We will look at the data and try to find the best time to post articles. You might expect that the hour you post your article might be very important but in fact, the day of the week is more significant for your success.
Which day should you post?
Sunday has the most votes of any day in week (orange line in graph) but also lot of articles are written on Sunday (blue line). The best average number of votes per article is on Saturday (in graph the best average is at the point where blue line is lowest while orange is the highest i.e. number of articles is low while number of votes is high). Author that has lot of followers and is quite successful should prefer Saturday and Sunday since those two days have the highest average of votes per article while for new users is the best day only Sunday because most people vote that day and therefore you have the best chance to attract new readers.
What is the best time to post?
The biggest number of votes (orange line in graph) are awarded from 9 AM to 8 PM UTC time zone (5 AM to 4 PM Eastern Time, 10 AM to 9 PM Central European Time). Number of articles is very similar to number of votes each hour but as you can see, from 22 PM to 2 AM UTC, there is a lot of votes given to only few articles. Another good period is from 17 PM to 19 PM UTC with most average votes per article.
About graphs
Both graphs show number of votes – blue line and number of articles – orange line. Axis x displays normalized values between 0 and 1, axis y shows a day of the week in first graph starting from Monday at 1 until Sunday represented as 7, second graph uses hour when the article was created rounded up i.e. 2:13 AM is rounded to 3 AM. We are using UTC time zone which means that if you write article at 11:28 PM ET on Sunday in USA, it is counted as 4:00 AM UTC on Monday.
About data
We used data older than 1 week, up until 7 weeks old. Only articles with tag “Steemit” were considered since they consist of enough data to be representative even though it is possible that posts with e.g. tag “photography” might act differently. Also most common languages other than English were excluded – it was done based on tags like “kr”, “deutsch”, “spanish”… Data were downloaded through API https://api.steemit.com using C# library https://github.com/Chainers/Ditch
Conclusion
The best time to post is on Sunday between 5 PM and 7 PM UTC (1 PM – 3 PM ET, 6 PM – 8 PM CET).