Best Time to Post

Often times it’s not what you post, but when you post.  The most important thing is to still post great content, however, you can severely hamper your great content by posting at the wrong time.

General guidelines:

• Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are your best days
• Saturday is the worst day
• Holidays are slow traffic days (except commerce sites)
• 10 am – 11:30 am and 1 – 3:30 pm are best times to post
• Stagger posts based on time zones

A recent study by Virtue specific to Facebook also shows that Social Media may follow similar patterns to the rest of the traditional Web.

• The three biggest usage spikes tend to occur on weekdays at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. ET.
• The biggest spike occurs at 3:00 p.m. ET on weekdays.
• Weekday usage is pretty steady, however, Wednesday at 3:00 pm ET is consistently the busiest period.

What day of the week posts are happening on Facebook

Fans are less active on Sunday compared to all other days of the week; most sites slowest traffic day is Saturday, followed by Sunday.

This is interesting since so many schools and companies block Facebook from 9 – 5 pm.  Tough to block mobile devices though.

When conversations are happening on Facebook

There are exceptions to the above rules, depending on what you are posting, but these are good general guides for most sites, social media activity and blogs. I’ve been fortunate to have access to statistics to hundreds of different sites/blogs during my sixteen year career and roughly 90% of the time the above holds true.

When I was the Head of Marketing at Travelzoo our production team always sent out the Top 20 e-mail list to the 21 million subscribers on Wednesday at roughly 11 am.  Why?  This gave it the best chance to be read.  You should do the same thing when you post.  If you have an incredible Tweet you need to get out, but it’s 2 a.m. on a Saturday, use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule for the tweet to go out when more potential readers might read it.

Ironically, this post may not be picked up as much as it could since I’m posting it in the afternoon on a Monday following a holiday.

Other good posts on this topic: YouTube Traffic Patters, Best Time to Send E-Mail, When are Facebook Users Most Active?, Conversion Volume by Day