I was recently looking through the Blog stats – the hyperlocal site I run in the North of England – and noticed something.
Everything we posted of an evening tended to do a bit better. Looking then through Facebook, there was a trend. Evenings, anytime at weekends + Facebook equalled our best performing stories.
We had a directors meeting on Sunday and we are giving something a try, based around this premise…
If our audience according to social media analytics tools is most active in the evening and weekends why publish our content during the day?
If the bulk of your audience is coming to you via social media and search, with very little direct traffic to the site, why not model your behaviour around them?
It works for us. We are all volunteers, we have other jobs, so we tend to write first thing in the morning or in the evening or at weekends. And it makes sense to me, in the evening the audience has more time to spare, an extra few moments to read your update and be interested in something local to them.
The bulk of our posts previously went out during the day. Why? Well, just because. There wasn’t much logic to it other than to space them out so they didn’t all go up at once.
So we are giving it a go. Apart from one early morning post, and one lunchtime post, anything which isn’t breaking news or time sensitive we are unleashing our content in time for an evening audience.
Early signs have shown our evening content getting good engagement, particularly on Facebook…
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