 A question that has plagued me since 2009 when I started teaching social media is when is the best time to post on social media, George, please tell me which day of the week, which time of the day or approximate time of the day that I should be posting to reach the maximum number of followers. Okay, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable question like why why wouldn't you post optimal time so that you can reach the most number of people, right? Sounds right. And the reason why the question has always bothered me a couple of reasons. One is I'm like, hmm, this information, first of all, is easily searchable on the internet. You go to the internet and it's the best time to post on Facebook to reach maximum followers. And you'll go Tuesdays at 10am or, you know, after work Tuesdays at 7pm or whatever, you know, whatever. It's easy to find and you can find it for the current year, you know, they always update those metrics. It's like, you go and do that if you want to, but I'm like, if this stuff is so easy to find, then isn't everyone else doing this? And the answer is, of course. So it's like, so the same question is, when is the best time to drive to work? It's, well, that's, that's a good co on, right? It's a good like pairing question. What's when's the best time to drive to work? When everyone else isn't driving to work, right? So when you post, when everyone else is posting, which is active, the best time apparently Wednesdays at noon or whatever, whatever they'd say, I don't even know anymore because I have such disdain for this question. Then you're basically fighting with the other millions of people who think that that's the best time to post. And so when your followers shows up on social media, the algorithm is now saying, oh, my God, we don't. We have to, we have to compete. We have to find the right post for, you know, George is now browsing Facebook at this optimal time, right? And there's 10,000 other people trying to get George's attention. So therefore your post is going to get buried probably because someone else who has a bigger fan page or more active or whatever, it's probably going to get the attention. So so then George, then you're saying we should post at the least optimal times. Is that what we should be doing? Because if you're going to drive to work, you know, and drive to work at 3 a.m., right? No one's driving at that point, man, few, few people are. So here's the irony of it. Probably, probably yes is the technical right answer because the truth about the social media algorithm is that it's not like, oh, your post is 45 minutes old. It's old now. We're going to bury it. It doesn't work like that. Have you noticed when you serve Facebook or any other social media, you keep surfing and you see a post that was posted three days ago or even a week ago and you didn't have to scroll that far to get there? Why is it that a post from days ago is showing up pretty high when you're scrolling the algorithm? Why is that? Because the algorithm doesn't, the algorithm prioritizes your engagement history with that person or brand much more than out of the hundred pages you follow, this one just posted five minutes ago. So therefore we're going to show it to you. Yes, if you have a good engagement history with that brand and there's recency as a factor in the algorithm, of course, recency. And they don't want to show you something that was posted three months ago for no reason. Then because it's outdated, you're not going to be as interested as a human being, you want new stuff, you know, they know our bias. So long story short, the irony is if you actually post at the least optimal times, the people who are going to see your followers who see your post, they're up in 3 a.m. in the morning, they can't sleep, they see your post, they have a good engagement history with your post. That's why they're seeing it as a, the recency factor is now good enough because they're like, okay, engagement history. Yeah, that's check. The algorithm says check. Okay, well, then let's go to recency. Recency. Okay. You know, you like my, you like Georgia stuff in the past. You're up at 3 a.m. Georgia's posted at just at 3 a.m. Okay, great. You're awake anyway. You're going to go ahead and like it. And then what happens is Facebook says, hey, this was liked in the first wave of followers we showed it to. So we're going to show it to your second wave of followers who wake up at 8 a.m. and, and now they're surfing and the three through 3 a.m. people have already proven that this was a good post and there's some social proof there in fact, meaning some, some likes and maybe a comment or something already. And then the 8 a.m. people go, hey, this looks like a good post. Good look, there are already some likes there. And then that engages even more. So I've never set this publicly before, but the irony is it's actually better technically speaking for the algorithm to post at the least optimal times because 3 a.m. 8 a.m. people, 12 p.m. People are going to see it again. The 7 p.m. People after work will see it again. The people who only surf Facebook once a week will see it also because their Facebook says, hey, you don't want to miss this. This is one of the people you engage with. And you haven't shown up for a week. So we want to make sure you saw this really good one because why? Because social media, their algorithm prioritizes engagement. Their algorithm prioritizes, wait for it, addiction. They're not being cynical like evil, you know, addiction. No, they're prioritizing attention. They're like, how can we get people to look at our stuff more so we can show ads to them? Because that's how we get paid. We get paid for you to show up and surf more. So you always see an ad, yeah, good. We just now we just we can take money from the advertiser because we just reached you with that ad. So that's they're just trying to keep their jobs and the way to keep their jobs is to make sure you keep showing up. And how do they make sure you keep showing? Because every time you show up, you feel it's worth it. You feel it's addicting. You feel it's like, oh, my God, that was entertaining. Oh, that was engaging. That was important every time I whether whatever your value is important, you know, entertaining, funny, angering, yeah, unfortunately, you know, anger and, you know, resentment and whatever is is a very addicting emotion that social media knows a lot of people engage with that. So they show more angry content and outreach, outreach, you know, outreach, outreach. But others of us, we get engaged by humor. And so the algorithm is going to show us more of that, right, because they know that that's what. So long story short, coming back to the original question, George, tell me when the hell I should be posting to stop all this technical talk when the Tuesday at 10 a.m. is that one? OK, go, go. So so here's the bottom line. To me, you should post whenever you want your audience to start. Engaging with you like it like a show, like a regular show. It's like right now. OK, guilty pleasure. Now that you watch all the way to this part of the video, my wife and I are really into Love is Blind and the Netflix show. We just guilty pleasure. We have fun watching it together. And we're like, oh, new episode coming out on Friday. Like we look forward to Friday. And the the first thing we do when we sit down to TV together on Friday, we're going to go and look for the new episode of that show. You see what I mean? They have they have they announce it. And so we know when it's when it's dropping. Same thing. Is there a podcast that you really enjoy? Maybe mine. And you know, George always releases his episodes on Mondays at 6 a.m. Pacific Time, you know, so Monday at 6 a.m. It's a Monday. We haven't seen George's episode. Let me go look for it. So I basically have come to a particular rhythm of I still get. I used to schedule. I schedule my Facebook and Instagram posts, for example. And I just I don't know. I picked a I picked a random time one day. I'm like a Thursday at 4 a.m. I just 4 a.m. OK. It's not I don't want to. It's like I'm thinking about my ideal audience and my ideal audience. It's like this mixture. It's like all around the world now. Unfortunately, there's Europe. There's there's America's. There's even Australia and Asia's. I've kind of built my business into this corner where I have to like serve everybody in the whole world. So I'm like, whatever Thursday at 4 a.m. 4 a.m. I'm just going to pick pick that time. It wasn't strategic. I didn't Google or search when's the least optimal time. Or most of all, I didn't I just I don't know why I just came up with it. But I've stuck with it. And that's the bottom line. That's the final message I want to say I've stuck with it. For for this platform, it's 4 a.m. For YouTube, it's 12 a.m. Because whatever I just whenever I schedule something, it's 12 a.m. by default. I'm just going to keep it there. There was no rhyme and reason other than I decided. And the rhyme and reason is I stick with it. If I stick with it, it's you always see my text only post on Facebook on Mondays. And when do I post it? Well, Monday is actually end up posting around 12 p.m. My text only post on Monday because I'm I'm still editing it to the final minute. And I've scheduled myself to edit it like at 11 a.m. or 11 30 a.m. and post it. So it ends up going at like a 12 p.m. It's not the 4 a.m. optimal time or least optimal time. It's just but it's consistent. My text only post Mondays. My my video gets posted to Facebook on Thursdays. I have a Facebook live on Fridays at 2 30 p.m. or 2 p.m. or whatever I do it. It's just my lifestyle made it so that that was when these things happened. Before I am, I'm not up. I'm I scheduled it for that time on Instagram, whatever. The long story short, just be consistent and you'll become like a TV show or a podcast for your audience. And they'll look for it and those who don't look for it. They'll see it three days later because they've been engaged with you in the algorithm, make sure they see it. Right. So I hope this is helpful and relieve some stress about trying to find the optimal times. Oh, I'll give you one more example. Like if you post, if you use the the meta business suite to schedule your post, it's going to tell you supposedly the active times for your followers in the last seven days. And you're like, well, OK. But again, that also means that this is being this is being recommended to probably, you know, millions of other people using this tool. So what are we going to do? That's the active times. Right. So just relax. They're going to see it three days later, five days later, 12 hours later. So all this helps.