This is a question I ask myself all of the time and make a point to analyze with any data I can get my hands on. The idea is simple: if you know when your audience’s participation is at its highest, you’ll know when the best time to seed your social content is. In my opinion it is very important that you collect your own data and not go with any published statistics. Each industry has their own unique audience type, and each audience type functions in a different way. Because of that, you want to experiment and collect your own data to ensure its accuracy.
In part one of this series we’ll take a look at what kind of data we need to collect for two of the more popular social media sites: Facebook and Twitter.
When it comes to Facebook, there are a handful of engagement metrics we want to focus on:
- What time of day and day of the week do our posts receive the most “likes”?
- What types of posts and topics receive the most comments?
- What types of links get the largest amount of click throughs?
- Which links generate the largest amount of conversions on your site?
- Which days of the week are your Fan Page page views at their highest?
- What days do you add the most fans?
This is going to require a lot of testing and the right tools. Here’s a run down of tools that can help you capture this data:
- Google URL Builder
- Facebook Insights
- Raven Tools
- Buddy Media
- Webtrends
- Coremetrics
- Google Analytics (hack)
Twitter also has its own unique set of engagement metrics you’ll want to look at:
- Which tweets received the most replies/mentions?
- Which tweets received the most retweets?
- What time of day and day of the week were retweets, replies and mentions at their highest?
- Which Twitter followers received the most RT’s of your content? In other words, who was a top influencer?
- What days are your top targeted keywords referenced the most?
- Which days do you receive the most new followers?
- Which shared links receive the most click throughs?
- Which links generate the largest amount of conversions on your site?
List of tools to help you collect this data:
- Google URL Builder
- URL shorteners like bit.ly or goo.gl
- Raven Tools
- Trendistic
- TweetStats
- TweetVolume
- HootSuite
- TweetReach
- Tweetmetrics
- TwitterCounter
- Twitteranalyzer
Once compiled, you’ll get a good idea of what kind of reach your tweets and posts will have each day. That way you can plan when to release product announcements, link bait or anything else you want to maximize viral attention.
