Tips and Times to Get the Most from a Blog Post

While blog posts are designed to be casual commentary based on bursts of insight and inspiration, there is actually a science to the schedule of posting and tried-and-true tactics that affect a post’s performance. Some blogs only post on certain days or insist on specific windows of times, while others are fanatical about grammatical features and swear by exclamation points and capital letters. To find the best practices for posting and better benchmarks for blogging, TrackMaven examined the posting protocol of 1.16 million posts from more than 4,600 blogs. The results were revealed in their Colossal Content Marketing Report, and MarketingProfs.com featured some of the findings to answer your burning blogging questions.

When deeming days for posting, the report showed that 87% of the blog posts reviewed were published during the workweek. The most popular days for posting were Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Interestingly, the blog posts published on the weekends averaged more social shares per post, with Saturdays showing significant sharing and boasting 18% of the week’s total social shares despite the day’s mere 6% publish rate.

Breaking down days to times, it appeared that most of the analyzed blog posts were published during the American office hours of 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, with postings peaking between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m. Despite this daytime posting preference, the most social shares occurred outside of business hours, especially between 9:00 p.m. and midnight Eastern Standard Time. Smaller spikes were seen early in the morning and in the primetime evening hours.

In terms of titles, blog post titles that averaged 60 characters in length earned the most social shares, yet titles longer in length saw sharp declines in sharing. Punctuation also played a part in titles and those with question marks had almost twice as many social shares, despite comprising only 5% of the analyzed posts. Conversely, exclamation points in a title had a negative affect on social shares, which may be why they were barely used by the blogs reviewed. Finally, capitalization followed a standard style in most of the titles, which was a wise move since posts with both capital and lowercase letters in their titles had the most social shares.

Speaking of social sharing, the results revealed that Twitter and Facebook were the sites of most blog post sharing. Tweets made up 38.6% of total social shares, while Facebook fared almost as well with likes leading to almost 34% of engagement and shares comprising almost 27%.

Since blogging has become so vital to brands and businesses today, bloggers should heed these helpful results and use these findings to get more from their blog posts.

Keep up with the buzz and business of blogging. Contact MDG today at 561-338-7797 or visit www.mdgsolutions.com.

MDG is a full-service advertising agency and one of Florida’s top branding firms. With offices in Boca Raton and New York City, MDG’s core capabilities include branding, logo design, print advertising, digital marketing, mobile advertising, email marketing, media planning and buying, TV and radio, outdoor advertising, newspaper, blog development, video marketing, Web design and development, content marketing, social media marketing, and SEO. To discover the latest trends in advertising and branding, contact MDG today at 561-338-7797.