By Kelsey Jones
Klout has it all wrong. How many followers a person or business has on Twitter or how many thousands of users have liked a company on Facebook doesn’t matter as much as timeliness does. In order to get responses from businesses and individuals on Twitter, Facebook, or other social media avenues, no one is going to see a post when it is posted when they aren’t online.
According to Bit.ly, most links posted on social networks last about three hours, with YouTube having the longest longevity of links. The Bit.ly blog states, “In general, the half life of a bitly link is about 3 hours, unless you publish your links on youtube, where you can expect about 7 hours worth of attention. Many links last a lot less than 2 hours; other more sticky links last longer than 11 hours over all the referrers.”
Graph is from the Bit.ly blog post:
Therefore, the actual time a user or business posts on their social network profiles will directly influence the chance that they will share or click on a link. For important content or messages, Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land recommends posting a “Second Chance Tweet”:
“On our @sengineland Twitter account, we tweet a story as soon as it’s posted. However, many of our Twitter followers might easily miss this, if they’re not online, busy and so on. That’s why we schedule a “second chance” tweet for most major stories to go out a few hours after they originally get tweeted.
Typically, we receive about 50% more traffic from Twitter from our second chance tweets as from the original ones. In other words, by simply tweeting a story again, some hours after the “half-life” of the original tweet has expired, we pick up 50% of the traffic that the original tweet generated.”
The content a profile posts, combined with the time they post it and how many times the content is shared, will be the key influencers on how many times a link is clicked on and shared. Do accounts with larger numbers of followers or likes have a greater chance of someone seeing their content based on the likelihood of higher impressions? Yes, but in order to make these numbers effective, businesses and individuals must pay attention to when and what they are posting.
The annual holiday of love is fast approaching, and for many people, finding the right Valentine’s Day gift for their family members or significant other to express their affection is fast becoming more crucial. For marketer and advertisers, the Valentine’s Day gift, floral, and greeting card traditions make it worthwhile to offer special discounts and products.
