Best Times to Post with Traffic and Ranking in Mind

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Imagine knowing the right time of the day to post content that guarantees rank. Imagine being able to pick the best hours of the day to post for maximum traffic.

I bet you have the Maida's touch if you can be guided on the right time schedule you should be hitting publish buttons to maximize your traffic and ranking.

Of course, if you can maximize your publication efforts by posting the right moments - when traffic is sure to spike, you can achieve but are not limited to:

• feeding your audience with your cooked content at the very time they want it most
• posting at the duration when your audience won't be distracted at work
• sharing with the right people and minimizing being ignored

Achieving these will go a long way to help you atop your chosen niche or industry.

A few authors, to be mentioned in this post, had already worked on this using human psychology, geography/location, sociology, and philosophy as the primary bases of their arguments, while some had reported results of surveys or studies.

In the end, lots come into understanding the best time, hour, day, week, or even month to pure out your thoughts on blogs or social media.

Let's take a look at the following premises:

1. Monday Morning (11am) - Updates, and News or Permanent?

This period may be niche centric. Niche is the area of your topic. There is no doubt that this influences the right time to publish.

If you're in a news or gist niche, you're likely going to post any hours of the day. There's no limit to the number of times you drop posts. In fact, this niche enjoys sharing JUST-IN! and BREAKING NEWS!

In this case, the audience understands you can get in touch at any time of the day. Hence, publishing  at any time of the day shouldn't be seen as excessive or factoring good or bad timing

Though Neil Patel was specific that...

For maximum traffic, the best time to publish a post is on Monday in the late morning around 11am. The weekend is over and people are looking for something interesting midway through work. If you're aiming for comments, though, research suggests that Saturday morning is the best time.

This will, however, be more relevant if your news is MOSTLY shared on social media. If otherwise, you're more likely to depend on Google Discover and Google News for more of your traffic. Check Google Discover: How to Rank for Every Post.

Speaking of the right to post on social media, you may find the following findings very helpful.

1. Facebook: According to research, the best time to post on Facebook is on weekdays between 10am and 3pm. However, it can vary depending on your target audience, so it's a good idea to experiment with different posting times to see what works best for you.
2. Instagram: The best times to post on Instagram are generally weekdays between 11am and 1pm, as well as 7pm to 9pm. Again, this can vary based on your target audience, so it's important to test different posting times.
3. Twitter: Twitter is most active during weekdays between 9am and 3pm, with the peak engagement times being around noon and 5pm. Avoid posting on weekends as engagement rates tend to be lower.
4. LinkedIn: The best times to post on LinkedIn are weekdays between 10am and 12pm, with Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday being the most popular days.
5. YouTube: The best time to post on YouTube is on weekdays between 12pm and 4pm. Weekends tend to have lower engagement rates, so it's best to avoid posting then.

The audience using the two mediums for news consumption has no specific time they prefer. Rather they can check online for updates anytime they want. Most using Google news know where to go when they need updates.

A few other niches, such as how-to guides websites, don't have to wait till a specific time of the day before they hit the publish button. Their audiences are natural searchers. They take to Google or Bing to find solutions to problems. Hence, it doesn't matter when the post was published once their issues are well attended to.

Recommended: Does Reading Help to Write Better Articles/Posts?

2. Monday Afternoon and Evening (2pm, 6pm, and 8pm) - Evergreen or Periodic Updates?

This time of choice is dependent on the nature of the writing. Similar to the niche of choice is the content type. What do you write for? Topics that are evergreen or that get outdated within hours?

If you write for online marketing, business strategies, education, etc, you may not worry about the time of the day you publish. In fact, where evergreen content comes in, you may post 100 articles within the same hour. Your traffic majorly depends on what search engines send to you except if you want to live without search engines as detailed in my post, "How to Dominate the Internet Without Google or Ranking".

However, if you're publishing on certain events (especially live), or similar to news, you may not be conscious of your hours. Here, the specific time may not even matter. However, being timely is the key. The earlier your audience can get the post to their devices, the more relevant it is.

Consequently, a reported result by Forbe stated that the best day to post your articles about bird watching in the city is Monday. On Monday, between noon and 2PM, EST is the best time to post, as everyone is eating lunch and scrolling the web. And as far as time spent on the page (and not just clicking and reading one paragraph then leaving a scathing troll comment) that would be in the evening, between 6PM and 8PM.

3. Early Evening (around 5pm) - Search Engines or Social Media?

This time of choice is dependent on Traffic Source. Being worried about the timing of posts is more important in social media marketing.

For example, the best way to measure the right time to post on Facebook is by using Facebook Analytics.

Just log into your Facebook page and select Facebook Page Insights. You can see when your users are most active, what time zone they’re in, and a host of other data.

Publishers using Twitter, Instagram, and similar social media platforms will need their local time. When are people usually active on social media? There may not be significant differences, if any, across these platforms.

In her observation, Micah Lally said that early evening, around 5 p.m., stands out as the best time for social media posts. A frequency of one to four posts is the best to get noticed in the crowd. Noon is also a good time to schedule tweets. Midweek and weekend updates will get your social content the most traction.

Below are your best times, broken down by industry and across social media (according to internal research by CoSchedule):

This report packed the statistics and data from 25 different studies. That includes anonymized data from CoSchedule customers, plus 24 others from around the web. Some of these studies cross-reference one another, but each provides at least some degree of individual insight and opinions on the matter.

Instagram Network Summary

Accordingly, below are the recommended times for Facebook posting across the industry

• B2C: 8 am, 1 pm, and 9 pm.
• B2B: 12 pm-1 pm, 5 pm-6 pm, 8 pm-9pm.
• Software Services: 11 am, 1 pm, 5 pm.
• Healthcare: 10 am and 2 pm.
• Media: 9 am, 12 pm, and 3 pm.
• Higher Education: 5 pm – 6 pm

Facebook Network Summary

Accordingly, below are the recommended times for Facebook posting across the industry

• B2C: 9 am to 10 am, 12 pm – 1 pm, 4 pm to 5 pm.
• B2B: 9 am to 4 pm, from 3 pm to 4 pm being the best.
• Software Services: 9 am to 5 pm, then it drops off. 9 am, 3 pm and 5 pm are the best.
• Healthcare: 6 am-7 am, 9 am, 11 am-Noon.
• Media: 7 am, 11 am, 6 pm.
• Higher Education: 8 am, Noon, 3 pm

Twitter Network Summary

Accordingly, below are the recommended times for Twitter posting across the industry

• B2C: 8 am-10 am, Noon, 7 pm-9 pm
• B2B: 7 am-8 am, 11 am, 6 pm, 9 pm
• Software Services: 10 am, 2 pm, 6 pm
• Healthcare: 9 am, 6 pm
• Media: 6 am-7 am, 11 am, 7 pm-8 pm, 10 pm
• Higher Education: 8 am, 5 pm, 7 pm, 9 pm

LinkedIn Network Summary

Accordingly, below are the recommended times for LinkedIn posting across the industry

• B2C: Noon
• B2B: 8 am, 10 am-Noon, 6 pm
• Software Services: 9 am, 11 am-Noon, 5 pm-6 pm
• Healthcare: 10 am, Noon-2 pm
• Media: 8 am
• Higher Education: 10 am

4. Geographical Time for Different Audiences - Including Email?

The primary basis we relate posts to the time is the audience. And aside from people seeking answers through search engines and social media, you may need to consider the right time for publication if your audience is highly dominated by your email subscribers.

For certain websites, the list is divided into geographical location, countries, work, class, etc. This figure can help to tailor the period of posting if you will receive maximum return for your content.

Sending emails at the wrong time of the day to the working class may cause distractions. Retired people will love receiving their emails almost any time of day.

Hence, dividing your audience into classes will be a perfect approach to sending posts on time.

However, for bloggers who use platforms such as WordPress or Blogger, the approach might be different. A few hours after hitting the publish buttons, emails are usually delivered to the subscribers. Here, you need to be more careful.

I use blogger. And with this platform, if I post today, they get delivered to my subscribers the following day as early as 5am. I want to believe WordPress writers will have similar experiences - using the default email platform. With Feedburner, for example, you may not have control to divide your audience into different categories or pick the right time to deliver the email.

With my experience, for my education blog, that is the perfect time for my audience to get my email. These people get up to see what is waiting for them in their emails. When they press the snooze button, they will check back before the day runs out.

5. Active Hours of the Week

I've noticed generally that as the week grows across all platforms, the traffic usually also drops. For instance, we generally experience a spike in the percentage of readership on Monday and drops or fluctuations through other days of the week. During the weekends, you should expect a drop in traffic - even earnings.

This is because people's expectations are generally high on Mondays across the years. And as the week grows the feelings drop.

Publishing during the day hours of most active days may be the right choice since publishing during the weekend is generally going to witness low traffic notwithstanding. Check How to Push Blog Traffic During Weekends and Holidays.

Using this yardstick, we may conclude that the nature of your audience and content type will influence the readership during this active and non-active period.

At a time when the world is experiencing general and partial lockdowns due to pandemics, publishers for news, updates, and medical advice don't specifically need to be choosy about the time or the hours of the day to get back to people. A man will love to read the news that will save his life even during odd hours. Whereas publishers for business may need to suspend publications (if not completely) until the stay-at-home is over if they can't write more for work-at-home.

Conclusion

With all reports and suggestions, it's safe to agree that what matters in deciding the right time for you in publishing, should include social reactions, places of people during the time, location of the target audience, classes of the audience, etc. Understanding that will help us to be time mindful.

In all, there is no generally agreed period to hit the publish button. Understanding your niche vis-à-vis the audience is the best take.

Do you depart from any of the statistics in this post? Do you have better suggestions for the post-timing? Share your views in the comment section below.