You’ve seen the reports. You’ve seen the blog posts about best practices and timing your tweets. You’ve tried it.
And while you may have seen some incremental lift in performance, the results were nowhere near what you could have achieved.
Our research proves it.
We’ve heard this story repeated a thousand times as marketers attempt to optimize their social media activity for maximum ROI.
The truth is, social media best practices are about as useful as a pocket knife when you’re trying to cut down a tree. Sure, it helps you make a bit of progress, but you really need something specifically designed for your specific situation, ie, your audience/community.
The reality is that everyone’s social audience is unique and the environment on a social network is changing constantly. What works today, may not work tomorrow. And what works in general, certainly doesn’t mean it’s best for you.
At Socialyzer, we do an in depth analysis on the audience of each user. We analyze their profile, their tweets, their followers’ profiles and their followers’ tweets and activity.
We recently did this analysis for Distribion(@DistribionDM), a distributed marketing company and Rhymesayers.com (@rhymesayers), an independent hip-hop label.
The “best practices” would have them tweeting at 12pm and 6PM Eastern time to maximize clicks.
Our personalized analysis showed that, in fact, @DistribionDM should tweet at 10am Eastern time for maximum clicks and @rhymesayers 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.
Now that Twitter has become accepted as a powerful tool for reaching customers and prospects, marketers must move past tribal knowledge and start rigorously using data and analysis to drive engagement results. If you are using best practices you are doing a disservice to both your followers and your organization.
Stay tuned for our follow up post on what happens when you further optimize for a specific segment of your social audience that you want to reach, the results are even more surprising!
Want to have this type of complex analysis happen *every* time you want to share content to a social network… and automatically schedule it for the perfect time for maximum impact? Try Socialyzer for free today!
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