It’s midnight. You’ve just finished your blog post. You hit publish and then visit Hootsuite to promote it on all your social media channels.
You brush your teeth and go to bed.
The next morning, you wake up and bounce out of bed ready to respond to any comments left on what you though was a highly-engaging blog. And… nothing. Not one single reply.
Wtf?! You exclaim.
Although your blog might have been the most interesting thing you’ve ever written, you just might not be getting the readers you deserve because you’re posting and promoting at a time your audience isn’t online. This means they are missing your marvellous work and in return, you’re feeling worthless.
I wish I could tell you that there was an exact science to blog posting and social media promotion, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
When’s the best time to publish and promote? Well it all depends on two things – your business and your audience.
Understand your readers
First you need to find out what your audience is like as this will let you understand when they’re likely to be online. Do they have busy 9-5 jobs? Are they stay-at-home mums who are busy running their children about in the evenings? Or are they students?
Your social media channels can give you an insight into these demographics. For example, on Facebook you can look at your Insights and see the ages and sex of the people who visit your page, plus a look at the best times to publish for when they’re on Facebook. This is an invaluable tool for helping you to choose the best time to promote on Facebook.
For Twitter, you can access the Analytics Tool to gain a good insight into when your traffic is most active, and what sort of demographic they’re made up of. Of course, it’s also important to see where the majority of your readers live – so you can pick a time zone to match.
Analyse your statistics
Use Google Analytics and take a look at how much of your traffic is coming from social media and when they’re arriving.
You can also take a look at your blog demographics – what ages and interests do your readers have?
Once you’ve got a better understanding of these analytics you’ll understand when your readers are most likely to read your content and you can tailor your promotion to suit.
What the experts say
According to Add This, a widget company that promotes content engagement, the best time to publish on different social media channels are as follows:
LinkedIn: Tuesdays between 10am and 11am
Pinterest: Wednesdays between 1pm and 2pm
Facebook: Thursdays between 9am and 12pm
Twitter: Fridays between 2pm and 3pm
The company got these results by analysing 14 million websites and also discovered that it’s better to post on Facebook and Twitter during the day but Pinterest in the evening.
The busiest time isn’t necessarily the best time
Of course, you need to take these statistics with a pinch of common sense on the side. Because if every blogger was to follow the above posting times, with everyone promoting their content at exactly the same time, then the social media platforms would get very crowded and noisy.
And what does this mean?
That your content will be hard to see amongst everyone else’s, resulting in it getting pushed to the bottom of their feeds.
So perhaps you might decide to publish an hour or two to each of these top posting times, to ensure your content is visible.
What ever you do, it’s important to reflect each month – by looking at your statistics – on what timings did and didn’t work. And repeat what did to grow your audience.
