Struggling to find the perfect time to publish a new article or when to share that new fire meme on Facebook? Well, you’re in luck, web analytics firm, KYA, has released new findings that show when the highest amount of internet users are engaged across multiple fields and has broken it down into some easy to read charts.
While it might seem that all engagement is the same – engagement’s engagement, right? – that simply isn’t the case, and knowing the best times to get your stuff to the public could be the difference in gaining social traction through shares and having an article or post sit there with almost zero interaction. We could sit here and argue on the merits of quality material being the differentiating factor, and it is absolutely important, but if no one is seeing your posts, then how can they speak to the quality of the piece?
So, let’s stick to the basics with these first two graphs.
What these two graphs show is that if you’re looking for just straight up engagement at a base level, then posting on Monday, between 12pm and 2pm is going to be your best bet, according to KYA. While the Monday part of this is somewhat surprising, the time range is to be expected, people scroll and click around furiously during their lunch breaks, whether it’s out of boredom or a way to avoid human interaction with coworkers (probably the latter).
If you’re looking for that high quality interaction, however, and really want people reading your piece, then posting in the evening between 6pm and 8pm will garner the most intention. This one also makes sense as people have gotten home from work, completed their errands and dinner prep, and are settling down for the evening. We can combine this knowledge with the fact that Tuesday is the highest engaging day for page views and use that information to post a scathing piece on the latest political debacle or on the best ways to grow cherry tomatoes in an NYC apartment.
A couple other interesting takeaways from report is that Twitter is laughable when it comes to page views through tweets, coming in at only 188,000, compared to Facebook’s 13.5 million page views. Twitter has become overrun with promotional tweets and article sharing, so it’s not too surprising that people have just given up on even trying to find a quality article to read in a sea of mediocrity – but the drastic differences between the two social companies is surprising, however. Engaged readers, not just page views, are most prevalent from Google searches, which makes sense considering they ended up there on purpose, not just from some clickbait intrigue/curiosity through Facebook.
In the battle between desktop and mobile, desktop reigns supreme when it comes to engagement, with an engagement score of 18.6%. Page views dominate on mobile however, with over 17 million views. I can relate to this on a personal level, as I despise reading quality pieces on my phone, but often find myself quickly scanning through articles when I have 30 seconds of downtime.
According to Jeff Weisbein, founder and CEO at KYA, “The data was collected over the course of 6 months and collected from sites that use KYA’s analytics product. We then ran various different calculations on the collected data using the same technology behind our Smart Insights feature to pull the insights.” The sample size used for the report was 15 million unique visitors across over 530 websites. You can read the about all of the findings here.
Also, avoid Saturdays. No one is looking at your stuff on Saturdays. Go out and have some fun – everyone else is.
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