Last Friday I shot, edited and submitted a video to Ecos’ “Get Washed” video contest and despite the quick production, I think it’s one of the best video contest entries ever done.  It’s simple but quirky and it features one of the best actresses I’ve ever worked with.  It’s also probably the greatest color correction job I’ve done, period.  (One of the tough things about filming in the woods is that the light is uneven and everything has a yellowish-green hue.)  The shooting and editing might have only taken a few hours but I had to put a surprising amount of pre-production work into this project.  Just picking up and dropping off the giant squirrel suit took about 5 hours! Because the whole commercial is basically just a monologue, I knew casting would be crucial.  After days of searching I finally found a fantastic actress and she just knocked it out of the park.

The top prizes in this contest are $10K and $5K and I think I might actually have a decent shot.  There is a public voting phase to determine the Top 25 videos though.  After the voting is done, judges alone will chose the top winners.  I didn’t think I’d really need to hustle for votes for this contest but Ecos wound up getting almost 90 entries!  So if you’ve got 5 seconds to spare, I’d appreciate it if you could click on this image and vote for my submission.  And if you’ve got 35 seconds to spare, you can even watch it if you’d like.

Today is the first day of voting which happens to be a sunday.  And that’s kind of unusual because most contests start and finish their voting phases on week days.  When the voting went live this morning I posted a request for votes on my personal facebook page.  But then I stopped and thought about the timing of my request; how many people would actually see it?  How many people are even on facebook at 10AM on a Sunday?  I don’t like to bombard my facebook friends with a ton of video contest vote requests so I only ask for votes a few times each contest.  (If all your facebook posts are about contests, you’re friends are just going to get annoyed and block or limit your posts.  So a ton of requests can really backfire on you.  Plus like I said, it’s just annoying and not cool)

So if I’m only going to ask for votes 2 or 3 times, I want to make sure I post those requests at the right time.  But what is “the right time”?  Basically what I want to know is, when is facebook busiest?  Unfortunately, Facebook isn’t saying.  And that’s not surprising because if they actually came out announced the best time of day to post something, every company would start posting stuff at that time. But it seems that this question does have an answer.  A social Network Management company named Virtue conducted a study of facebook activity about a year and a half ago.  You can read a breakdown of the study here but it looks like the best time to post a vote request (or anything, really) on facebook probably is…

2:55PM on a Wednesday.

According to the study, facebook is constantly getting a ton of traffic.  But there is always a spike in activity around 3pm on weekdays.  You should try and post just before 3:00 because a lot of people sign in right at the top of the hour.  (Maybe that’s when the TV show they were watching ended or maybe that’s when their afternoon break begins.)  This spike happens every day but Wednesdays are usually facebook’s busiest day of the week.

According to the study, posts that are done in the morning actually get seen/liked/shared more than afternoon posts.  But a vote request isn’t a typical facebook post.  In the morning people are signing into facebook right at the start of the day.  9:00AM is not goof-off time…it’s a time to sign in really quick to check messages and skim the news feed.  By late afternoon, people are signing into facebook because they’re bored.  So you want to get your vote requests in front of people who have some time to kill.

Keep in mind that if you live LA but all your family and friends live back in Chicago, you should probably post your requests at 3:00PM Chicago time.  Oh and by the way, as it turns out the weekend really is a bad time to post anything to facebook.  These days, only about 30% of employers block facebook so most people spend time on the site while at work.  So you can post a vote request on a sunday morning (like I did today before I saw the Virtue study) but it won’t get you too many clicks.

Oh and PS:  Happy Mother’s Day from VCN and Mark Wahlberg!