Are your customers giving you the time of day?
In today’s world of real-time streams and channel choices it’s often confusing as to when the optimal time is to post your social media marketing. Is Twitter better at night? Is Facebook better later in the week? What about blogs and email? What times have been proven by research and technology as the best to hit that send button?
To shed a little light I’ve gathered some charts on each medium from a variety of smart folks.
eMail Marketing
This study by Sign-up.to of when 200 million emails in the UK were opened suggests that it’s good to get in the inbox early as open rates peak at 11 a.m.
There’s lots of different views on the best day to send email in the world of email marketing but this chart suggests suggest mid-week. Of course, only your own experimentation will tell you for sure, but email behaviour seems driven by a workday attitude.
Blogs
Like eMail, blogs seem to follow an early morning pattern according to Dan Zarrella’s survey of 1,400 blog readers. For many, blogs have become today’s version of the early morning paper.
Zarrella’s work also shows a tendency toward morning when it comes to Facebook sharing.
It’s a trend supported by a separate report by Vitrue on this chart showing effectiveness of Facebook posts in the morning vs. afternoon.
It’s pretty safe to say we consider Facebook as more social and less work-oriented than email or blogs – an observation supported by the second spike in the evening on the Zarrella chart – so perhaps the morning skew is influenced by stay-at-home Moms who spend 95% more time on Facebook than they do on Twitter and the 28% of 18-34 year olds who check Facebook before they get out of bed!
In regards to time of week, the research differs but both skew towards the end of week when we lighten up and are ready to socialize more.
Zarrella’s study looked at sharing overall while the Vitrue report looked at the effectiveness of posts by businesses which may explain the respective views on Saturday.
The tendency of activity of the more social media to occur at the end of the week continues as evidenced of this Zarrella study of random tweets vs. retweets.
And retweeting is more likely to occur later in the day as well; perhaps after people have looked after their emails and are more attitudinally open to sharing.
Mobile Marketing
Mobile straddles both work and social as this study by Zokem Mobile Insights shows the bulk of uses of the more business-oriented functions such as SMS/eMail and voice occur during work hours while the night time is the right time for the more marketing-friendly channels of apps and web browsing.
The evidence gathered here shows how people look at each channel differently and suggests that you stand a lot better chance of getting your social media marketing message to ignite when you get the timing right.
Hope this helps the cause.
Any questions check out my tips on Social Media Marketing and Effective eMail Marketing or, hey, contact me and we can share .
Bob Nunn is an award winning digital marketing consultant based in Toronto passionate about getting brands tuned up for the online age and, on one distant beautiful day, conquering the half pipe. He is the founder of themarketinggarage.ca and a regular contributor to Search Engine People’s blog. Addendum: Hubspot just posted a chart via MailChimp that provides email click-throughs by day. Interesting in that it has the exact opposite curve than the open rate version included above with the weekend showing higher rates than the weekend. Here’s a link: http://bit.ly/euOi3t Addendum 2: As I mention in this post using these as a guideline and doing your own experimenting is key. To that point, here’s a great post from AWeber that gives examples of timing from 6 different marketers. Check it out here: http://bit.ly/go0L8cAddendum 3: Return Path just published a study which sheds some light on MailChimps rise of the weekend for email open rates. Their study shows that mobile-viewed email is rising fast and is more likely to be read on the weekend.
Great data! It is so important to consider these factors when crafting your email/social media strategy.
It is important to remember that more than 60% of employers now block Facebook at work. That significantly influences the morning, evening and weekend behavior that these studies show. A savvy marketer must keep that in mind when planning a Facebook campaign.
Great add Matt. Funny enough almost included that stat. It underscores that these are guides only. You have to identify who you’re after and what their schedule is. For instance, I’ve had great 40-50% email open rates sending Sunday night for a sports resort customer because we recognized many were personal emails and were more likely to be in a sporty frame-of-mind on the weekend. Set the benchmark with the standards above. Next one tried Sunday. Worked.
I love this! Especially the email info. I was just recently thinking about that and noticed that personally if I get things on Tuesday or Wednesday there is a better chance of me opening it because I have caught up with all of the weekend stuff and it is early enough in the week I’m not feeling the crunch!
Thanks for putting all this research in one place… it’s laid out so nicely and really highlights the results. Very, very valuable information!
Cindi
Thanks for your comments Cynthia. Understanding the time flow of your target audience can really improve results I’ve found.
Thanks Cindi. Glad I could help. Your own site is stocked with lots of good info as well.
This will be very useful for some of the jobs I plan to do not only with my blog but with the company I work at. You mention a few things I wouldnt have realised even after sending emails to people on Mondays. Perhaps might be best to review some of my tactics and apply what you have presented here. Thanks a lot. RC
Awesome post and great information. I am not sure about the authenticity of the data though. Have you collected this info for your own social media usage or a group of people ?
If I understand your question correctly Krishan I have aggregated this information from a variety of sources all of which, I believe, I have sourced and/or linked to in the post. You can check the authenticity of each by clicking through or searching for the report. While I trust all the data – hence, why I have passed it on – these should only be used as guidelines to use as a starting point as, in my experience, the brand and the category impact the results.
This will be of great help to bloggers and professionals who are into search engine marketing. The data collected is laudable!!
Thanx for such stats they will be quiet helpful
So if I am trying to reach a worldwide audience via Facebook, what time of day would you recommend, I am on EST but really do have people all over the world.
We have clients who have the same issue either across North America or beyond and when we have a message we really want to get across (like a blog post) we use social scheduling tools like HootSuite to schedule the post at different times for different regions; for example if we take the best practises in our article and want a 10 a.m. post time for Facebook we’ll schedule it at 5 a.m. for Europe, 10 am for Eastern North America and 1 pm for the West. Thanks to the endless stream phenomena of most social media sites this isn’t too annoying assuming you’re also posting other non-promotional messages in there. Even so, we’ll schedule those posts across two days: 5 am & 1 pm one day, 10 am the next.
Keep in mind only a small fraction of people actually ever go to your Facebook page after first visiting so it’s not too spammy.
If it’s Twitter we adjust it later reflecting the pattern there.
Of course, the other alternative is find one or 2 ‘universal’ times that fit within the window; 11 a.m. EST is 8am out West and 4 in England which is fine.
Hope that helps. And remember this is just the best practice. The most important thing is to use these and then observe when YOU get the most ‘like’ spikes.
Thanks!
Great post. Quite useful info.
I almost never leave remarks, however i did some searching and wound up here 10 Charts on Best Time of Day Week for Social Media Marketing | eMail Marketing. And I actually do have 2 questions for you if you tend not to mind. Is it just me or does it look like some of these comments appear like they are coming from brain dead folks? 😛 And, if you are writing on additional places, I would like to follow anything new you have to post. Would you make a list of all of all your social pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
Thanks Gregory for commenting. It truly is a revolution in marketing so I think you have to give people’s brains some slack as we all stretch our marketing grey matter in new directions. After guest posting on some places this is now the main place where we’re concentrating. We want to create a community of sorts of folks interested in the measuring the mash-up of branding and online. You can follow me/us on the social profiles right to the right including Facebook and the other usual suspects.
We post news of new original posts there plus stuff from friends & heroes that we like.
Cheers