You’ve seen the reports. You’ve seen the blog posts about best practices and timing your tweets. You’ve tried it. So did I.
If you’re like me, you may have seen some incremental lift in performance, the results were nowhere near what you could have achieved.
At least that’s how it seems to me. Don’t get me wrong – I rely on Business2Community and other sites for information that can help me in my social media marketing activities. But there are so many ideas and theories out there that I found it hard to separate the great ideas from those that simply don’t work.
Who, What, Where, & Why: The Easy Part
I’m an old-school marketer in one regard. I believe strongly in the 5W’s: who, what, where, why, and when. The first four were the easy part of social media for me. I think most marketers have the tools and know-how to understand who they want to reach, where to find their audience, and craft messages that deliver the “what” and “why” content that their customers or prospects want.
When those audiences are online and receptive to my marketing messages is a different matter. And it’s one that I struggled with for months before I found a way to get the data I needed.
I had followed the “best practices” advice from a well-known industry guru to set up a schedule for tweets aimed at driving traffic to content on my employer’s website. And it worked pretty well – it worked so well that Marketing Sherpa calculated that my content marketing strategy (driven almost solely by social media) was responsible for an increase of more than 2000% in the company’s web traffic.
But we all know that what works today may not work tomorrow. And what works in general, certainly doesn’t mean it’s best for all audiences, all brands, or all situations. I volunteer as a mentor at a Dallas-based start-up incubator called Tech Wildcatters. One day last spring, I met Bradley Joyce, CEO of a start-up called Socialyzer one of the companies participating in Tech Wildcatters’ 2012 program.
The PhD’s and social media experts at Socialyzer told me that the reason I was having trouble growing my social media following was that I was tweeting at the wrong time. They said that the “best practices” advice I was following wasn’t right for my audience. I wasn’t initially receptive to their messages. After all, I’d even invested in a product that promised to help me time my social media for best results, and I’d run several tests of my own to try to identify the best times to tweet. Frankly, I thought I had it down.
Then I took their advice, changed the days and times of my tweets, and almost immediately saw a 130% increase in my click-through rate on links I tweeted.
Timing Social Media for Better Results
Socialyzer ran an analysis of our Twitter schedule. We were following “best practices” that suggested that noon and 6 PM Eastern time would result in maximum clicks. Here’s what our analysis looked like, alongside the analysis for a hip-hop music group called Rhymesayers.
What does a hip-hop music group selling direcitly to consumers have in common with a business-to-business marketing campaign for entenrprise software? Not a lot — so comparing the two was a way for me to insure that what Socialyzer was offering wasn’t another kind of “best practice” scheme.
My personalized analysis showed that my former employer’s twitter account (@DistribionDM) should tweet at 10am Eastern time for maximum clicks and @Rhymesayers should tweet at 3pm Eastern time. The difference between our recommendations and “best practices” is an eternity on Twitter!
The only thing that the best practices get right for these two accounts was that they should share midweek. The top 5 best time slots for each fell during Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Where best practices ultimately fail is that they don’t take into account the variables of your specific audience.
One of the clearest indicators of the difference between various accounts is measuring when an account’s audience is online and most likely to engage. Compare the two charts below.
The charts clearly display a significantly different audience activity profile, something that can’t be uncovered without an account-specific analysis.
The results? After implementing the Socialyzer recommendations, @DistribionDM saw a 130% increase in average clicks per tweet and a 200% increase in average retweets. Rhymesayer got even better results, which translated directly into sales for tickets to live online performances.
Twitter is now accepted as a powerful tool for reaching customers and prospects. That mean that it’s time that marketers started moving past “tribal” (collective) knowledge, and start rigorously using data and analysis to drive engagement results. “Best practices” are a general guideline — and relying solely on them does a disservice to your followers and your organization.
