What time of day is the best for social sharing?

Social media strategists are constantly testing and re-testing to find the answer to this timeless question. Of course, time of day nuances will vary based on your specific audience, but we took a look at the wealth of data from sites in our network to see how social traffic compares to overall traffic throughout the day:

The verdict: social traffic substantially underperforms overall traffic from the morning through to the early afternoon, and substantially overperforms overall traffic during evenings and nights. So if your goal is reach, late afternoon through night is the best time to attract readers on social media and get them to click through to your site. And, as you might expect, we see social media strategists adapting to the behaviors of their audience.

Below, we see a graph of how frequently these sites posted to Twitter, compared to their volume of social traffic.

Posting to twitter is strong all morning and reaches its peak in the afternoon and early evening, as traffic from Twitter dramatically picks up around noon to midnight. By increasing posting when traffic is already its strongest, publishers in our network are capitalizing on reader trends to continue getting their traffic even higher.

Want to put your social data to work? Sign into our Real-Time Dashboard and take a deeper dive into your social traffic.