Why Tuesdays Suck for Social Marketers

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In 1979, long before I was born (not true), Bob Geldof's Boomtown Rats sang about not liking Mondays. In 2005 I had the huge pleasure of listening to Sir Bob speak about entrepreneurship at an event, and the even greater pleasure of interviewing him afterwards. So what does this have to do with the social web or PR? Not much admittedly, except that a) the guy is a stone cold motivational genius, and b) my own hate is not for Mondays but for Tuesdays.

In the world of social media marketing, Tuesdays suck big time. At least, that's my experience. A while back I wrote a blog post that I was sure would tick all the right boxes, raise a few hackles and hit all the sweet spots along the way. This was to be my ticket to the big time; the day when Solis would come knocking at my door for guest slots. Now maybe the post just sucked, but I prefer to blame this particular failure on the fact that I published on a Tuesday. And I never have since.

OK, so that in itself is not much evidence for stating that Tuesdays are the social media equivalent of a beach party in Skegness in the middle of December, ie, dead. But week after week, across blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms, it seems to be that Tuesday is just a bad day to get engagement. Publish identical posts on a Monday and a Tuesday and I guarantee that the Monday post will get more shares, reads, likes or tweets. Same for the other days of the week. Try it yourself.

So why is this? My theory (and it is just an unproven theory based on educated guesswork) is that Tuesday is the day when people get their heads down in the office. On a Monday we get into the office wanting to get back up to speed. We devour information in blog posts and tweets to ensure we didn't miss anything over the weekend. The following day, we get down to work. We don't have time to read anything in any depth and so social media information, unless truly outstanding, is wasted. By Wednesday, we're regaining interest and this stays with us as we approach the weekend, when we naturally become more social.

So my advice is quite simply to avoid announcing anything significant on a social network on a Tuesday. Don't publish your best blog posts, don't launch anything on Facebook, don't upload your latest and greatest YouTube video. Just ride the day out, accept that people aren't feeling that social and move on. Anyone else had similar experiences?




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