The Science of Timing Webinar Recap

I think that attending conferences, reading industry related blogs (and magazines), and sitting in on webinars is a great way to stay on your A-Game when it comes to understanding marketing and technology. That said, Hubspot happens to be one of my favorite companies to sit in on a webinar with and today’s host was the “Social Media Scientist”, Dan Zarrella.

The topic was: The Science of Timing. Basically, we looked at statistics and an analysis of when it’s best to share your content through social media, email and blogs. Here are my notes from the webinar. Hubspot will be posting slides and video of their webinar (today or tomorrow) but feel free to use mine as the cliff-notes version in the meantime. But also, I’d love to start a discussion on how you all are using social media, email marketing and blogs to share create and share your content. What challenges are you facing? What successes are you having? As always, the comments are yours… 🙂

Social Media:

Here are some stats for you to consider:

• Late in the day & week is the most retweetable times.
• Saturday and Sunday are the highest days in terms of click-thru rate so don’t be afraid to post/share on weekends.
• Click-thru rates stay consistent throughout the course of the day so don’t be afraid to share your content later in the evening.
• Weekends are the best days for Facebook Sharing.

My question(s) to you: Do you share the same content at different times throughout the day? Do you use services like Hootsuite to schedule Tweets? Do you auto-post content to Facebook using services like NetworkedBlogs? What has worked for you and what hasn’t?

Emails:

Email tends to get far more attention on weekends and also, tends to get the best open rates very early in the morning (between 5 – 7:00am). I use Aweber to send out my newsletter and often schedule it to go out around 7:00am PST | 10:00am EST (with a fairly high open rate). A couple of things you should note when building your own email campaign:

• Your un-subscribe rate is going to be highest when people first sign up for your email list. (Take for example someone who might have signed up just to download a copy of your ebook).
• The newer people (most recently added to your list) are the ones most likely to click on your stuff. So if you have something to sell, share it early and share it often (take this into consideration when building your drip campaign).

My question(s) to you: Do you currently manage a newsletter and drip campaign? How often do you send out emails? Do you track your Open and Click-thru rates? How do you determine the success of your email marketing campaign?

Blog:

First and foremost, know your audience. How do they like to consumer and share content? What kind of content resonates with them? You should be tracking this, assessing and adjusting accordingly. Personally, I use two things to do this: Visistat & PostRank Analytics. Now, here are some things Dan Zarrella recommends you take note of:

• Statistically, page views tend to take a slight dip on weekends.
• Page views are highest on Mondays.
• Posts published around 10 – 11:00AM tend to get the most views.

If you’re blogging for comments, blog on the weekends (comments tend to spike on Saturday and Sunday). Also, posts published earlier in the morning tend to get more comments (8 – 9:00AM). If you’re looking for links, posts published at 6 – 7AM tend to get the most in-bound links by the linkerati as they’re looking to source their own writing. Lastly, the more frequently you publish, the most benefit you get (more traffic, comments, etc.).

My question(s) to you: How often do you publish new blog content (once per week, twice per week, daily)? How do you share that content? How do you track your success? What’s your BIGGEST blogging challenge?