Good Timing: The best times to post to Facebook or Twitter

You know “the lull.” It’s the time in the later part of the afternoon when you find yourself drifting away from the task at hand and wandering around the internet while looking at the clock periodically. Can I go home yet?

If your business has anything to gain from Facebook or Twitter networking (and believe me, it does), you might want to listen up, because that lull is the potentially golden time for scoring big hits on your posts. Mashable’s Samantha Murphy recently wrote about new findings on peak traffic times for both the social networking giants, and the results could yield big results for business. New data released by bit.ly indicates that Twitter’s hottest posting timeframe is between the hours of 1-3 pm EST (or 10-1 PT). But no surprise, don’t bother posting anything after 3 pm on a Friday – we all check out a little by then, don’t we?

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With Facebook, the peak time to generate traffic with posts is any day from 1-4 pm EST, but especially on Wednesdays at 3 pm. That turned out to be the magic hour for traffic generation on Facebook. Links posted before 8 am and after 8 pm generated the least clickage. Oddly enough, though Twitter and Facebook were shown to be ghost towns on Friday nights, that turned out to be a peak time for posting to Tumblr.

So how does this information help your business? Have you noticed any specific traffic patterns on your own business’s Facebook or Twitter page(s)? Let us know – we want to hear your thoughts!