Schedule your content for maximum impact

There seems to be a divided camp at the moment with a healthy dose of backlash as to whether all this focus on social media has been at the expense of more traditional websites. But social really isn’t another channel, it’s a behaviour that should span your activities rather than define and confine them, and something that can enhance your other online activity rather than replace it.

I watched a fascinating presentation given by @steverubel at a recent TNW conference, about attention being our next big fight.

With 140M tweets sent each day and 29M active Facebook users in the UK alone, the amount of noise out there means that you need to be especially mindful not only of your message but also the best time of day to send that message. The content shelf-life for social networking sites is so much shorter than for websites, and @steverubel highlighted some of the key facts.

Twitter content decay: 71% of tweets get no response, and of the 23% that do receive a reply, 85% of those get only a single reply. Only 6% of messages are retweeted, and of these, 92% of retweets are in the first hour.

Facebook content decay: The greatest interaction with content is within the first 15 minutes of posting, and interaction is highest at the end of the hour, i.e. when people are between meetings.

While the compressed content shelf-life for sites such as Twitter and Facebook is well under the hour, content on your website will have a longer shelf-life and will have a greater permanence and visibility. By working the different sites together, not by automation but by really considering which aspect of your message will be most appropriate for a particular audience, you will be able to maximise the impact your content can have across your whole online estate. By knowing your audience and their most active times, you can tailor a message that can be repeated or rephrased several times in order to have more chance of reaching a higher proportion of that audience.

Fold your social media tactics into your bigger business and online strategy, using effective measuring and scheduling tools, think carefully about what each channel needs to do for you and when it can do this most effectively. Clever use of content calendars, content scheduling and intelligent listening to the current atmosphere of each arena before posting will allow you to make the most of the voice you have online and allow you to grab your own share of attention.