According to recent data published by TrackMaven, it seems that most people are publishing their content on the wrong days and times for maximum effectiveness. For most marketers, content creation is an important part of their overall strategy, so getting it right is absolutely essential. The data in this study is showing that most people are doing it wrong.
Publishing New Posts
The study found that most people are publishing new content to their sites and other locations between 9AM and 5PM, Monday through Friday. This is not really surprising since that is when most people are in the office. Even most self-employed individuals end up sticking to a work schedule that is similar to this. The problem, however, is that most people who read and share data aren’t most active during these times.
Social Sharing
The study found that most social sharing of content occurs between 4 and 6AM, and then between 7 and 11pm. This is completely outside the hours that most people are publishing new content. The bottom line here is that people are publishing content when people aren’t looking for it. This means that fewer people will see the new content right when it comes out, and will therefore either not share it right away or even at all.
In addition to the hours listed above, more people do social sharing on the weekends than on the week days. Unfortunately, content publishers only publish about 5% of all the content on Saturday & Sunday. This is obviously another bad matchup between when people are publishing and when their target audience wants to read it.
While this data is, of course, just an overview of people throughout the digital marketing industry, it likely has some impact on how you should be doing your content creation. Identifying when your target audience is most active online can help you to dramatically improve engagement and sharing of your content. This will then have the effect of bringing many new potential clients to your site, where they can then (hopefully) be converted to buying customers.
