Friday, September 28, 2012

Emoticons on a Sunday and other keys to effective wall posts

There were two interesting articles on Mashable today about a report from Buddy Media exploring how effective brands are at using social media (Facebook and Twitter). Overall the study found, "marketers are still posting too little on weekends and at night and when they do post, they’re way too verbose." I found some of these findings to be very helpful especially in contrast to my understanding of best practices in email marketing. Namely, when I was doing email marketing I had been taught that you will get better open rates if you send an email on Wednesday mornings but this study found that Wednesday is the worst day to post on social (interactions on Wednesday are 7.4% lower than average). Another surprise was the big boost they recorded with the use of emoticons including that posts containing emoticons receive 52% higher interaction rates and that :D is the most effective emoticon garnering a 2.4X higher response rate than other emoticons.

Most interesting to me are the differences between Twitter and Facebook illustrated in the graphic below. The study found that Tweets published during "busy hours" 8am-7pm had 30% higher engagement rates than Tweets published from 8pm-7am. While on Facebook posts during "non-busy hours" had a 17% higher engagement rate.



Visit two Mashable articles on the study http://mashable.com/2012/09/28/marketers-facebook-wrong/
and http://mashable.com/2012/06/26/marketers-failing-twitter-study/
The full text of the studies on effective wall posts and effective tweeting can be found at 
http://www.buddymedia.com/newsroom/2012/06/buddy-media-twitter-tweeting-best-practices/

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