Our blog posts are automatically shared on our networks. That means we're sharing original content at a maximum of one per weekday which fits within The Social Media Guide's frequency. This looks to be ideal for LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus, but completely ineffective on Twitter. Below are my summaries of what I've been researching, as well as links to the original articles. Buffer is a free tool that I deliberately left out of last week's guide to pushing content to social networks. So after using Buffer for a few months, I found the free plans limit of 10 scheduled tweets to be limiting. That's only half a week . I discovered that Hoot Suite allows for tweet scheduling and has no limit! Although I'm not using it for scheduling tweets, I recommend subscribing to Buffer's blog for informative, well written, and inspiring articles.
What
Small Business Marketing Tools has this excellent chart examining what type of content works best on different social networks.
The takeaway is Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are best for sharing news, content, and stories while LinkedIn is best for sharing industry news and discussions. It seems pretty straightforward, but knowing your audience is half the battle.
How Long
The ideal length for content depends on a wide variety of factors. The Ideal Length of Everything According to Science gets into the statistics of engagement. Their results:
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Tweet: 100 characters
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Facebook post: less than 40 characters
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Google+ headline: less than 60 characters
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Headlines: 6 words
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Blog posts: 1,600 words
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Width of a paragraph: 40-55 characters
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Email subject line: 28-39 characters
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Title tag: 55 characters
When
The Social Media Frequency Guide really gets into the details of posting across social network platforms. The main takeaway is:
Post to Twitter at least 5 times a day. If you can swing up to 20 posts, you might be better off.
Post to Facebook/Google+ 5 to 10 times per week.
Post to LinkedIn once per weekday.
I highly recommend clicking through and reading the entire article as it's insightful and well researched. In addition to frequency, time of day can make a huge difference. For example, this article discusses 4 ways to find the best time to tweet.
Another excellent read on this topic is The Case for Reposting Content with three great results.
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More traffic
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Hit multiple time zones
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Reach your new followers
It also goes over tips on how to implement and test the success with your own content.
It looks like I'll be spending significant time with Buffer and scheduling posts over the next few weeks. I'll report back if I discover any more great insights!
Next week we'll look at optimizing your content for SEO by using Google Trends.
This post was updated to include information about Hoot Suite January 22, 2015.
This post edited by the Revise It! Team.
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