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HubSpot hosted a great webinar today with social media expert Dan Zarella on The Science of Timing, a primer on best practices for timing your emails, social media updates, and blog posts.  Dan has been conducting timing-based research over the past two years and compiled his knowledge into a wealth of tips and takeaways for marketers with questions like “When’s the best time to send that email?” and much more.

Here are some of the most useful takeaways we heard:

Twitter & Facebook Timing Tips

  1. Retweet activity is heaviest between 2 – 5 PM (EST). Tweet later in the day and later in the week for best results.
  2. Saturdays and Sundays are amongst the highest days for Twitter click-through rate (CTR).
  3. @DanZarella says: “Don’t be afraid to tweet too much!” If anything, tweet MORE!
  4. “Don’t crowd your content; give your links some breathing room. If you post a link on Twitter, let it marinate before tweeting again.
  5. Weekends are the best time for sharing things on Facebook.
  6. For marketing purposes, there is very little difference between a B2B consumer and a B2C consumer when it comes to timing of social media communications.

Email Timing Tips

  1. Email open rates AND bounce rates tend to be higher on the weekends because people are able to give more attention to emails then.
  2. Best email practice:  send email blasts early in the morning to take advantage of contra-competitive timing. (Contra-competitive timing = when you go against the grain of crowd timing to have more of a chance to be heard and get your content noticed.)
  3. The newer a subscriber is to your to your email list, the more likely they are to open your emails and click on the links.

Blog Timing Tips

  1. Blog post pageviews are highest on Mondays.
  2. Posting a blog on the weekend is your best bet for getting the most amount of comments.
  3. Blog posts published early, between 6 – 7 AM (EST), tend to get the most links because of the linkerati’s ravenous material-sourcing habits.
  4. Blog more frequently!  There is very little benefit to blogging infrequently.

Want to read more timing tips?  Follow the #TimeSci hashtag on Twitter to follow along with the conversation.