Timing is everything.
Ever wonder why your seemingly awesome Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr post didn’t get the traction you expected? You optimized for search, plugged in those keywords and even added a photo for good measure. Now where are all those beautiful retweets/likes/reblogs?
It could be that your social media timing is off.
Earlier this year, Mashable noted a study by the link shortening and tracking service bit.lywhich found that as far as Twitter goes, late in the day and week are the most retweetable times. However, between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. is the sweet spot for yielding the highest click rank, especially early in the week. Bit.ly also found that the half-life of a link is 2.8 hours. The worst times to tweet a link? After 8 p.m. as well as Fridays after 3 p.m.
As for Facebook, links sent between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. receive the most traction, while Wednesday at 3 p.m. is the optimal time to post all week. You would be best served not to post links before 8 a.m. or after 8 p.m., with traffic fading after 4 p.m. Bit.ly added that while traffic starts to increase around 9 a.m., it’s best not to post until 11 a.m.
Tumblr, on the other hand, is a different animal. The study found that it’s actually better to wait until 4 p.m., with posts between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. receiving the most clicks. It even suggested that Friday evenings are a key time to post on Tumblr—a block where posts go to die on other social media platforms.
That said, social media frequency has its effects, too.
Hubspot’s general guideline for posts is: don’t crowd your content. It suggests leaving a buffer zone of at least one to two hours between posts and then doing some testing. For example, use a third party, like the social media management dashboard HootSuite, to schedule shares two hours apart (it supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, MySpace, foursquare, WordPress, and mixi) and monitor engagement for one week. Schedule posts more frequently the following week and note whether engagement increases or decreases.
You’ll also want to take an informal audit of how many people your followers are following. If most of your active audience doesn’t follow many others, Hubspot wrote, you run the risk of crowding its stream and overwhelming it with content.