To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose, under heaven.
Are your marketing programs purposeful, or are you taking the spray-and-pray approach to attracting new customers? If you’re not getting the results you want from email, Internet and social media marketing, consider that the problem might not be what you’re doing, but when you’re doing it.
The Science of Timing
Dan Zarrella, hailed in the marketing world as a social media scientist, recently hosted a webinar on The Science of Timing. He presented research on consumer behavior when interacting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and email.
According to Zarrella’s research, late in the day and late in the week are the optimal times for retweets. In fact, retweets happen most frequently between 1:00pm and 6:00pm Eastern. If you’re posting first thing in the morning on a Monday, no matter how wonderful they are your tweets are likely going unnoticed.
If you want more people in your target market to see and interact with your tweets, try posting after 1:00pm, Wednesday – Sunday. And, says Zarrella, don’t crowd your content. If you’re tweeting links to good content, send only 1 or 2 per hour to achieve the best click-thru rate.
BONUS: HubSpot’s TweetWhen tool will examine your tweets and retweets to help you determine your own most retweetable times. It’s free, but if you don’t have many retweets, the tool won’t work.
Facebook is even more sensitive to over-sharing than Twitter, so don’t bombard your fans and clog up their news feeds with your content (or spammy promotions). Pages that average slightly less than one post per day have the most Likes.
If your goal is to get Facebook users that Like your Page to share your content with their friends, consider posting the most shareable content on Saturday and Sunday between 11:00am and 12:00pm, as that’s the time users are most likely to share information on Facebook.
Blogs
Almost 80% of blog readers report reading posts in the morning hours. Blog posts published on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday seem to get the most views, but most comments are posted on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. If it’s links and inbound traffic you want, publish your posts early in the morning. If it’s comments and interaction you want, post on the weekends.
The frequency of your blog posts also affects inbound links and traffic to your blog. Those blogs that post once per day or less get significantly less traffic than those blogs that post more than once per day.
What’s the first thing you do when you get to the office each morning? Like most of us, you check your email, right? So why are you sending email campaigns to your customers or prospective customers in the afternoon, or worse, at night?
More than 95% of email messages are read in the early morning hours, says Zarrella. But, don’t limit yourself to sending messages only during the week. Email campaigns sent on weekends achieved an average 35% open rate and an 8% click-thru rate in Zarrella’s research.
Be sure to welcome and engage your subscribers immediately after they sign up. Subscribers less than 30 days old have nearly double the click-thru rate as those subscribers that have been receiving your messages for 60 days or more.
Time is Money
You’re already investing time, effort and dollars into your marketing programs, so time your activities purposefully. Experiment with tweeting, posting to Facebook, publishing blogs and delivering emails at the times Zarrella suggested. Tweak it until you find the right timing to generate the response (and the sales!) you’re striving for.
For more information, or to watch a recording of the webinar, visit HubSpot.com
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About the Author:
Paula served previously as a Marketing Manager at ZCorum.