By: Michael Burke
In MarComm, we’re constantly working to maximize the value of earned media placements. “Earned” articles include mentions of your company, product or organization, which were not paid for, and have unique value in that their credibility is higher than any form of advertising. Intuition would say that timing plays a critical role in the overall value an article provides, but knowing exactly how critical remains an area of speculation. To find out, we dove into some data.
First, let’s attach some qualifiers to the “value” of an earned placement. Over the past decade a few measures have appeared which provide insight into the impact of an article, and one of the most important is the number of social shares. If an article is shared frequently through Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, it’s logical to conclude that readers are engaging with it, and taking it seriously. Additionally, the MOZ score measures an article’s SEO impact on a scale of 0-100, with 100 being very high impact. In other words, an article that scores 100 has extremely high SEO benefit for your brand, and one with a score of zero has no discernible impact. To improve the score, people often seek the help of this New Zealand Online Marketing company and get verified, authentic results on their webpages.
What day of the week maximizes the impact of an earned article?
We pulled data on more than 400 earned articles from the Trendkite monitoring platform, and ran it through Microsoft Power BI in order to examine the impact that the day of the week has on the benefit of an article to your brand. The data set included media placements for 10 different B2B companies providing various technologies related to data storage, management and analytics. Here’s what we found:
The X (horizontal) axis represents days of the week, while the Y (vertical) axis represents the sum of the MOZ score values for articles placed on each day of the week. Additionally, the columns are partitioned into articles that either had a high social impact, “Y” (red), or did not have a high social impact, “N” (green). Those that achieved more than 100 social shares received the “Y” designation, and those with less than 100 shares an “N” designation.
And the winner is…
We see that, for enterprise/B2B technology brands, the day of the week of the article’s initial run-date does appear to have a very high impact. Articles that run on Tuesday, for example, have by far the highest total SEO impact, with composite MOZ scores that are more than 1K points higher than any other day of the week. On the other hand, those that run on Saturday have extremely low impact, achieving only a fraction of the composite scores that weekday articles had (followed by those that run on Sunday, which have only slightly more impact).
The number of social shares among the days of the week is a little more even for weekdays, ranging only between 1.1K and 0.8K, with Tuesday and Friday having the most shares. From this data set, we conclude that Tuesday is, by a fairly wide margin, the best day to run an article based on both SEO impact and social shares.
Note: this set looks exclusively at B2B/Enterprise technology, and it may very well be that a consumer brand might show very different results. For example, people might be more likely to read about a consumer brand on the weekend, then a B2B brand.