So this morning Merritt sat in on a webinar called ‘The Science of Timing’ through Hubspot. The focus of the webinar was how to time out social media and blog posts, as well as emails so that you can make the most out of that communication.
It was a great webinar and Merritt took some awesome notes, so we wanted to share them with you! We here at integratePR are definitely going to use them and hopefully they can help you too.
SOCIAL MEDIA
- Follow the idea of “Contra Competitive Timing”: Talk when less people are talking (when you have good content, address smaller groups of people so that you can have a greater impact).
- Post on social media accounts later in the day and week to get the most retweets out of a post.
- When it comes to Click Through Rates by day , there isn’t much variation. Saturday and Sunday, however, show the highest CTR’s, so don’t be afraid to post on weekends. Weekend posts are much better than posting on Monday and Thursday.
- Click Through Rates by hour – CTR’s stay stable throughout the course of the day, they do normally peak around lunchtime and 5pm/right after work.
- Pages that are posted on every other day on Facebook had the most luck in increasing likes (pages that post every day tend to crowd the content on people’s feed’s).
- Weekends are best for Facebook sharing (people sharing content from a website, blog, etc using the “Facebook share” button). Content that is shared during the week is much higher in the morning—so think about that when you are considering sharing content during the week.
- Users read email mostly in the morning.
- Spam reports happen more on the weekends, so use of the spam button is a lot higher on Saturday and Sunday. During the week, spam is mostly deleted early in the morning.
- Email Opens – Open rates are higher on the weekends and early in the mornings, sending emails in those times will get you more attention.
- Email Clicks by Day – weekends are when most clicks happen.
- Email Clicks by Hour – highest rates early in the morning.
- Sending Frequency – After about 3-4 a month, click through rates stay the same, so you might as well test out sending more emails.
- Effect of Sending Frequency on Unsubscribe Rate – once you get past 4-5 times a month, the effect on unsubscribe rates is almost nonexistent. Unsubscribe rates are highest when you send emails once a month.
- Unsubscribe rate is highest the first couple of times/days you send someone an email. Also, when people first sign up is when they are paying the most attention (and may find that your content isn’t right for them).
BLOGS
- Most people read blogs in the morning, with a slow decline throughout the day. Men read blogs at night more than women do.
- Do a survey of your followers to find out WHEN people read, WHAT they prefer to read, and in what FORMAT.
- Page views per blog post are highest on Mondays and take a slight dip on the weekends. Page views by hour it the highest between 10-11am.
- The highest amount of comments on your blog tends to spike on Saturdays and Sundays. Likewise, comments per hour is highest in the early morning.
- Blog links by day – the rate of people linking to your blog is highest on Mondays and Thursdays.
While you’ve always known timing is everything, you may not have known how specific that timing could get! We are thrilled to have this new information and to apply it to our work. It will definitely be something to keep in mind as integratePR moves forward!