Whether you’re a seasoned veteran or just starting out on social media, there are three key ingredients to boosting engagement and truly succeeding at social media marketing.

Today, I’m going to show you what they are and how you can incorporate them into your social media strategy.

Without further ado, here are the top three things smart marketers know about social media.

1 - When to Post

It should be pretty obvious that you need to know what content to publish on social media, so that won’t be covered here. However, if you’re struggling a bit with it, try to identify your target audience by developing buyer personas, polling your email subscribers, or doing a bit of market research.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss the first key to social media success: timing.

They say timing is everything, and it’s especially true with social media marketing. You can have the most clickable content all ready to go with the most attractive call to action, but you’ll get very little engagement if no one is around to see it.

While this makes sense intuitively, tons of marketers develop a posting schedule around their own personal timetable instead of their target audience’s preferences.

If you want to really get the biggest bang for your buck, you need to post to social media at a time when your message can get viewed by the most amount of people.

Earlier this year, CoSchedule collected tons of data and analyzed when would be the best time to post across the six biggest social media platforms. Here’s what they discovered:

For Facebook, the best time to post is between 1:00pm and 4:00pm on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays as well as 12:00pm–1:00pm on Saturdays and Sundays. Apparently, Facebook users are most active during the tail-end of their week and during the afternoons.

For Twitter, the best time to tweet is between 12:00pm and 3:00pm throughout the work week with a peak best time at 5:00pm. While the data didn’t directly explain why 5:00pm was a peak time for posting, one can imagine that many check their social media accounts near the end of their work or school day. Also, according to the research, many folks don’t tweet on the weekends, so focus your efforts during the work week to maximize Twitter engagement.

On Linked-In, the best time to reach people is between 5:00pm and 6:00pm during the middle of the week along with Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30am-8:30am and 12:00pm. This piece of data is vital to know if you’re trying to reach people on Linked-In, especially since it’s so radically different from the timing most people are on Twitter and Facebook.

For Google+, 9:00am through 11:00am throughout the work week with a peak best time at 9:00am is the best time to reach users.

Pinterest people prefer 8:00pm through 11:00pm on Saturdays as well as 2:00am–4:00am and 2:00pm-4:00pm on all other days. This means many Pinterest users are night owls, so be sure to use that to your advantage.

Instagram users prefer any time on Mondays and Thursdays except 3:00pm-4:00pm and any day of the week between 9:00pm and 8:00am. Also, the data revealed that prioritizing video posts at night can tremendously boost your Instagram engagement.

How in the world did CoSchedule figure all this out? Check out their study to find out.

Lastly, remember to streamline everything by creating a posting calendar and scheduling automatic postings with your tool of choice. This way, you won’t have to personally be on each particular social platform at their respective peak times.

2 - How Frequently to Post

The second key to social media success is frequency.

How many times should you post to social media in a given day or week? According to HubSpot, the following breakdown should be your rule of thumb for the Big Four:

• 4-6 times per day on Twitter

• 2 times per day on Facebook

• 2 times per week on Linked-In

• 2 times per week on Google+

If you’re new to social media, using it this often might seem like a lot. However, once you get the hang of it, you’ll see just how much it boosts your engagement and website traffic.

Try to come up with a social media posting schedule at the beginning of the week outlining all of the social media posts you want to publish for that week. Then, when it comes time to do the actual work, you’ll already have a great starting place. Feel free to recycle posts across all of your social media platforms too, just tweak them as needed.

Depending on your niche and how much time you can allocate toward social media marketing, you might want to focus only on one or two platforms.

3 - Where to Post

This brings us to the third and final key to successful social media marketing.

You now know when and how often to post, but which social media channels are best for your specific business or brand?

As you probably know already, different social media platforms tend to cater to different types of audiences. One might be extremely helpful for your business while another might be rather useless.

For instance, if you’re a baker or hair stylist, a picture-oriented platform like Instagram or Pinterest would be incredibly helpful for you. However, Linked-In––which thrives off of text-based articles––probably wouldn’t be.

On the flip side, if you’re a doctor or a lawyer, using Pinterest and Instagram would be a much less valuable way to spend your social media dollars than harnessing the power of Linked-In to build your brand and referral network.

Ultimately, if you discover where your target audience is and you post at the times that they are most likely to be found on that platform with enough frequency, you’ll be well on your way to succeeding at social media marketing and growing your business.