engagement?
This chart shows you which day your posts earn the highest engagement. You can hover over each column in the chart to see your post engagement rate on that day.
📝 Please note, this chart is only available for Facebook, X/Twitter and LinkedIn. For Instagram, you instead have the best time to post chart mentioned above.
Which is the best type of post?
This chart shows you which type of post earns the highest engagement rate. You can hover over each column in the chart to see your post engagement rate for that specific type.
📝 LinkedIn posts labeled as Rich are posts labeled by LinkedIn which contain both media (i.e. images/videos) and text. Posts labeled as Article are posts composing of only text.
Which is the best frequency to post?
This chart shows you which posting frequency earns the highest engagement rate. You can hover over the column in the chart to see your post engagement rate for that frequency.
Adding charts to a custom report
Finally, you can add any of the charts from this area to custom report. Simply click the plus button at the top right of any chart you'd like to include. Learn more about creating custom reports here.
You can also export all data as both CSV and image files using the Export as... button.
