The Best Time to Tweet, Email, and Facebook

I attended a great webinar on the Science of Timing for Blogs/Social Media and E-Mail marketing campaigns put together by HubSpot.

It was a great seminar, it was free, and I got a bunch of new connections from it as well (via twitter.)  The info that was presented was based on studies of data collected from billions of messages, tweets, blogs, and other marketing campaigns.

Here are a few of the main takeaways:

• Targeting marketing campaigns for Weekends was shown to be a very GOOD idea. Less competition (“noise”) on the weekends which means that the more likelihood of your message being processed by the recipient. Most professionals check their work e-mails now on the weekends too. . .

 

• Not much difference in the typical “business/professional” contact as compared to a typical “consumer”. Studies show that most professionals now check their work e-mails over the weekend and during off-hours at night, so there is not as much of a downturn in sending B2B campaigns during those off times.

 

• If you’re looking for people to retweet you – studies show that tweeting between 2pm and 5pm ET is the best time. This is when most re-tweets on average occur.

 

• Tweets are looked at more on Weekends than on Mondays and Thursdays. So weekends are still a very good time to market through twitter when compared to the rest of the week.

 

• Tweeting more is a good marketing strategy, as most people that use twitter follow hundreds of people – so it’s hard to overwhelm them with your content. Facebook is a little different, and it was suggested to only do a Facebook update at most a couple of times a day (as you’re more likely to overwhelm a Facebook activity stream in comparison to a twitter activity stream).

 

• Most people “share” Facebook links on Fridays and Saturdays. This is most likely due to a lot of companies still blocking Facebook. Mornings are a slightly better time to do facebook posts as more people tend to “share” in the mornings rather than in the afternoons.

 

• The best click-through rates on e-mail campaigns happen on Saturdays and Sundays. This is most likely due to the decrease in most marketing campaigns on the weekends (fewer e-mails to look through = more time for the user to spend looking at each one).

 

• Best time to send e-mails is very early in the morning, so that they are in a persons in-box when they start their day (and they are most likely to open them).

 

• There is very little loss in click-through rates based on the frequency of the email messages coming to the user. Takeaway was to email the recipients more often rather than holding back The notion of “flooding” a user with too many emails was basically dis-proven as far as click-through and unsubscribe rates are concerned. Content is King though – if your producing good content people will pay attention to it – if your producing crap – well, expect a lot of unsubscribes.

 

• The percentage of unsubscribes also goes down with the MORE e-mails that get sent out. So Send More E-mail!

 

• The newer the subscriber to your opt-in list – the more likely they will be to click on links and pay attention to the message.

 

• Blog pageviews are highest on Mondays. Blogs posted between 10-11am (eastern time) tend to be viewed the most. Blogs posted in the mornings also tend to get more comments on them than ones that are posted later in the day.

 

• Blogging more than once a day will greatly increase the traffic and backlinks (for SEO) generated for your site. The more frequently you can blog – the better your results will be.

 

• http://tweetwhen.com is a cool little site where you can plug in your twitter account, and it will do a analysis on when you get the most re-tweets (so you then know for your own account when is the best time to tweet).

 

• “If it don’t make dollars, then it don’t make sense” – Analytics is crucial when it comes to any type of marketing. Stop doing something if it doesn’t work . . . do more of something if it does work.

 

Again, was one of better training seminars that I have attended. HubSpot does a lot of these free one-hour training sessions; so if your interested in this stuff, I suggest you sign up to their mailing list to get notified of their next sessions. http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/