Tuesday, Hubspot hosted one of their periodic social media webinars called “The Science of Timing: When to do everything.” Hubris intended, I wonder? By Hubspot’s report, 22,000 people attended from around the globe, although the timing of “everything” was discussed strictly in terms of US. time zones.
Hubspot’s research began with the stat that most of the US population is concentrated on the East Coast, with the next largest group in the central time zone: that’s a whopping 80% of the US population clustered within one hour of each other.
So, presuming that EST is the gold standard for reaching US consumers and business people, Hubspot’s research tells us:
Twitter and Facebook
- Retweets on Twitter are much higher both late in the day (2- 5 PM) and late in the week.
- Tweeting a lot doesn’t discourage followers, but FaceBooking too much does.
- Facebook shares are much higher on Saturday and Sunday
- Open and click through rates for email and much higher on weekends than during the week.
- Email opens are highest in the very early morning
- Your newest subscribers (those who have most recently signed up for your mailings) are the most responsive, so if you are going to make an offer to a email subscribers, make it in their first few days of subscribing.
Blogs
- People read blogs more in the morning, but men tend to do more evening reading, woman favor the morning.
- Peak blog viewing is on Monday and is generally highest during the 10 – 11 am time frame. However, most comments are posted on Saturday and Sunday, presumably when people have more time. Peak comment posting time is 6 – 9 am.
- If you highly value other bloggers linking to your content, note that links are much higher in the very early morning (6 – 7 am), presumably when bloggers are out trolling for new content.
- The other finding of note to me was, not surprisingly, that the more posts to your blog, the higher the unique views and links. Real champs log in at more than one post per day.
In tomorrow’s post, “Social Media: When lawyers should do everything,” I’ll discuss what these stats might mean for law firms, legal marketers and the marketing of different practices of law.