Yesterday, I listened to Dan Zarrella from HubSpot‘s webinar about the “Science of Timing.” As a blogger and as a social media participant, I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of the insights that he provided. Here’s just a taste of what was discussed:
Timing for social media
Zarrella shared a slide which identifies the best time of day to get Re-Tweets. Content that is Tweeted in the afternoon and evening is much more likely to be Re-Tweeted than in the morning. I’ve seen this same trend happen with my own content. See the HubSpot slide below for scientific proof:
When it comes to Facebook sharing, it appears that weekends are the best time to share content with your “fans”.
Timing for blogs
Zarrella has done a lot of research on when people are most likely to read blogs. He showed data that indicated that blogs are more likely to be read in the morning and during the day. However, when it comes to gender differences, men are more likely than women to read blogs at night. Therefore, if your blog is targeted to male readers, you may want to alter your blog publishing strategy slightly.
Zarrella showed a slide that indicated that weekends are when you are more likely to receive comments from your readers. While most bloggers (myself included) prefer to blog during the week, there is definitely some merit in also blogging on the weekend. See Zarrella’s slide about comment timing below:
There were even more valuable insights presented in the HubSpot webinar yesterday. In case you want to see all of the data, here’s a link to Dan Zarrella’s webinar slides on SlideShare.