Social media posts expire very quickly. Consider Facebook, for instance.
Engagement = likes, comments, shares
Impressions = the number of times a post is displayed in the news feeds of your followers and/or their friends
Reach = the total number of users who are sent or shared an impression
This graph indicates the first 12 hours of your next Facebook post; and concludes you’ll achieve a 75% engagement rate after two hours.
Studied in the fall of 2013, Wisemetrics summarizes:
- 90% of your post’s engagement occurs within 12 hours
- 75% of its impressions occur within 150 minutes
- 75% of its reach occurs in 110 minutes
- 50% of its reach occurs in 30 minutes
Metrics are worse on Twitter — with a half-life four times shorter!
One takeaway is you must be memorable and analytical in every social media post. General Electric is a great case study and can be easily scaled. They know the best days and times to post to achieve emotional connection and maximum return.
Another takeaway is to stop using social media for sharing big thoughts — and to blog about it instead. The shelf life of your blog post is as long as people link to it, comment on it, and search engines give it high rank.
In support of decreased shelf lives of social media posts, Dave Winer posits blogging is great for enriching value: “[I]f you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog.”
If you don’t know if you should be blogging, or need help setting one up, let’s talk.
Absolute agree – a great blog post will go a long way and often I notice it can take several months until a blog post really picks up and gets traction.
Indeed. Sometimes a popular blog notices something I wrote days/weeks/months earlier and links to it, increasing the comments and shares (and visits namely) long after it was written.
Blogging takes more time, thought and energy, but well worth all three. Cheers! Kaarina
Though, I’ve noticed those posts that take less time to write receive greater impact. Whereas if I do a lot of research or rewriting for a post, it’s too much work for little return.
I would agree with that. The posts that simply flow are the ones I find best hit the mark. And sometimes, the ones you believe are your “best”, don’t generate the engagement you expected. I just follow my friend Jack’s advice: “Just write baby, just write.”
Hi Ari!
I think this is great stuff. But not the GE example. They had only 532 Likes for that post out of 1 million fans. But that is normal for all major brand pages. A post usually gets between 0.01% and 0.1% this one was 0.06%
I think the big key is unless you pay to promote a post Brand Pages are a horrible publishing platform.
But yes almost all social media content disappears never to be seen again ever really quickly. Which is why the focus should be on being social and talking with fans which you can do on Twitter much easier than on Facebook. That is the one way that people undervalue twitter and over value Facebook. I can call you out on Twitter and I did that to great success when I was a community manager for some clients. Facebook is like fishing. You have to hope someone comes by so you can talk with them.
My point with GE is unlike most big brands (and I don’t care if B2B or B2C), they always receive more engagement than their peers — because of the way they post such pictures.
The Twitter halflife is horrifying … and yet sometimes, it’s longer than you’d think. More than a month ago, I posted a link to a silly Prezi I bashed out one evening while taking a break from work. It was by far the least important thing I’d written that week and it had no social media plan. But it is -still- getting retweets.
I think when you hit on content that appeals to people, it can have a long tail – even on Twitter.