Timing Social Media For Best Results

Timing Social Media For Best Results
To be successful in social media marketing , you have to do two things:
 * Provide interesting content that gives people value for their time.
 * Deliver your message at a time and place when your audience is there to hear it.

Creating interesting content is the easy part for most marketers. Finding the right place to communicate your message is a function of targeting your message to the right audience, and then finding the communications channel that reaches that audience. There are many tools and techniques for doing that.

Timing, on the other hand, can seem mystifying. How on earth are you supposed to predict when a particular person will be online to receive your message? The answer, of course, is that you can’t predict the behavior of a particular individual in the future – but you can certainly get clues as to their likely behavior from their past behavior online.

The Half-Life of a Tweet
Link shortening app Bit.ly coined the term “tweet half-life” in September, 2011, with a blog post that explained its analysis of clicks on its short-links based on when they were first tweeted. Klout follower in November of the same year with an analysis of tweets that showed that users with a high Klout score (and therefore a larger social network) had a longer “shelf life” for their messages than those with lower Klout scores.

Bit.ly said that the average half-life of a tweet – that is the amount of time before it had reached the majority of the people who would click on the link in a tweet – was just 3 hours, while Klout said that just over 5 hours was the top of the range for even those social media users with the highest Klout scores. Other social media channels don’t fare much better in terms of lasting impact according to research by Gartner – a post on Facebook or Google+ has a half-life of about 6 hours, while LinkedIn status updates are viewable on the front page of someone with about 500 connections for less than 7 hours. There are three ways to approach the problem of extending the life of your social media efforts.

More and more marketers have decided that the right approach is to do all three, testing and tweaking their campaigns until they get the results they want. Don’t worry about too many tweets, or about repeating tweets. They have a very short “shelf life” unless someone is using a hashtag to search for a particular topic.
 * 1) Repeat the same link, with different messages, over several days, at different times of day, on Twitter.
 * 2) Use hashtags and posting to special interest groups (on LinkedIn, or in an industry-specific forum) or social bookmarking sites (Reddit, StumbleUpon) to extend the life of your messages.
 * 3) <span style="font-family:TrebuchetMS,sans-serif;font-size:10pt;">Optimize the timing of your initial posting (and subsequent re-posting, if needed) to reach the largest possible audience.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;tab-stops:.25in.5in.75in1.0in1.25in1.5in1.75in2.0in2.25in2.5in2.75in3.0in3.25in3.5in3.75in4.0in4.25in4.5in4.75in5.0in5.25in5.5in5.75in6.0in6.25in6.5in6.75in7.0in7.25in7.5in7.75in8.0in; mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:'TrebuchetMS',sans-serif;font-size:10pt;">In social networks other than Twitter, content and value are more important than quantity. Facebook’s in-house research shows that company posts more than every other day don’t get as many “likes” and comments as corporate posts made less frequently, for example.

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt;line-height: normal;tab-stops:.25in.5in.75in1.0in1.25in1.5in1.75in2.0in2.25in2.5in2.75in3.0in3.25in3.5in3.75in4.0in4.25in4.5in4.75in5.0in5.25in5.5in5.75in6.0in6.25in6.5in6.75in7.0in7.25in7.5in7.75in8.0in; mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none">- Reference: Fricken Rich