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I had a visit this past week with Nora Flint, PR Manager of TruConversion. Her company is developing an app to help businesses optimize and track their social media results. With her editorial team, she provided me the answers to some of the world’s burning questions about social media posting in a new infographic, which I've made available here.
For entrepreneurs using social media for marketing, here’s the lowdown on what's working best.
For Facebook
- The times to avoid are before 8 a.m. and after 8 p.m. The sweet spot, however, is 1-3 p.m. with activity, engagement and happiness highest on Thursday and Friday, and peaking on Friday afternoon. (No surprise there!)
- For brands, Fridays generate 17% of all likes, 15% of comments and 15 percent of shares.
For Twitter
- The best time for retweets is after 3 p.m. The worst time is after 8 p.m., any day. The very best time of all? 5 p.m.
- For B2C businesses, the best times to tweet are on weekends and on Wednesdays.
- For B2B businesses, the best days to tweet are Monday through Thursday.
- Interestingly, workers use Twitter most while at work. Students, likewise, access Twitter most while in school.
For YouTube
- The time to avoid for new posts is 5-6 p.m. The time to catch, however, is noon to 3:00.
- For viewer engagement, activity rises Thursday and continues through Sunday. On workdays engagement rises after the workday is done.
For LinkedIn
- Conversely, LinkedIn is a workday sport. Activity and engagement rises from 8-5, Monday through Friday.
- Any given status update is likely to reach just 20% of your network. For this reason, to reach higher saturation, scheduling app Buffer suggests you aim for 20 quality postings each week.
For Pinterest
- Pinterest gets most engagement from 2-4 in the afternoon. The worst times to pin: 5-7 p.m.
- The time of pinning is especially beneficial on Pinterest. If you pin while your viewers are active you can boost re-pins by 36%, according to Pintura.
- For fashion and retail brands, highest engagement occurs after 5 p.m. on Friday and continues through Saturday and Sunday.
- Pinterest is a bonanza for retail engagement, particularly for women consumers. A full 55% of Pinterest users have engaged with retailers and brands through the program. 87% of Pinterest users are women. And—most impressive of all—the average time on site is 89 minutes, surpassing Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
These results may not surprise you. But at present, social media looms as the marketing activity every entrepreneurial business knows they need to engage in, but few are able to assess and measure with skill. Methods of measurement are steadily improving, but as you prepare your company's programs and budgets for 2016, these new data points can provide you with help.
