How do we find what times our followers are online to sync our posts with follower activity? Which time of the day has the highest amount of active users?
Will you read this post or watch the original video from YouTube to see me use a new tool shared by a follower that is helping me optimize my posting strategy?
Finding the best time to post on Steemit
There's an awesome tool created by Julian Gonzales @JGA at “Steem activity - Explore what is the best time to publish.”
What I'm going to do is show you inside that tool now.
Go to this URL:
https://joticajulian.github.io/steem-activity/index.html?account=jerrybanfield
Then, what you need to do finally at the end of it is replace my username by yours.
Here's what it looks like from my account, this shows me the activity of my followers and the very best time to make a post.
It tells me that, “I'm expecting to get the very most votes on Tuesday.”
This is based on my follower activity, this means that not just activity on my posts, but it collects all of the data from all of the upvotes, from all of my followers, and then puts them in these very simple tables I can see, therefore the very best time it suggests for me to post for my followers is noon on Tuesday for the most upvotes. It looks like Tuesday is the best day in the week to post.
Based on that, every other day of the week is about the same, which is remarkable for Steemit to have this much consistent activity and it is incredible. That means out of 7,000 people following me, on one day alone those 7,000 followers on average are making three plus upvotes an hour, during these times on Tuesday.
What really is happening is that there's a few followers that are making 20, 30 or 50 upvotes, but there's consistent upvote activity around the clock. There's also auto votes from people who set up automatic voting on their account, Steemit is awesome for automatic upvoting because you actually earn a little bit of Steem Power, it's very lucrative if you find an author you love to just upvote them automatically.
Some of this activity reflects automatic upvoting as well, but with these spikes especially you're getting a lot of manual upvoting where people are online looking at posts and upvoting them.
This data is helpful because this shows me where to focus my attention.
For example, most of my followers are not online at four in the morning on Tuesday, then why would I want to schedule a post at four in the morning on Tuesday?
If the odds are that there's twice as many of my followers online and voting on Tuesday at noon, it's much better to schedule at noon.
It takes a while for me to load 7,000 followers of data here, maybe five minutes, but this is nice because this is specific and unique to you. This will find your exact number of followers, and then give you exact recommendations based on the current state of your followers.
Therefore, I know Tuesday is my best time to make a post for activity.
Every day at about the same times here, from about 10:00 AM Eastern time to about 01:00 PM or 02:00 PM, these are some of the peak times. That allows the most people from around the world to be online, in Europe and in the US. That is a good overlapping activity there.
Now, your followers may differ and it's nice to see how this differs based on day of the week. One thing that might be surprising Sunday is one of the best times to post. I would suggest based on this that Sunday is actually one of the very best times to post because there's probably fewer posts by people on Sunday.
On Facebook, Saturday and Sunday have tended to be the best days to post because there's less competition. While this does track my follower activity the one problem with this is that it doesn't track the competition for follower attention.
Let's say that while it might look best to post at noon on Tuesday, what if there's really heavy competition?
What if my followers are faced with a whole bunch of new posts from other people at the exact same time on Tuesday?
Meanwhile if I would post a few hours later, there might not be as many posts coming out.
While this tool gives an idea of when my followers are most active, it does not give me the idea of the relative competition.
Some of these times when followers are less active might even be better because there's lower competition. I've made some posts at ten at night and even though these are lower in terms of follower activity, some of the posts that night have done very good probably because there's not as many other posts coming out either.
Still this gives a very good idea of when my followers are online, which is awesome, especially on Sunday. It shows that you want to make posts seven days a week on Steemit and post consistently. That means even do a post right before peak follower time and right after peak follower time.
What I'm thinking based on these graphs is that I want to get my posts right before peak follower time because these upvotes are when people actually vote. Therefore, I want the post to come out a little bit before peak follower time, so it is in position, and then maybe to have one come out at peak follower time or shortly thereafter, or even maybe right before there's going to be a downslide.
What I did yesterday that I'm happy with is I posted right around these peak follower times and I did pretty much the same thing today.
I posted right around the peak follower time on Thursday, however it then will be available to followers throughout the day, and then what I'll probably do is post in a few more hours while many followers are still online, then that post will carry over. I will probably do one more at night to carry over for the rest of the day until the next peak follower time. I try to intentionally match my posts with when my followers are online and voting as much as possible.
Sometimes there's no way to find out either except just testing your own posts. I've made a post, which is on the lower end of posts that I also posted at night and came out at two in the morning my time.
That’s one of the lowest activities consistently, meaning that if I make a newer post my followers are likely to see that as well, I realize that the more you analyze things the more it gets messier and messier.
The point is if you use this tool, it's helpful that you can isolate exactly where your followers are online. I would say make a post right before peak activity because on the home feed then the newer the post you've got a chance to get up there and if it's got a few votes right away, then it'll have a higher opportunity to get into the trending page, as well you might need a full day for that, so if you get it right before peak time you will get a bunch of votes and some votes will keep coming in and then the next day it should be ready for peak time.
I hope that showing you this tool created by @JGA is helpful because this has been helpful for me. The tool also shows the account activity and all the followers are listed down here as well.
If you look at the account activity, this is over a four week period and it shows when I voted.
I've done most of my votes on Friday at night for some reason, and then on Saturday I can see my own voting trends, so for example, if you want to see exactly when I vote or another follower votes, you can put in that account and see when they do most of their voting.
I'm curious about that right now and I'm interested to see when Hendricks votes, he's one of the top voters.
Now, you can see Hendricks votes all over the board here, his voting times are consistently spread out because I believe he's got one auto voter set on, and then he also goes in and manually votes.
This is cool if you want to see when someone else votes, you can see when their votes come out over the last several weeks, this tool allows you to look and say, "Oh, this person votes here," and you can also guess that some people have auto voter setup if they vote around the clock because you might realize that someone's not likely to be online 24/7.
I've checked a couple of my top followers and upvoters here. There are certain times over the past four weeks that I've got almost no shot of getting an upvote, if the post comes out of at exactly the time, or if they see it at the exact time.
What's cool is that you can see some of the top accounts that are active in voting on Steemit, are online and vote every day. That is outstanding, that's great to have people with such big investments that are online and participating on a daily basis.
I hope this has been helpful for you, if you'd like to find out when to reach your followers on Steemit at the very best time, and if you want to see how and when anyone's voting, when the best time is, when are some of the top voters on the website actually voting, you can then just put their account in and see exactly what time they vote.
Thank you for reading this post.
I hope it's helpful for you.
Would you please leave a like on the video or an upvote on the post if you'd like me to do more like this?
I love you, you're awesome.
I hope you have a wonderful day today.
If you found this post helpful on Steemit, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk