How to decide on the timing and frequency of social media updates

Our friends at Hubspot have put together this really informative article: 

Here's the thing: Social media timing matters.

In 2011, HubSpot's Dan Zarrella conducted extensive research on the topic of social media timing. He examined than 100,000 accounts to determine what timing and frequency resulted in the greatest outcomes for social shares. While this research can serve as a general guideline, marketers should also conduct their own research to see what is most effective for their particular audience.

Determining Your Optimal Frequency
It's every marketer's concern: Am I over-communicating? Are people sick of seeing my updates? Getting frequency right is an important achievement in marketing, whether you're talking email strategy or social updates.  

The General Guideline - Don't crowd your content. HubSpot's research found that companies that allow each shared link a buffer zone of at least an hour on either side see higher clickthrough rates overall. In fact, HubSpot's own default suggested times try to space scheduled shares out by approximately two hours, just to be sure. 

How to Find Your Personal Sweet Spot
The right frequency for you depends a lot on the concentration of content in your audience's stream. Think about it -- you could post an update to Facebook once every 40 minutes, and if there are 20 other posts between yours, it won't seem like your content is overwhelming. Start by taking an informal audit to see how many followers your typical follower has. If most of your active followers (the people re-posting or clicking on your content) don't follow many others, you'll want your sharing habits to be less frequent. You should also do some testing to determine your optimal publishing frequency. Here's a simple one to get you started:

• Week One: Schedule your shares two hours apart.  
• Week Two: Increase your publishing frequency gradually, but keep the calibre of the content fairly similar.
• Then compare the activity levels of each week. Separate retweets/reposts, replies/comments, and clicks. You may notice that one method may result in more comments but fewer clicks, and vice versa. Determine which method meets the lion's share of your goals as a marketer.
  

Determining the Best Time for General Engagement After you get the frequency down, you'll want to take a look at which days - and time of day - work best for generating activity and engagement with your posts. 

The General Guideline

• Twitter: Late in the day and week are the most retweetable times.
• Facebook: Shares are at their highest during the weekend.

Hubspot analysis found that on weekdays, later in the day - between around 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. (Eastern Time) - was when the content analysed saw the greatest retweet activity. Facebook, on the other hand, saw more activity during the weekends. This could be due to the nature of Facebook or the fact that many workplaces still block Facebook during working hours. Regardless of the cause, with schedulers, there's reason enough to experiment with increasing the content you post to Facebook on Saturdays and Sundays. HubSpot's research only went into optimal timing for Facebook and Twitter. To find optimal timing for other networks, you'll need to do a bit of testing. 

Creating a Well-Balanced Schedule
Once you've settled on a schedule with the best odds for your company, lock it into your publishing tool. Don't forget to go back and re-evaluate it occasionally to make sure the effectiveness of your timing doesn't change over time. When you've got timing down, you'll also want to think about content variance. 

The General Guideline
In a nutshell, mix it up! The biggest lesson learned by Hubspot in social content is to make sure you're not sharing the same content, types of content, and method of positioning of your content again and again. On Twitter, mix in @replies and retweets of other people's content. On LinkedIn, share both the title of, say, a blog post, and also try including some details or sound bites from within it. Facebook, for example, gives you a great opportunity to feature images, pictures, and other media -- take them up on it. Hubspot found that visual content helps to drive engagement. 

How to Find Your Personal Sweet Spot
Hubspot is a big fan of repurposing and reinventing good content. Test which types of content work well by taking one piece of material and positioning it in a number of ways. Try to track down trends by looking at your individual click and share rates. Did a particular piece of content do really well this week? Deconstruct what it was that made it so successful. If you've got a Facebook page or LinkedIn group, you can also poll your members to find out what kind of content they like best.

Whittling social media into a powerful marketing channel for your company takes a little time and research, but the time you put into tailoring your approach is well worth it.
 

Reproduced from www.to-market.co.uk  Original article from http://blog.hubspot.com/

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