Dan Zarrella’s in depth study, The Science of Timing, offers some really great, concrete data on the best times to do your social media outreach. Many things were pretty predictable while others were a bit more surprising. And, while everything ultimately comes down to doing your own research targeted for your audience, there are a lot of useful starting points for anyone to go by.

A lot of people often wonder how much they should take into account their given time zone. According Zarrella’s research, 48% of the American population actually live in EST—Central is a close 2nd at 33%. So, that’s 81% of the nation’s population that lives within an hour of EST. Of course, if you are a local business in LA you may want to stick to PST, but for the majority of national businesses, EST timing will get your message to the most people.

Here are some of my favorite stats:

TWITTER

• For the highest click through rate (CTR) try posting between 1-4 times an hour. This probably sounds like a lot to most people but it works. People used to worry about overloading their followers’ streams and annoying them, but nowadays most people follow over 200+ people, so it’s highly unlikely you’ll monopolize their attention.
• 5pm is the best time to tweet to get the most retweets
• Midweek & weekends have the highest CTR
• CTR peak between 12-6pm

FACEBOOK

• The best day to share is on Saturday—not surprising since many companies block Facebook on work computers, so a lot of people catch up on the weekends
• The best time to share for any given day is 12pm
• Release 1 post every 2 days for the most likes—since most people don’t follow as many people as they do on Twitter you should be more conscious of not overloading your followers and, not crowding out your own info

BLOGGING

• Post on Mondays for the highest page views
• 6-7am gets the most links because the “linkerati” scour the net early to find source material for their posts that usually go live a few hours later
• Post between 10-11am for the highest page views
• Saturday & Sunday get the most comments—there is other data that will tell you comments aren’t really the most powerful metric, but if you’re looking to foster dialog, weekends are best

Here’s a fun infographic that illustrates these facts.