Is timing really everything when it comes to marketing strategy? We’ve all heard the reports claiming when the best time to post on Facebook is and when you should be sending out emails, but how much of it can we actually believe? This month we’ve done some digging and are excited to share with you the truth behind the science of timing.

Jon Loomer, social media marketer and founder of his own agency, recently posed the same question and set out to get the facts straight on the validity and trustworthiness of these marketing reports. Loomer sifted through various data sources and analytics ultimately leading him to countless contradictions and the conclusion that most of these studies are a “mishmash of geographies that are bound to have very different results. A business whose audience is only in Australia is bound to have a different peak time to post than a business in New York City.”

So where does this leave us? While there is no clear answer to the question of when the exact best time is to implement your marketing efforts, there are some valuable trends among the abundant research. Incorporating these best practices into your marketing efforts can play a role in improving campaign performance and your overall reach:

• Send emails early in the morning to increase your reach and campaign performance. New subscribers tend to be the most attentive to emails with the highest click-through rates.
• Tweets are most likely to be retweeted later in the day, as well as later in the week. While it’s important to have an ongoing stream of tweets throughout the week, be sure to schedule tweets between 2-5pm on Thursdays and Fridays. Tools such as TweetDeck can be extremely helpful for this.
• Saturday is the most popular, but also the most impactful day to post on Facebook. Post in the morning rather than the afternoon to achieve the greatest reach.
• Gender plays a great role in blog readership. Women tend to read content early in the morning while men are more likely to access blogs later in the day. Additionally, blog comments tend to be greatest on the weekends as a result of readers having more time to provide feedback.

Take these guidelines one step further by conducting your own research specific to the habits of your audiences. Facebook Insights and Bit.ly are each valuable, free tools that can support these initiatives by revealing data around the performance of your marketing according to time. Discover the commonalities of your top performing posts in order to best understand the time of day and day of week where your marketing has the greatest potential.

The best time for your marketing depends not only on the channel of communication, but who your audience is and what your content is seeking to accomplish. Take advantage of the tools that are out there and test! Post at various times and on various days to figure out when your marketing performs best. The result will not only be personal to your business, but a reliable means to improve your marketing strategy moving forward.