When to Post Your Blog - Timing is Everything - (A Non-Scientific Analysis)
There is nothing more fluid than finishing up a blog post, tweaking the final edits, centering the artwork, adding the tags and hitting post. What a great feeling that is. You've just created content that everyone on steemit will be dying to read, upvote and resteem. You are ready for your steemit pulitzer!
But wait. Nothing happened. Why isn't anyone reading my masterpiece? Where is all the fanfare? Why are there zero comments?
This is the bane of every minnow. Working your little fish-tail off on quality content only to release the fruits of your labor into an empty pond. Your post was swallowed by the ether.
Granted, if you only have 8 followers, odds are those 8 people aren't going to be looking at the same screen at the same time and all hit the upvote button. You won't likely have much success whether you let that post loose at the perfect time or in the middle of the night. You do need to have something of a following to have a chance.
Having read the last paragraph, you may have noticed mention of a "perfect time" to post a blog. Is there such a thing you ask. The answer is yes and no. There are optimal times, never a perfect time.
The majority of steemit users, writing in English, live in the Eastern Time Zone in the United States. That will be the primary focus of the article. The remainder of our focus audience lives in Western Europe, about 5-6 hours ahead of the East Coast US audience. The real focus here is to think about where people are going to likely be in the course of their day and to find points in the day that these two audiences are most likely in front of a computer.
The typical person in the US works 9am-5pm, Monday thru Friday.(We'll tackle weekends separately) In reality, tack 2 hours on to that in the morning; shower, kids, school bus, commute -> JOB. You can also tack on an hour at the end of the work day; commute, kids, activities, grocery -> HOME. So far we have identified two windows of no posting zones: 7am-9am and 4:30pm-6pm. Those periods, the typical American worker will not be in front of a computer.
Time for sleeping would generally be 12am-7am. We've ruled out 12am-9am and 4:30-6pm. So those periods are right out of our focus.
What is left? 9am-4:30pm and 6pm-12am.
Obviously, I am using generalities in this article. We have many intelligent people on steemit that work when they want and don't adhere to a rigid schedule, so take what I'm writing with a few grains of salt.
Let's break down the typical US work day. Once into the office at 9am, a potential layout of the day:
9:00am-9:45am: Coffee making, small talk, water cooler banter. Comparing your College hoops skills to LeBron. Typical stuff.
9:45am-10:45am: Check phone messages, emails and memos in your inbox.
10:45am-12:00pm: Potential for doing actual work and/or time to check in on steemit!
12:00pm-1:00pm: Some form of lunch. More potential steemit time.
1:00pm-4:00pm: Three hours to really get something done at your desk. Prove your absolute worth and necessity to your employer, also, more potential steemit viewing.
4:00pm-4:30pm: Tidy up desk and write notes about potential steemit posts. The story your cubicle neighbor told about the dolphin and the whale are a must!
4:30pm-5:00pm: More tidying, yawning, generally moving towards the door as you say your daily goodbyes. A solid output of almost five hours of actual work completed.
We have identified our first large posting window for your awesome content. 10:30am-4:00pm. In reality, I would tighten that into a smaller window of 11:00am-3:00pm, the small talk can run long and the desk tidying may start earlier depending on how late in the week we are.
The next steemit window of opportunity doesn't open till after people on the East Coast have reached their homes. This window is open from 6:00pm to 12:00am. This time frame is fraught with obstacles for ensuring that your target audience will be in front of their computers:
Dinner time with the family can occupy a full hour.
Help with Junior's homework.
The TV.
Video games.
Porn.
Chatting up the wife.
Mom might call.
I believe you may want to shoot for the beginning and the end of this window. Catch them when they're freshly in the door and have been away from a computer for two hours now. They are itching to check out how their post "Duran-Duran Lyrics: How They Relate to Foreign Policy" is doing. They may hazard a glance at your eminently superior post at this time.
Or try for the 10:00pm-12:00am window, when the house has settled and your target audience is winding their way towards sleep. I wouldn't shoot to close to midnight, for the crowd really thins out the later you go. So our targets in the evening window would be: 6:00pm-7:00pm and 10:00pm-11:00pm.
What is Western Europe doing during the "windows of opportunity" we've identified for the East Coast US? Here is a guess-work overlay of the two, granted I don't know much of the day to day of Western Europe, for this articles purposes, we'll say they're similar.
11:00am-3:00pm EST in Western Europe(W.E.) would translate to be 4-5:00pm to 8-9:00pm. Using the same base logic from before, the W.E. worker will walk in the door from work around US 12:00pm-1:00pm. This tightens our window of opportunity even tighter for the first window.
The second window gets truly narrow when you line up EST worker and W.E. worker. EST walks in the door at 6:00pm which makes for 11:00pm-12:00am in W.E. That leaves barely an hour to hit all of your target audience at the same time.
We have now identified what we will be calling "Super-Prime Posting Time" windows:
I can't say that every single steemian will be locked into a laptop between these hours, but using the speculative facts that we've been supposing this entire argument on, these are the most likely windows of opportunity to increase your chances of getting content noticed.
Briefly to touch on the weekends. Don't bother pumping out content after 11:00am EST, nobody will ever see it. Shoot for the morning. Otherwise your audience will disappear. Tied up at picnics and ballgames, rock climbing and kamasutra positions. Don't waste content on an audience that isn't available. Possibly try them in the evening, but people do have lives. They'll likely be at the ABBA reunion concert.
In summary, this timing guide will do nothing for you if you have no following, if all of your followers go to rave parties all week or if your content is absolute shit.
This is the most basic, non-scientific study available for how to identify SUPER-PRIME POSTING TIME windows.
My analysis says the most epic times to hit post are at 1:00pm and 6:00pm EST. Try holding back your best content for those exact times and see if your results improve.
What are your thoughts on this analysis?
Do your results agree with or run contrary to this post?
Should this study be packed away in the rubbish bin?
Feel free to let me know :-)
Thank you to @cerebralace for the idea to write this post. Check out a similar post by him with a different perspective:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@cerebralace/the-best-time-of-the-day-to-post-on-steemit
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All images except ABBA, courtesy of pixabay.com
ABBA image source
It's very interesting the topic of timing but there is a point where I don't agree.
In these times of globalization there are people reading us from the whole globe and even in you just center in the USA, it's plenty of different timetables.
:)
True @dssb. I was just using the two largest demographics. Thanks for reading.
I disagree with the conclusions in this article. I think there are way to many unfounded assumptions on which to narrow conclusions aren't based.
Initially there is already an issue with the presumption that posting in a high volume 'read' window is a better than in a low volume time window. I am not to sure about that as. Ore readers also mean more posters. So although there is more readers, there is also more lattices to be read, so the average amount of articles per reader stays the same
But even when you believe that during high volume time there is a higher read conversion ratio, I think the best way to determine the highest volume is to just look at the blockchain info. I always thought that steemdb had a graph for this that showed the me of posts per hour in a 24h window which would answer this question, however, I cannot find it. I will look again later today or otherwise I might create the graph as a one off myself over the weekend :) when I do, I will share it here.
Kudos for the length of the post though :)
The entire article was an assumption, as stated in the article. I actually spent some time on steemdb looking for that exact chart and couldn't locate it. I look forward to your breakdown over the weekend. Thanks for reading @cantribute.
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Fabulous work...you could be onto something! But you failed to acknowledge the enormous population of Australia! All 26 million of us lol... and OK (begrudgingly)... New Zealand!
Without Paul Hogan, I doubt they would have bothered putting Australia on the map...joking. That post was the most unscientific bit of analysis ever commissioned. But, in practice it actually works. I find myself finishing up a post while eyeing the clock, hoping not to miss "super prime posting time"
Australians are pretty cool cats from my experience.
Yes we are geographically quite substantial but population wise slight under achievers, but I think the evidence is clear, per capita of population we're kicking ass for example... Russell Crow, Nicole Kidman, Geoffrey Rush, Hugh Jackman, Kate Blanchett, Chris Hemsworth... and that's just the movies, I won't even get started on sports, music and the arts lol And thanks we think we're pretty cool too, but we have been out in the sun! lol
Talented group down there. Plenty of golfers too. I was hoping the Hogan crack wouldn't be too much.
Absolutely not lol
I had wondered about this timing issue!
Thanks for reading @steemed-open
Yes! This is some thing I never seem to be able to follow through with. I wanna get my posts out as soon as they're done... but usually that's in the late evening here on the West coast.
ps. might wanna go back through and fix some of your am/pm things for 12. You often have 12pm when I am pretty sure you mean am. 12am is midnight. 12pm is noon. :D Can make it confusing especially for those not using the 12 hour clock. Everywhere else uses the 24 hour times. Haha.
I was in a hurry to get my post out. I had to leave the house. My dogs had to pee. I'll go back and fix. Thanks @farmstead
Hahah no problem, I totally get that! Would you like me to edit my comment to take that part out? :)
No worries. Thanks tho.
Wow. I completely blew that. I think I fixed 8 mistakes on the same error. Thanks for the heads up!
Great analysis! I've noticed this myself the hard way 😉... So I think a lot of people will be very happy with your post! As an European, I keep an eye on the American timezones for my posts... But this could change as soon as Steemit and cryptocurrency get more attention over here! Keep up the good work! I really love the style (writingstyle, vocabulary, layout, taggs) of your post!
Thanks @skririm. Always encouraging to hear a compliment.
@wakeupsheeps ha-ha I'll upvote for the amount of effort and words you put into this post to simply suggest the best posting window for U.S. eastern time steemians LOL 😃
Thanks for sharing!
PS: What are my thoughts on this analysis?
I think most minnows are over-burdened with steemit flaws - too many to detail but consider the popularity meme where most must follow the popular steemians or "Whales"; consider the missing user-friendly features common to most social media platforms, consider the censorship potential for abuse... etc.
Yeah, what I am saying is, there is a lot more to consider for us minnows than merely the time to post.
I appreciate that @ronmamita. Obviously the hurdles on steemit are great and the learning curve is high, the payouts don't lend themselves to fairness, we could go on and on. Just having word fun with a small subject. :-)
@wakeupsheeps yeah, I know - which is why I upvoted 👍
Thanks for the posr, timing is also something I was pondering about as we sit slap in the middle of east and west! Geenwich mean. So now I resorted to make a post in the morning and in the evening!
Good plan @marcel1965. I found that I finished quite a few of my posts at about 4:30pm EST and they got zero attention. My article was supposition from my own trial and error on steemit.
Just got back from the ABBA reunion concert and read this post. Hilarious!! And hopefully useful to some folks. ;)
Gotta go “help the junior with his homework” now (you know what I really mean, right? ;))
Hahahaha! How was the show @oleg326756?
Still going strong, after all those years! ;)