When are the best times for social sharing of blog content? [#DigitalInsights]

A new analysis of 1,167,426 blog posts shows the best times

Inbound marketing is incredibly effective and rewarding, but to get it working for your business you will need to optimise every element of it to gain the most possible traffic from the content you have created.

Blogging is a key element of any inbound marketing strategy, and social shares are critical to getting your blog seen. So it follows you will want to know the best times to post your blog content and what social networks to focus on in order to best promote your blog posts so the greatest possible number of people see them.

Which days are best to post?

This research from Track Maven makes for interesting reading. It reveals that during the working week, Monday and Friday are slightly less good for achieving social shares than midweek. Because we so often find ourselves in meetings on Mondays and Fridays it makes sense that people are less likely to be reading and sharing blog content. Although it is important to note that the Monday and Friday dip is quite slight, so if you post blogs regularly it will still probably be worth posting to your blog on these days.

The strongest trend that emerges from this research is the popularity of social sharing during the weekend. Especially given the fact that blogs are posted half as often at the weekend as they are at weekends. So if you want to get a boost to your blog social shares consider setting up your site to publish some content at the weekends. In addition it might be a good idea to use social sharing tools with scheduling features such as Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule social posts about your blog articles at weekends. As these will probably gain more traction over the weekend when your audience have more time to read and share you content.

There are some drawbacks with this research though. Unfortunately it does not give a breakdown of times of day that are most effective for generating social shares, which would make for interesting reading. However for Twitter you can use Followerwonk to discover when your followers on Twitter are active, which can help you discover what is the best time for you to post to reach your audience on Twitter.

In addition, the research has not controlled for the differences in time zones, which may be smoothing actual differences between days. So it is always best to track when your own network is online so you can be sure you are defiantly posting at the optimum time for you.

Which Social Networks are most effective?

The report also gives a handy breakdown of which social channels are generating the greatest numbers of social shares. This is important as it can help you focus on a few key channels to get the greatest results. Particularly useful if you are short on time!

The research reveals that Twitter and Facebook are far and away the best networks for social shares. The way the data is presented is somewhat misleading however. From the chart it appears that Facebook makes up almost two thirds of social shares if you add together Facebook shares and Facebook likes.

Shares, Tweets or Likes?

However a ‘like’ on Facebook does not constitute a share. Facebook’s sharing algorithm means that although there is a chance it will appear in other peoples newsfeeds that they have liked a post, it will not be given priority and instead Facebook is far more likely to show what people have been posting themselves. So a ‘share’ is considerably more value able than a ‘like’, as it is more likely to appear in people’s newsfeeds. A tweet may also be much more valuable than a like because a tweet goes to everyone who follows that person’s feed, whilst this is not the case if someone likes something on Facebook. So my advice would be Twitter is in fact a more powerful sharing tool than this chart gives it credit for.

It would also be interesting to see the affect of post length or type of content on social shares, but unfortunately the report doesn’t contain that information.

However you can see our resources on content marketing strategy and management to help you optimise your blogs to get the best possible results.

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