Timing your content is important for maximising impact
I watched a fascinating presentation given by @steverubel at a recent TNW conference, about attention being our next big fight.
With 140M tweets sent each day and 29M active Facebook users in the UK alone, the amount of noise out there means that you need to be especially mindful not only of your message but also the best time of day to send that message. The content shelf-life for social networking sites is so much shorter than for websites, and @steverubel highlighted some of the key facts.
Twitter content decay: 71% of tweets get no response, and of the 23% that do receive a reply, 85% of those get only a single reply. Only 6% of messages are retweeted, and of these, 92% of retweets are in the first hour.
Facebook content decay: The greatest interaction with content is within the first 15 minutes of posting, and interaction is highest at the end of the hour, i.e. when people are between meetings.
While the compressed content shelf-life for sites such as Twitter and Facebook is well under the hour, content on your website will have a longer shelf-life and will have a greater permanence and visibility. By working the different sites together, not by automation but by really considering which aspect of your message will be most appropriate for a particular audience, you will be able to maximise the impact your content can have across your whole online estate. By knowing your audience and their most active times, you can tailor a message that can be repeated or rephrased several times in order to have more chance of reaching a higher proportion of that audience.
Fold your social media tactics into your bigger business and online strategy, using effective measuring and scheduling tools, think carefully about what each channel needs to do for you and when it can do this most effectively. Clever use of content calendars, content scheduling and intelligent listening to the current atmosphere of each arena before posting will allow you to make the most of the voice you have online and allow you to grab your own share of attention.
Thanks Sarah, interesting blog, makes you wonder if tweets should have a ‘best before’ date on them. What’s your advice into how many times you should schedule a tweet for maximum effectiveness? For example when I publish a new blog post?
Hi Sue, thanks for reading and commenting, you’ll love the answer – like everything else, it depends…! Depends on your audience, their habits and their location, and whether they are all equally valuable to you or if you are targeting specific people you have identified that you would most like to see your message. If you have a homogenous global audience who you are trying to reach equally, then you should aim to reissue a tweet between 3 to 4 times in a 24 hour period to get the biggest reach. If you have a smaller and more localised audience, then you start to see when the busiest times are and you can aim to tweet then. Try to vary your message, as different wording will capture different people’s attention. And like everything else, track results so you understand over time what is working best for you.
Thanks Sarah, sounds like any marketing method then 🙂 I will try a new approach with my next post WHEN I get it out! Nearly there. Just started today with Tweet Old Posts plugin to reuse old blogs, a bit of recycling! Will see how that goes.