Social Media Peak Hours: Or, Close That Twitter Window and Get Back to Work!

Aren't You Worried He's Watching You?

I long ago noticed, based on the number of posts in my streams and the number of responses I got to my own posts, that the peak hours for social media activity is during the business work day. And, usually I can't stand "infographics", which pack a lot of disparate, hard-to-digest data into a single slickly-designed image.

But, this nice infographic from Socialcaffeine.com is actually very useful, and it confirms with hard numbers what I've long suspected: most people are Twittering and Facebooking their day away when they are sitting at their desk in their office, supposedly doing work for whatever company is paying them for their time. Over the weekend, when they have more interesting things to do, it drops off dramatically.

But, here's the kicker I didn't expect: the stats for LinkedIn, the one site that is explicitly work related, show that it gets its highest traffic not during the work day, but rather right before and right after business hours during the work week. Considering the extent to which LinkedIn is used these days in sales and any sort of customer-facing roles (in the consulting game, we look up people on LinkedIn all the time, trying to figure out who they are, where the came from before they joined their current company, to recruit and headhunt, etc., etc.), I would have thought the workday numbers would be much higher.

Perhaps those LinkedIn users are logging in around 5 in a bit of a panic, trying to shore up their professional network in case they get fired because they just wasted the whole day on Facebook.