Last week the US PR podcast "On The Record" interviewed Dan Zarrella of Hubspot about the science of timing Facebook and Twitter updates.
Zarrella has studied when people are most effective on these platforms by drawing on data from two years of quantitative research.Although his material mostly covers US data, it reveals interesting insights, particularly about Twitter. It seems:
•You stand a better chance of getting your content retweeted, if you tweet later in the day or on a Friday.
•To get click throughs, Thursday and Friday are popular days to sprinkle links in your tweets.
•When tweeting your own content, it's OK to tweet the same information multiple times. For example tweet once in the morning, in the afternoon and then again in the evening. This exposes your message to the greatest number of people, many of whom may miss your original tweet. However the trick is to change the wording of each tweet over the course of the day so, although information is the same, each post appears slightly different.
Zarrella's Facebook insights are also interesting:
•Avoid posting too often to Facebook because feeds tend to stay around a lot longer on this platform than Twitter and you can annoy people by updating too frequently. Twitter users tend to have more followers than Facebook friends so Facebook posts come through an account at a slower rate and are visible longer.
•People who post once every other day seem to attract more friends.
•When brands publish on weekends they tend to get more "likes" because apparently there is less competition from other brands as business updates slow over the weekend.
•Videos tend to work much better on Facebook because they are easier to watch than on Twitter.
It would be interesting to see Australian stats on the how's and when's of engaging others on-line.
Credit to Eric Schwartzman and Dan Zarrella.