One of the most common questions I get is, “when is the best time to reach out to people via email and social media outlets to let them know about my new pieces/shows?” I have read numerous books and articles and attended seminars on this particular topic as well as having my own personal experiences and this is what I have learned. Recognize that these suggestions are guidelines and a great place to start but monitoring the responses you get at different times is still the best way to know how your particular audience responds.
Email
On the average, people read business and personal emails in the morning. Keep in mind that eighty percent of people do not have separate work and personal inboxes so both personal and business messages can be sent on weekends as well and you don’t have to restrict yourself to confining them to the conventional workweek.
Abuse reports, bounces, clicks on links and open rates are all at its highest on Saturday and Sundays. This may sound contradictory but it is because as a rule, people give their emails the most amount of attention on the weekend. If you are sending new, unique and wanted information you will have more positive calls to action on the weekend. However, if you are sending information they do not wish to receive, duplicate information or not telling them something useful or new, you will get more negative reactions during this time period.
Whether you are sending unique or unwanted information you will always get some un-subscribers. This is not necessarily a bad thing as it allows you to clean up your lists and focus on only the people who are interested in what you are offering them. That being said, to those who are interested in your content be sure to reach out often (2-4 times a month—provided you are creating enough unique content).
Take away: Try sending “good” emails between 6 and 8am in the weekend 2-4 times a month.
Facebook
The most sharing on Facebook happens on the weekends – likely because 50% of companies block Facebook on their work computers. Early morning posts (between 1 and 3am) get the highest number of views. “Flooding”, (the taking over of peoples update streams by posting too much), is much easier to do on Facebook then with any other social media tool, so less is more when it comes to Facebook posts.
Take away: Post 1 post every couple of days with unique content (not always to the same link) and try posting early in the morning and on the weekends.
Twitter
Re-tweets are most common later in the day (between 2 and 5 pm) and later in the week. The click though rate for tweeted links are at the highest on Saturday and Sunday probably because tweet traffic is a lot less and people have more time to “link travel”. Mondays and Thursdays have the lowest view and clicks but every other day is fairly stable during all hours including later in the day – don’t decrease your tweets at night.
On Twitter unlike Facebook you can tweet the same link more then once. However, you have to change the text that precedes it. For example, you can tweet the same link but just pull a different quote from the article to proceed it.
If you are tweeting other people’s content (like links from art news on AC’s blog) tweet as much as you can because these links are to many different sources and are not about self promotion therefore are very accepted on twitter. If you are tweeting your own content, do not tweet more then once every couple of hours as twitter users tend to find constant self-promotion offensive and may turn against you.
Take way: tweet often with links to other peoples content that complement what you do (art news) and intersperse it with random posts of yours.
Blogging
Women read blogs in the morning (typically Mondays between 10am and 11am), men read blogs at night so know your audience. Unlike email, Facebook and Twitter, weekends yield the lowest views for blogs. Comments however, are the highest on the weekends specifically between 7 am and 8 am.
When reviewing the people linking to your posts on their sites or other social media platforms, Mondays to Thursdays had the highest amount of “link backs”. These are often a goal for people because the more the people link back to you the higher your blog or site will be in a Google search. It’s no surprise that Monday to Thursday are the biggest days for links because there is a large group of people who look for information sources to write articles about during the workweek.
Frequency. Blogs that post two or more posts a day far exceed the industry standard and get the most amount of hits. Posting that much is very difficult to do as it’s very time consuming and requires large amounts of unique content, but for some this is very doable.
Take away: Blog as much as you can and as early as you can. If you can post between 6 am and 7 am (even if you just schedule it to be released that early) the chance for you to get more links and views is much higher.
Finally, be sure to make all your efforts compliment one another. For example, use key words like “original art”, “painting”, “photography”, etc., whenever possible in all of your posts. Make sure you include this in your art descriptions and tags under each one of your pieces on AC, that way all of your posts are clearly themed and grouped together when buyers are searching online!
Happy Posting!
Brittany O’Donnell
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