The Main Artery

Subtle shifts in how and when you share social media content can make a big difference in your engagement with patients and prospects.

A recent study by content platform, Compendium, examined 200 companies’ social sharing statistics.  Here’s what they found for business-to-consumer content:

• Ideal message length
  • LinkedIn: 21-25 words
  • Twitter: 1-5 words
• Using a question mark
  • LinkedIn:  45% fewer clicks if include a ?
  • Twitter: 52% fewer clicks if include a ?
• Using an exclamation mark
  • LinkedIn: 27% more clicks if ! is used
  • Twitter: 8% fewer clicks if ! is used
• Using hashtags
  • LinkedIn: 20% fewer clicks if hashtag is included
  • Twitter: 82% fewer clicks if hashtag is included
• Using a number
  • LinkedIn: seems to have no real effect one way or the other
  • Twitter: 3.5% more click if number is included
• Best time of day
  • LinkedIn: 9 a.m. – 11 a.m. and again over the lunch hour
  • Twitter:  10 a.m. – 2 p.m.
  • Facebook: during the lunch hour and the late afternoon
• Part of the hour
  • LinkedIn: fairly even, but avoid sharing content 10-15 minutes into the hour
  • Twitter: top and bottom of the hour
• Day of the week
  • LinkedIn: Monday
  • Twitter: Monday and Wednesday

While it’s fun to see stats like these, I still think it’s important to use this as a starting point and do your own testing.  But this study does drive home the point that it is important to include metrics like these in the evaluation of your social media strategy.  Several of these items are imperatives in developing a social dashboard.

And, don’t forget.  Great content still rules.  Sending irrelevant messages will never work – no matter what time or day of the week.

*B2B stats vary significantly.  See the study for more details.

When you Tweet, what you Tweet and how often you Tweet can have a big impact on results.

Having grown to more than 140 million active users and 340 million Tweets per day, most brands agree that Twitter is an important platform these days. In fact 77 percent of marketers say Twitter is now one of their top three priorities in social platforms.

But how can you craft strategies that maximize your efforts?

Buddy Media, a social enterprise software company, analyzed user engagement from more than 320 Twitter handles of the world’s biggest brands. They looked at success metrics around reply rate, ReTweet rate and engagement rate.

I encourage you to download the whole report. It contains some good stuff. For those of you want some quick takeaways in the meantime, here are some highlights:

• Don’t overlook weekends. Twitter engagement rates are 17 percent higher on Saturday and Sunday compared to weekdays.
• Use both Facebook and Twitter to create an “always on” conversation. Engage with followers on Twitter during “busy hours” (7 AM – 8 PM), but post to Facebook fans during “non-busy hours” (8 PM – 7 AM).
• Tweet four times per day or less.
• Use less than 100 characters per Tweet.
• Add links to Tweets to drive higher Retweet rates.
• Ensure links are clickable by placing a space before the URL.
• Include hashtags in Tweets, but don’t use more than two per Tweet.
• Use images to drive the highest engagement.
• Use a “Retweet” or “RT” call to action to prompt followers to Retweet. Spell out “Retweet” to get the highest engagement