Facebook Doesn’t get Monday Blues? (Weekly Social Media Behavior)

Its true! EVERYONE rests on the sabbath!

I just completed 7 months of blogging – fairly sporadic stuff, i must admit. In these 7 months, I had formulated some theories about days and day parts that are most amenable to posting. These were:

– Mondays are great for posting on Facebook (Contrary to what you would expect, most folks do NOT get to office all waiting to sweat it out! I get loaaads of posts on my timeline, and actually a fair number of hits on my blogs on Mondays)

– Facebook gives me greatest hits – after all, these are friends, and they are fairly varied occupationally (from my mom, to my daughter – see this old post on Facebook’s ubiquitous appeal; to ex colleagues, to batchmates from school and college..)

– Fridays are bad – both these are actually a bit counter intuitive, aren’t they? If you look at lunch places, they are more crowded on Fridays than other places – most “nice to do” stuff is typically kept for fridays – so, one would think that Facebook browsing should be on the rise on Fridays? Not true

– Weekends are worst! On saturdays and sundays, I guess folks don’t use laptops; and, despite mobile increasing as access mode, I get least hits on those days 🙂

– For all social media platforms, the beginning of the day is better than the end – this is true of all, except twitter – where BOTH the beginning and the end is better.

I thought I would undertake some analysis and see if my hypotheses were true. Just so you know, I typically publish my blog at night, and then post it on twitter. In the morning, I repost it to twitter and then also post it on Facebook and Linkedin (Ofcourse, after judging appropriateness! There are posts that don’t make it to LinkedIn and Twitter; just as some that don’t make it to Facebook. See another old post with my opinions on segmenting content according to the character of the social media channel)

So, here’s what the trend of visits looked like:

This validated my hypotheses about weekends being days of rest, but threw out a few surprising winners!
Interestingly, on a cumulative basis, all weekdays had more or less the same no. of visits per day (average).

However, if you break it up into days when there were posts published and those when there weren’t, Mondays and Thursdays were best for posting blogs. (I did a further drill down where I removed the outlier posts – those that were wildly successful, and found that Mondays were certainly the stars by far)

But, for “regular” behavior, ie, that not triggered by posts – which further translates to organic / search type visits – Mondays were actually the worst (and Wednesdays the best!). My theory for this is as follows:

After a lazy weekend, folks get back to work but also to their social networks – this points more and more to social networks, even the “non professional” ones like facebook, being almost an adjunct to your productive work day! This explains the high visits on Mondays when new triggers (new posts) are seen. But, during the middle of the week, folks start actual “work” – I am talking presentations/ inspiration/ research 🙂 – and hence organic visits peak then! Makes sense?

Look at the sources analysis:

Again, much to my surprise, “search” almost equals “Facebook” – this is partially testimony to the (slow) speed of blogging, but does atleast endorse the cleverness of my tags 🙂

A look at a few other similar subject analyses can be had here and here

So, if you want to start blogging, you know what time of the day/ day of the week and which channel to do it on! Happy blogging!