How to Leverage Social Media for Business
You’re tweeting, pinning, posting status updates, and uploading videos consistently.
You’ve incorporated your social media strategy with your overall business marketing plan. You’ve finally gotten the hang of it!
But, are you getting the most from your efforts? How are you tracking your social media engagement? A recent study by the link shortening and tracking website, bit.ly, revealed the best and worst times to post links on popular sites Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, based on user engagement.
When to Post on Facebook
For Facebook, the bit.ly survey found that the peak time to post links was on Wednesday at 3 p.m. with the daily window being 1 p.m.-4 p.m. for the highest average click-through rate. According to their Facebook findings, avoid posting on the weekends as traffic dips significantly. Also, links posted between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. struggle to get much attention. As is also the case with Twitter, avoid posting on the weekends. Also noted was that traffic starts to pick up around 9 a.m., but it is best to wait to post until closer to 11 a.m. to get the most traction. Traffic starts to fade around 4 p.m. to keep your most important content limited to the middle of the day.
Keep in mind that while timing is everything, so is content!
It is very important to consult your analytics to determine what posts, links, and timeframes resonate best with your fan base and industry so that you can get the most leverage out of your content. For Facebook specifically, make sure you are utilizing your Insights. Facebook Insights provides metrics on the performance of your Page or app. Like all of Facebook, it is FREE. You can understand and analyze the demographics of your followers (those that subscribe to your updates or “like” you), their reach, consumption of content, creation of content, best days and times for interaction, and more, leaving you better equipped to reach them and improve your business. You can specify the date range you’d like to view too. Contuinual monitoring of the metrics helps you to assess the size and impact of engagement from the content and discussions made on your page, as well as the timeframe that results in expanding your reach!
When to Post on Twitter
So, what did the bit.ly study say about Twitter? First, like Facebook, you should avoid tweeting on the weekend. The proof for that is in the numbers. After 3 p.m. on Fridays, Twitter is on weekend time and, like you, appears to take two days off. Ideal times for Twitter are similar to Facebook, between 1 p.m.-3 p.m. Monday through Thursday. Steer clear of evening tweets after 8 p.m. too. You can use a site like TweetStats to check out your Twitter interactions and the times that your followers are most engaged.
What are you supposed to do with all of this information?
First and foremost, please take away from this that analytics are critical to any successful social media marketing campaign.
Second, this information should help increase your efficiency. Schedule your posts when they will stand the best chance of being shared. Make your posts work harder for you. Always note which content your fans or followers are reading and sharing and continue to post similar but unique information.
Do not overpost! Facebook posts should be limited to once, maybe twice, per day. Keep in mind that the mean “half life,” or the amount of time at which a link will receive half of the clicks it will ever receive after it’s reached its peak, of a link on Twitter is 2.8 hours and on Facebook it’s 3.2 hours. Use that as a guide. The more you post, the shorter your window of opportunity for fans to share your content becomes. Videos tend to have a half life closer to seven hours so consider that when developing content.
Have you been tracking your social media interaction? What tools are you using?