When it comes to social media, jewelers tend to believe that it’s the early bird who catches their followers’ attention. The hours between 7 a.m. and noon were clearly the most popular, accounting for more than half (53%) of the responses when we asked store owners in our 2016 Big Survey for the best time to post.

While the morning is probably the most convenient time for store owners to post, given that afternoons tend to be the busiest part of their day, it may not be the optimal time to encourage engagement — numerous studies by marketing companies suggests the afternoon hours during weekdays generally work better for business messages.

There is also quite a disparity among the different social media channels. An excellent roundup of recent studies (instr.us/10162) done by CoSchedule (the maker of a social media calendar tool) concludes, for example, that the best time to post on Facebook is 1-4 p.m. late into the week and on weekends. In contrast, the best times for the other mediums were scattered throughout the day and the week.

• Twitter: Noon-3 p.m. worked well with a peak time around 5 p.m. on workdays.
• Pinterest: Saturdays are your best bet — and later at night.
• LinkedIn: Midweek posting from 5-6 p.m.
• Google+: The beginning of the workday morning (which suggests that at least here, jewelers are getting it right).
• Instagram: Outside work hours. Instagram gets very low engagement on the weekends and during work hours. Surprisingly, 2 a.m. posts do well.

As for the best days to send out your email bulletins, here jewelers were much more in line with studies (instr.us/10163) that show emails sent on Tuesdays generate the highest open and click rates followed by those sent on Thursdays.

(So if you send two emails a week, send the first on Tuesday — 10 a.m. tends to perform best — and the second on Thursday.)

Of course, the great thing about digital marketing is that it is possible to track your response rates and to experiment to find the best times to reach your particular customers. It may be that those mid-morning hours are best for most jewelry retailers.

This article is an online extra for INSTORE Online.