Analysis of Internet activity over the weekend. Research: optimal posting times on VKontakte

Many SMM specialists are very often interested in what time is best to post in their group. Western colleagues have written a lot of articles about this and drawn a bunch of infographics. But all this is about facebook, twitter, pinterest, and not about our VKontakte, in which we spend a lot of time.

In fact, this article will not talk about publishing posts in your group or public page, but about what time is the best time to place ads in VK communities to attract users to the group or to commercial websites (you are selling something)

It’s probably worth starting with the fact that, like television, the Internet has prime time - the period of time during which the maximum number of users are on the Internet. VK also has prime time. It looks something like this

• Activity – users online on the social network VKontakte
• Color - the redder, the more users are online at a given time period
• Spaces— at some points in time it was not possible to obtain data from VK
• Data - Russia, Moscow, different age groups (gathered separately)
• Time– according to Moscow time

From the picture “14-80” you can see that the general “prime time” starts at 20:00 every day of the week (a little less on Friday and Saturday) and ends at 00:00.

Activity (the number of online users in VK) begins to grow from 8 am to 16:00 where it freezes until 20:00 and the growth continues after which, at approximately 01:00, it begins to quickly fall until 04:00. From 04:00 to 07:00 there are the fewest people on the social network from Moscow.

Few people are interested in the overall picture of activity, so let’s look at the activity of individual age groups

We are interested in the age groups 22-30, 31-45 and 46-80 and the general group 22-80... we have not yet learned to work with schoolchildren, children, except in applications.

Based on the activity of different age groups, it is possible to build template models of user behavior. It roughly looks like this

...woke up, had breakfast, checked via smartphone to see if anyone had posted on social media overnight, on the way to work, turned on the computer at work, looked at “My News”, received the first stream of information to discuss with colleagues at lunch, worked until lunch , sometimes distracted by “My News” and personal messages, had lunch, after lunch to get into work mode, I checked the social network again for new messages, and also quickly ran through the news feed, worked, before leaving work I checked the social network again, road home, came tired, washed, ate, at the same time turned on the radio or my playlist on the social network, continued to do household chores, sometimes got distracted by answers in private messages, shared a couple funny pictures for relaxation and a sense of moral satisfaction, I watched some series or movie on a social network, fell asleep...

Of course, to create a more accurate template, it is necessary to survey the group that will be targeted by advertising on the social network ( the target audience).

My personal experience promotion of a meta-search engine for air tickets showed that social network users react to information about air ticket sales (like, repost, follow links) better from 11:00 to 15:00, the peak of transitions from advertising occurred precisely at 11:00-12:00. At the same time, advertising in prime time did not give the same effect, despite the high activity of users of the social network.

The heat map shows that most requests for advertising in groups are placed between 13:00 and 16:00 on weekdays. Most advertisers have come to the right conclusion - VKontakte’s “prime time” is not suitable for advertising, users want to relax and do household chores, and not receive information about tire sales in a group about cats.

In fact, based on the information above, you can draw conclusions about effective posting to your group or public page:

• Understand who your user (target) is: at what time he is active on the social network, what he does, what communities he is subscribed to - create your own user behavior pattern to determine at what moment and what information he is ready to receive;
• Experiment and analyze. Track everything you can. Data will help build a behavior pattern

General conclusion

Today is not yesterday, and tomorrow will not be today. Next Tuesday is only a week away and it will be different because it will snow. At a certain moment, someone will share a post, and then his friend with 100,000 subscribers will notice and he will also share it, but tomorrow is not today, and this will not happen, which means last Tuesday was not so effective in comparison with this, because it didn't snow.

Recently, I set out to find out what time I should publish posts on VKontakte in order to get maximum coverage. To find out, I did some research.

We will talk about groups of copywriters. Other areas have their own audiences with their own preferences and schedules.

Theoretical part

Interested subscribers regularly come to the group to read new posts. There is no point in adapting to them. The more interesting you write, the more people will remember about the community and view its wall.

But you can influence the number of people who see the post in the news. To do this, you just need to publish content when a lot of your subscribers are online. or just before rush hour. These are the indicators I measured.

Let's experiment

For experiments, I chose 3 communities: Overheard | Copywriting, My blog Web.txt and Panda Copywriting (the liveliest of the major groups). Goal: determine the time with the maximum number of online copywriter subscribers.

The study lasted a week - from July 14 to July 21. Every hour, starting at 9 am, Alexey and I checked online in these three groups and entered the indicators into a table.

In total I made 7 simple tables

And then I calculated the average values, divided the results into groups: from the warmest (peak online) to the coldest.

Everything was calculated according to Moscow time.

1pm is the busiest time

Early in the morning people are still sleeping - there is no point in publishing posts. The revival begins at noon, reaches a peak value by 13-00 and remains at a high level for another 4 hours. After 5 p.m., working copywriters go home - the online service drops. And at 21-22 o'clock people come in again.

What conclusions can be drawn from this:

• The best time to post is just before the lunch rush. For example, at 12-30.
• The next post can be published immediately after lunch - online will be large for a few more hours.
• Publish evening posts around 20-30 - before the night peak.

Days of the week

At the same time, I will share the results by day of the week. This will be useful for those who do not write posts daily.

Weekends are always terribly slow

Of course, statistics based on one week's results are not very accurate. Therefore, I do not advise you to listen to her too much. Now I'm working on automating measurements. When everything is ready, I will collect evidence in a couple of months - and then I will publish new, more accurate data.

But here the statistics of the Overheard group come to my aid. There, people themselves offer content, new posts appear regularly throughout the day. And we can look at activity statistics by day of the week.

Activity chart in Overheard | copywriting for the last month

Do you see the "pits"? It's the weekend. Don't post anything important on the weekend. Nobody will read this. The coolest content should be released on Monday-Tuesday. Then you will get maximum coverage and the group will grow faster.

Social poll

I conducted a survey with almost 200 people. The purpose of the survey is to find out at what time people prefer to view the news feed.

Most often the feed is scrolled in the morning and evening

Conclusion: publishing evening posts (around 20-00) is a great idea. Firstly, there is a good online presence in groups at this time. Secondly, people are already free from work and ready to read your content. Thirdly, almost no one writes at night - so in the morning your publications will still be closer to the beginning of the news feed.

Of course, 200 people is very little. Don't take this survey too seriously.

conclusions

I repeat. I conducted research in copywriting groups. It only applies to copywriters. If your target audience is not copywriters, do not use this data. They may not work for you. It’s better to take a week and monitor your subscribers - it will immediately become clear to you when the content should be released.

What can be learned from the study:

• The best time to post is before lunch. This way you will get maximum coverage in the news.
• Second place goes to the evening - 20-21 hours. The online presence is good at this time, and your publications will still be visible in the morning.
• Don't post anything important on the weekend - your coverage will be minimal.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I hope my little research will help you increase your reach.

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"If we want to understand the information society, we must measure it. Without measurement, we will not be able to track progress or identify gaps that require our attention."

Director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau of the International Telecommunication Union, Brahima Sanu

Internet audience size

“We occupy first place in Europe today in terms of the number of global network users. There are already more than 90 million of them in Russia.” (from the speech of Russian President V. Putin at the International Cybersecurity Congress in Moscow, 07/06/2018)

18 years and older

On September 17, 2018, the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) conducted a survey about “Do you use the Internet, and if so, how often?”

The share of Internet users in Russia is 81% of citizens. Including 65% go online daily. Among Russians aged 18 to 24, this figure is 97%.

Also, among the most active audience (they use the Internet daily) are highly educated (78%) and financially secure (72%), Muscovites and St. Petersburg residents (76%).

1,600 Russians over the age of 18 took part in the survey. Data are weighted for selection probability and sociodemographic parameters. For this sample maximum size errors with a 95% probability do not exceed 2.5%.

According to the Foundation " Public opinion"(December 2017 - February 2018) total users (accessed the Internet at least once a month) - 83.8 million people (72%). 74.7 million people (63.8%) use the Internet daily.

Data in million people

• Total population - 72


• Central Federal District - 72
• Northwestern Federal District - 77
• Southern and North Caucasian Federal District - 71
• Volga Federal District - 68
• Ural Federal District - 70
• Siberian Federal District - 72
• Far Eastern Federal District - 75

Data in million people

Data in million people

Winter 2017–2018, data in percentage

• Total population - 64


• Central Federal District - 64
• Northwestern Federal District - 71
• Southern and North Caucasian Federal District - 63
• Volga Federal District - 60
• Ural Federal District - 62
• Siberian Federal District - 64
• Far Eastern Federal District - 68

Data in million people

Data source: Leaked data from weekly FOMnibus surveys of Russian citizens 18 years of age and older. The surveys took place from December 2017 to February 2018, with 24,000 respondents.

From 16 years and older

The Russian branch of the research concern GfK (Gesellschaft fur Konsumforschung) Group, 01/15/2019, published a report “Internet penetration in Russia”.

The audience of Internet users aged 16 years and older was 90 million people (75.4% of the country's adult population), which is 3 million more than a year ago.

73 million(61% of adults) go online on mobile devices Oh.

Of them, 32 million Russians use the Internet only on mobile devices.

13% of Internet traffic in Russia comes from mobile devices (smartphones generate 10% of traffic, tablets - 3%). This was reported by “The Apple World in One Site” with reference to data from the analytical company StatCounter.

In October 2016, for the first time in history, global mobile Internet traffic exceeded desktop traffic. Tablets and smartphones accounted for 51.3% of global Internet traffic, desktop PCs and laptops accounted for 48.7%.

Stay time is one of the most important indicators on a site that is often misinterpreted. Many marketers pay too much attention to Time on Site when measuring traffic. But this indicator not entirely reliable and can be misleading.

In this article, we'll look at what dwell time means, whether search engines use it as a ranking signal, and how to increase your average time on site.

What does “dwelling time” mean?

Three years ago, Duane Foster wrote blog article about how to create quality content. The concept of “stay time” was first mentioned in it.

In simple terms, the residence time is This is the amount of time (real) a visitor spends on a page before returning to the search results. Theoretically, than longer time stay is all the better, as it indicates that the visitor is consuming the majority of the content on the page before returning to search results or moving on to other activities on the site.

Failure rates and actual failure rates

Before we continue, it's worth noting that there is a difference between failure rates andvalid failure rates. The concept of “dwell time” is closely related to them.

In analytics platforms, including Google Analytics , it takes two clicks to find out the Time on the site - a click to go to the site and a click to exit the page. Even if a visitor clicks on a link, stays on the page for 25 minutes and then leaves, this time will be included in the bounce rate statistics. Although, in fact, visiting a page for such a long time is not essentially a “refusal”. This is why bounce rates may differ from actual bounce rates.

Obviously, a page visit that lasts for 6 seconds isreal"refusal". A visitor comes in, decides the content doesn't match what they're looking for, and leaves. But if a visitor spends half an hour on the site browsing the page before leaving, then thisNotwill actual indicator refusal. This is why some pages that rank well and have quality content have higher bounce rates.

This is why dwell time is a more reliable indicator of page quality than the bounce rate that most internet marketers mistakenly focus on. But what do search engines do with dwell time metrics?

Is Dwell Time a Ranking Signal?

A very often discussed question among SEOs is whether time spent on a page is a ranking factor or not. And although Google is silent about many components that influence ranking. The fact that this setting was first added and then removed from Google suggests that dwell time is a ranking factor. This setting allowed you to block all results from a specific domain.

Google determines whether or not to block a domain from search results based on dwell time. If you visited a site and quickly left it, the next time you use the same query, that site will be ranked much lower in the search results.

Another proof that dwell time is a ranking signal in Google is the presence of an option in the “More by” in the search results.

This function is closely related to authorship. Blogs by authors of verified content were encouraged by search engines - links to other articles by the author appeared under the main link. And while authorship remains one of the most important ranking signals, both the “More by” and domain blocking features have been removed from Google.

So, it is currently unknown whether time on site is a ranking signal. But we think it is.

How to increase the time spent on the site

We know what dwell time is and why it's so important. How to increase these indicators?

The truth is, you should be doing these things for your site anyway, whether you want to increase time on site or not. There is no magic here, you just need to apply the right methods at the right time.

Create quality content

Whether you're writing blog posts, creating infographics or videos, good content should be:

• Useful (this is a guide to practical actions or theoretical knowledge)
• Entertaining (fun, unusual, surprising)
• Accessible (easy to read, interactive, well designed)

If you're not sure you can start a blog, explore different sites. This will help you come up with ideas for creating killer content. The better your content, the more likely visitors are to stay on your site, resulting in longer dwell times.

Relink

Since dwell time is calculated from the moment the user navigates to the page until he returns to the search results, it makes sense to add some kind of button or link (i.e., a goal) so that the user takes some action after reading the content. As a result, the usability of the site will improve.

Of course, internal linking is important for increasing SEO effectiveness. Without strict and logical linking, your site may rank poorly, since search robots will not be able to index your entire site.

Use effective strategies

By offering relevant articles to readers, you encourage them to stay on your site. This method is very effective if done correctly. The closer the topic of the recommended article, the higher the chance that the user will click on the link to read it. If a user can learn more about a topic that interests him, then why should he return to the search results page?

Use a scrolling site structure

Another way to increase dwell time is to design a site on one page (to view the entire site, you just need to scroll down the page).

From a usability point of view, endless page scrolling is good. But from an SEO perspective, it can be harmful if done poorly. Search robots are not very smart and they cannot always reproduce user behavior: clicks or scrolling. Stupid robots.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem that does not involve complex actions. To help robots index content on a scrolling page, the page must be divided into several “pages”—sections. Each section must have the same tag