When Is The Best Time To Share Your Content?

When Is The Best Time To Share Your Content?

You’ve just written a great article or produced a compelling video to promote your business or brand and now you’re ready to broadcast it to the world. But before you hit that button..is NOW really the right time to do so?

You know, those of us who make our living here on the Interwebs often take it for granted that when we hit the upload or publish button, people will flock en masse to see our great content.

But who will see our stuff and when is becoming a metric that we may want to take note of.

You see, if you’re like me you’ve probably spent considerable thought wondering when’s the most opportune time in the day to publish your material. For that matter, you probably even wonder what days are best.

Should I start publishing later in the day, to hit the after-work traffic? Should I publish earlier in the morning, to catch commuters while they’re on the way to work?

Or is everything completely random, driven by the off-chance that a post will end up on StumbleUpon and enjoy a slightly longer tail?

Well the fine people over at Shareaholic looked at its data for the past year and they have published a report that is quite eye-opening.

Shareaholic looked at two metrics: social shares and traffic. For some, getting the highest number of shares is the goal; for others, increased traffic is where it’s at.

So what did the Shareolic study determine? Surprisingly…or rather a surprise to me, Thursday beats every other day of the week.

Why? I don’t know. That question wasn’t answered in the report. Maybe that will be the subject of another report in the future but what’s most important for us as marketers, is to look closely at the data that was revealed.

Shareaholic’s data shows that 31%, or more than a third of the top 100 social share days, were Thursdays.

However, the best day for pageviews, is not Thursday. In fact, it’s Monday. According to Shareaholic’s data, Monday captures 43% of the top 100 pageview days.

So depending upon the objective of your content, knowing when most people are likley to consume and share your content is pretty important.

Now here is where the two metrics coincide. .Most sharing, albeit primarily on Thursday, occurs around 9AM Eastern time.

Now take a guess what time of day you’re going to see the most pageviews? Yep, around 9:AM Eastern time as well.

So it appears that one could draw a reasonable conclusion that the best time to post your content would be Monday around 9AM Eastern and then share it on your social networks on Thursday morning.

So here’s a test, Please leave a comment and let me know when you’re seeing this video. I am publishing it on a Monday at 9AM and I’m going to wait until Thursday to share it on my networks.

After all, I’m a marketer and I understand results may vary and that the only way to see what works is to determine what works for you.

p.s. you may want to adjust the times mentioned to take into account where your main target audience resides.