Publishing on your blog is good. Publishing to be read is better. As regular as you are, an effective content marketing strategy cannot be improvised: it is important to ensure your content the maximum visibility, this varying depending on the time of upload. Morning or evening? Monday or Friday? And what content? Our advice to be sure to reach your prospects.
- Find the right timing
Before knowing when is the best time to post on your blog, the first question to ask is in one word: the calendar. How much content do you want to publish per week? Between 5 and 7, the hour and day will be determining factors. Beyond 7 posts, you won’t have to worry about when you post them: if you constantly refresh your blog, all times will be good.
Publishing a minimum is important: a blog that publishes a lot of articles automatically increases the number of its visits. A survey conducted in 2015 by HubSpot, a company specializing in inbound marketing, found that blogs posting more than 16 articles per month gain 3 times more traffic than those posting less. In addition, search engines appreciate the novelty: a high publication frequency will allow you to accelerate the development of your audience.
Identify the best times of the day
It’s not a surprise, we surf more during the day… than at night. Social networks record audience peaks during the day while off-peak hours are after 10 p.m. Also, it is during the day that the level of reader engagement is the most important.
However, certain times of the day are more favorable than others. The studies that exist show that the majority of Internet users visit blogs in the morning around 11 am. The majority of content sharing on social networks takes place in the morning between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. The comments are mostly written around 9 am. If you are aiming for a lot of hits, then it is best to post in the morning.
Be careful, this is not a golden rule. Certainly, this hourly strategy is likely to offer you more traffic and interactions on your posts. However, uploading content when everyone else is posting increases the risk of going unnoticed. Conversely, posting at times when the traffic is less dense certainly offers better visibility.
Identify the best times of the week
If we go by statistics, Monday seems to be the day to aim for good traffic. This is the day that blogs receive the most visits on average. On the other hand, it is at the end of the week, on Saturdays, that blogs elicit the most comments: if you want to get the most interactions, this is the day not to be neglected.
Despite everything, these data are very variable: depending on the field of activity or the subjects, the favorable moments to capture your audience will vary. Also, to calibrate your editorial schedule as well as possible, it is essential to confront yourself with the “metrics” of your blog. It’s about testing your audience to see what works best for your medium. Feel free to break down your posts at different times of the day and week.
- Does the nature of the publications have an impact on traffic?
You will understand, the main thing is to publish regularly, by publishing rather one article per day or every 2 or 3 days rather than 10 all at once. Publishing about fifteen articles per month or more will allow you to build a powerful blog, whose SEO will be driven by the freshness of its content.
However, in order to get traffic, it’s not so much the nature of the posts as their quality that matters. To put it more directly: only post (a lot) if you have (a lot) of original things to say. Otherwise, you risk scaring your readers and search engines away.
Let us add that there is no visibility without relay on social networks. In parallel, it is a question of developing content likely to direct towards your blog. On social networks, interactive content is preferred: surveys and quizzes engage your prospects in a fun way. Interactive infographics, memes, or quotes also work well.
- And the relays on social networks?
Today, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn are powerful agents for promoting your articles. Here again, everything is a question of balance: by wanting to post too much on the networks, we end up being inaudible. A meta-analysis conducted in 2017 by CoSchedule, a software publisher specializing in marketing content, specifies the recommended frequencies:
- Facebook and LinkedIn: one post per day;
- Instagram: two posts per day;
- Twitter: 15 posts per day.
In addition, the consultation of social networks responds to two simple rules. Week starts, Monday to Wednesday, are more conducive to sharing. Conversely, weekends are less so. However, depending on the platforms and the characteristics of their audiences, different times will be more favorable to acquiring traffic:
- Facebook and Instagram are rather networks where people come to take breaks: peak audiences are in the morning, between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m., and, in particular for Instagram, from 5 p.m.
- The LinkedIn audience is very active around 8:30 a.m. or from 5 p.m.
- Twitter is a network that we consult constantly, even at work: all times are good.
- What are the differences depending on the sector?
Another criterion to take into account, your field of activity. Indeed, this unites a certain type of public and constitutes a valuable indicator for defining the hours and days favorable to publication. A recent survey conducted by Hootsuite, the publisher of a social media management tool, concludes that in B2B it is better to publish:
- between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday on Facebook;
- between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. Monday to Friday on Instagram;
- Wednesdays on LinkedIn;
- between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. Monday and Thursday on Twitter.
In B2C:
- at 12 noon Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday on Facebook;
- rather at noon on Instagram;
- Monday and Wednesday on LinkedIn;
- between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. Monday to Wednesday on Twitter.
Otherwise, each sector has its own preferences: the fashion industry posts between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. and then between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. from Monday to Friday, while finance publishes on Monday, Tuesday or Sunday between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. then between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. These guidelines will help you plan your posting times but are not inflexible. It is a question of monitoring your competitors to define what will be the paid web editorial strategy for your content.
