The Best Times to Post to Social Networks

Cool Infographics: Charts and graphs can communicate data; infographics turn data into information.

When you are promoting your product through social media platforms, you want to make sure you are setting yourself up for success. First Site Guide has published the The Best Times to Post to Social Media infographic cheat sheet gives you data on the daily high traffic times of each platform to increase the likelihood of your post being seen. It also gives tips on times to send emails based on your content. 

Social media’s all about throwing the metaphorical spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, right? No. No, it’s not! Chances are good you saw that twist coming, but this First Site Guide cheat sheet is all about why time and type matter on social media. Believe it or not, there is a rhythm and a pulse to the tweets and the posts, and patterns of sharing and engaging with content which can be examined scientifically.

Why should you care, though? Well, as it turns out, knowledge is power and someone who knows when to post, where to post, what to post, and how often to post gets a lot more bang for their buck than someone who just sporadically adds random content to whichever social media platform has their attention.

Knowing your audience is an important part of the process. Did you know that emails containing news and magazine updates get opened more often during the lunch hour, but holiday promotions are best sent in the evenings?

There’s some really good information here that was gathered from a number of different sources. However, I have a handful of serious issues with this design:

• Is this data credible? I can’t tell from what is shared on the infographic itself. The Sources link is just a shortened URL, so no visibility to where the sources of the data.
• The Sources link is a downloadable Word DOC from a Russian cloud stoage site. The document includes nine links to data sources, but many of them are broken links.
• Is the data visualization, I’m guessing the wider sections of the stream are the better times to post. There’s no explanation.
• For the Email section, the time wheel has the days and nights reversed (AM vs. PM). We don’t all go to sleep for six hours after lunch.
• A couple of text typos in the infographic.
• The footer should include a copyright and the URL to the original infographic landing page so readers can find the full-size original when people don’t share the actual link.
• How do time zones play into these times and scheduling posts?

Thanks to Peter for sending in the link!