Thursday at Noon is the best time post and be noticed (PST)
It’s happened to me a few times; I stay up late working on a great post and finish at 1am EST. In a rush of excitement I decide to submit it to reddit or del.icio.us and goto bed fully expecting to see it on the front page of their sites the next morning. Of course this rarely happens… so being a programmer I figured I should do some analysis on the best time to post.My approach was simple: Look at the times of day and days of the week that have the most popular posts. To define popularity I used AideRSS’s Postrank ™.
PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. PostRank ranges from 1-10.
Using the aiderss feed api, I fetched the last 10,000 posts on delicious, digg, reddit, and mixx…Threw it into R and plotted out the number of posts by weekday and posts by hour of day with PostRank > 6
*NOTE* Hours are displayed in GMT
It’s pretty clear that Tues – Friday between 10am – 2pm PST are the “hot times” for popular blog posts.
Now, I didn’t filter out non-english posts and this doesn’t account for the time it took for the posts to get to the front page of these sites, but I do think it’s clear posting late at night or on the weekends + monday is a bad idea. Your post will most likley go unnoticed.
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