Ever wonder how much content you should be producing? What about how many times you should be posting to the social networks?
I was just asked this question during a speaking engagement yesterday, “How many times should I be posting to Facebook every day?”
According to the Engagement and Interaction White Paper, where they analyzed the top 20,000 Facebook fan pages, the answer is: A minimum of four times each day.
And now there’s a new study out from YesMail, which looked at the social networks of 20 popular clothing retailers in order to discover how email boosts social engagement, what times of day and week are most effective, and how to standardize some of your engagement in order to succeed.
It found a few interesting things:
- Marketers are deploying their Facebook campaigns the wrong time of day. According to the study, the Facebook campaigns of the brands it studied reached the highest level of interaction between 10 p.m. and 12 a.m. ET, yet the timeslot was the least used by marketers. We attended a client’s Twitter chat a couple of months ago, which was from 9-11 p.m. ET and it was highly attended and very engaged. Why? Kids have gone to bed and parents get on their computers for one last push before calling it a night.
- More than 84 percent of Twitter campaigns occurred within regular work hours of 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. ET, even though 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. ET is the timeframe with the highest level of customer engagement. I find this in my own engagement. Most of our blog commenters are here between 6-10 a.m. ET, again at noon, and then they drop off significantly.
- Marketers ignore more than half of the day when it comes to running YouTube campaigns.
- Just three percent of emails were sent after 6 p.m. EST, which YesMail notes is a “fairly consistently used timeslot for social campaigns.”
- The most interaction on YouTube occurs on Monday, but Mondays are right now the least used weekdays for campaign deployment.
Of course, this isn’t the end all, be all of studies. They only evaluated 20 brands during a three month process, but (based on our own experience), I have to agree with their findings. It’s why I almost always publish blog posts by 7 a.m. ET (except today because I’m extraordinarily tired).
You can get a copy of the study here.
Do you find the same…or different?