Perhaps surprisingly, HubSpot Blog Research revealed that YouTube sees the highest usage among social media platforms by video marketers, more than TikTok and Instagram. It’s also where marketers will invest the most in this year.
With this statistic in mind, we thought it was worth looking into how best to post on the platform.
The difficulty with YouTube is that video creation requires a lot more effort than TikTok and Instagram. A 30 second TikTok can take between 5 minutes and an hour to film and edit. The same goes for an Instagram reel or story which takes even less time. For YouTube videos however, this is not the case. YouTube is reserved for longer, more ‘curated’ videos like music videos, visual podcasts or educational content from language lessons to Adobe tutorials to vlogs.
Despite the time required, however, HubSpot surveys have revealed that most marketers say they post on YouTube four to six times a week – as much as they post on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and many other social platforms. This was a surprising piece of information and whether or not it will work for you and your business is very much dependent on the time you have and your resources. There are ways around it. Firstly, you could cut this to once or twice a week uploads. Secondly, you could produce and upload videos that require less edit time. For example, instead of a whole music video just upload a DIY filmed-at-home acoustic or a capella cover of a song.
In terms of when to post on YouTube, the Hubspot survey found the following;
- 31% of respondents said 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.
- 23% of respondents said 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
- 19% of respondents said 12 p.m. to 3 p.m.
- As for the best days, data shows that it’s the weekend with Saturdays being the most popular answer, followed by Fridays and then Sundays.
Other video platforms like TikTok and Instagram focus on short-form content, making it easy for consumers to get what they need during breaks throughout the day. YouTube, however, requires a bigger time commitment. This explained why the worst times found for posting on YouTube tended to be the busiest times in the day (i.e people are getting ready for work, on a commute, at work, at dinner). These worst times being;
- 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.
- 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. (midnight)
- 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.
Why does the time posted matter?
You can optimise your views during a specific time period which can help you generate more traffic to your content and help the growth of your channel. However, it doesn’t play a huge role in the long term. Say your video was posted at 3 a.m., that has little impact on how many views it can garner over the next couple of months or years. Unlike a platform like Instagram where fresh content is key to success, novelty is not the biggest ranking factor on YouTube – relevance is.
