People spend on YouTube about 30 minutes per visit on average watching videos, reels, and searching for content. It seems like a lot, considering most of them visit the website more than once a day, especially on weekends. However, this time is distributed unequally, and thus, posting time plays a key role in driving most views. Find out what the best time to post on YouTube in 2022 is.
Statistics Are Everything
To find the best posting strategy, you must understand how the audience behaves, and this is when stats come to help. According to them, users are most active on weekends, Fridays, and, surprisingly, Wednesdays. The leading majority of YouTube users come from the US, with Brazil, China, India, and the UK being significant markets as well. According to Frederator Networks, people engage with YouTube differently throughout the week. On weekdays, they visit the website early in the morning, before they go to work, and in the evening — after they come back. Toward the end of the week, the visit time starts shifting toward the evening.
To get the most engagement, a video must be posted a few hours before the “golden hour.” This way, the algorithm will pick it up and feature it to viewers when they are the most active. Frederator Networks determined such optimal time frames for posting:
- Mondays — 2-4 p.m.
- Tuesdays — 2-4 p.m.
- Wednesdays — 2-4 p.m.
- Thursdays noon — 3 p.m.
- Fridays noon — 3 p.m.
- Saturdays — 9 a.m.-11 a.m.
- Sundays — 9 a.m.-11 a.m.
Know Your Audience
When you understand your audience and their behavior, you can determine when they are most likely to engage with your content. For example, let’s say you make videos that help students get ready for their SATs. You know exactly when their exams will take place and can get a pretty good assumption of their timetable — school, homework, leisure time, etc. Based on these data, you can schedule posts to match the time when they are most likely to search for the type of content you make.
Each audience has its unique traits, which are worth researching. This analysis will give you an idea of their schedule and help you understand their preferences, resulting in much more unorthodox and engaging content marketing.
Keep Time Zones in Mind
If your target audience lives in a different country, it’s obvious that you should adapt your posting time to their time zone. If your audience is spread around the world, you’ll have to pick one or two categories that bring you the most conversions and focus on them. You can do so by checking the demographics in your YouTube statistics account.
You can go further by exploring the culture of the country your audience lives in to find out how they interact with YouTube. This will also help you adapt thumbnails and choose a template design that will bring the most conversions with a specific audience.
When Your Viewers Are on YouTube Report
If your channel drives a lot of traffic, consider yourself lucky. In 2020, YouTube introduced a new feature called the When Your Viewers Are on YouTube report. The report shows when your viewers were online on YouTube in the last 28 days. This is the most precise and straightforward tool to plan video premiers and other activities, such as live streams. The downside is that channels with little traffic won’t have the luxury to use this feature.
Use Google Analytics
If you have an online store or any other website and use YouTube for promotion, take advantage of Google Analytics to find the best posting time. You can do so by creating custom reports to see at what time people referred from YouTube mostly come to your website. This will not just give you an idea of when users watch your videos but at what time they are most likely to convert, thus raising the effectiveness of your YouTube channel in the marketing funnel. If you are running an affiliate program or collaborating with other YouTubers, make sure to exclude them from the mix to get the purest data.
This is just one way Google Analytics can help you upgrade your YouTube campaigns. There, you can view the quality of traffic it drives to your website, its bounce rate, how well they convert, and how much you pay for it.
Testing Brings Perfection
Testing is the key to finding valuable insights and pumping your stats. Analyze current data, make hypotheses, and test them regularly. While most tests will likely fail, some will result in unexpected revelations and help find posting time you didn’t even think about initially.
Conclusion
The top activity days for YouTube are Wednesday, Friday, and weekends. The research found that the best posting time is around 2-3 p.m. on weekdays and about 9-11 a.m. on weekends. To find the posting time best for your audience, carry out tests, analyze analytics reports, and research your audience’s preferences and schedule.
