It's extremely important to publish your content at the right time of day. A recent study by KISSmetrics helps outline some best practices for posting at times when your audience is most likely to properly consumer your content.
Before you do anything, you should consider what time zone your customers and prospects live in. Think about this: 48% of the US population runs of Eastern Standard Time (EST), 33% on Central Time (CST) and 14% on Pacific Time (PST). Define where your current and potential customers are and gear your social media publishing toward them. Here are some tips to help you choose the best times to publish and promote your content on Twitter, Facebook, Email Marketing, and your Blog:
- The best days to Tweet are Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday.
- 6pm is most ecommerce merchant's golden hour.
- Avoid having a block of time where you tackle Twitter in one go. Instead, spread your posts throughout the day. Statistics show that you will get the best CTR (Click Through Rate) if you post 1 to 4 times an hour. Save the most important Tweets for 6pm.
- The best day for Facebook is Saturday when people have time to read your links and respond.
- Facebook posts peak around noon and after 7pm - as people check their profiles during lunch hours and after work.
Email Marketing
- For ecommerce stores, 7pm to 10pm is your 'sweet spot'. People are more likely to respond to marketing campaigns or special offers when they get home from work.
- 6am to 10am is also a good time slot as people get into work, check their emails and allow themselves the distraction of marketing campaigns to delay the inevitable start of their workday. We're all guilty! :-)
- Never send emails between the hours of 10pm and 6am.
- When the end of the work day comes, and introspection sets in and readers are more likely to open mail from financial institutes and property services. The hours of 3pm to 5pm are ideal for this kind of marketing.
- The noon to 2pm lunch hour is when people prefer to be left undisturbed by email marketing in general, but if you are distributing news or magazine-style information, give it a shot.
- Weekends and early mornings see the highest CTR.
Blogs
- Blogs get the most traffic Monday at 11am.
- Post early in the morning or after the work day is done.
- Men prefer to read blogs after working hours while women are more likely to read them in the morning. What's your gender demographic?
- If you're looking for engagement: Blog comments peak around 9am and on Saturdays.
Final Thought
I spoke with Sean Work from KISSmetrics, who stressed the importance of doing whats right for you. "Everyone should collect their own data and find out when the best times to post, email, tweet are." It's very true - even with the Shopify Blog I've found exceptions to the rules stated above, so it's important to take everything with a grain of salt and see what works best for you. KISSmetrics offers full-service customer analytics starting at $29 per month.
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