I recently attended two presentations that discussed this issue of social media timing—one from HubSpot and one from our own Tendo social media expert Charlotte Ziems. Here are some highlights about timing for four key social platforms—Facebook, Twitter, email, and blogs:

Facebook
• Content posted before noon gets 65 percent more engagement than contented posted later in the day
• Friday posts generate the most engagement, followed by Monday and Tuesday
• Saturday and Sunday posts generate the least engagement but the highest number of shares

Twitter
• Twitter updates are retweeted more often when posted later in the day, as well as late in the week
• Click-through rates (CTRs) are highest mid-morning and early evening
• Mondays and Tuesdays yield the lowest CTRs

Blogs
• Twice as many blogs are read in the morning than at night
• Viewing is highest on Mondays and lowest on Saturdays
• Commenting is highest in the morning and on Saturdays, and lowest on Wednesdays

Email
• More email is opened on Saturdays and Sundays (early in the morning) than during the week
• Sending emails more frequently improves click-through rates and doesn’t result in higher unsubscribe rates

The takeaway from this research confirms something we’ve all heard before: the more frequent your activity, the better the response—and that can be further improved by timing your updates and posts accordingly. Try experimenting with the timing of your social media activity; for example, consider sending an email early in the morning and on a weekend and see what the metrics reveal.

Have you noticed certain days and times work better for your social media activity on some platforms? We’d love to hear about it!

This week I sat in on a webinar that outlined the latest eye-tracking data for the Web. I was interested in these five findings:

1. The F Pattern. Studies show that we read horizontally first, then track down the page, forming an “F” pattern. Also, time records of online viewing show that most people *scan* web pages—they don’t read them.
2. The Golden Triangle. When looking at search results, readers spend a lot of time in the top left corner of the screen. A Yahoo study found that putting thumbnail photos or videos next to search results improved click-through rates, and Google found that thumbnail images in search results help users more quickly decide whether the result will be useful. A picture really does say a thousand words…
3. Banner Blindness. Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy founded by Jakob Nielsen, the guru of Web page usability) found through heat maps that users ignore Web ads. Plain text on a Web page gets read in the golden triangle and face photos draw eyeballs, but ads are completely ignored.
4. Talking Heads Bore. Studies show that online video of a talking person loses the user’s attention—users start looking at things in the background of the person in the video, or anywhere else except the person talking. The lesson? If you’re going to shoot video of a person talking, keep it really short (less than one minute) or use a photo instead. Sometimes video isn’t the right medium for your content. The most successful use of video on the Web, according to eye-tracking studies, is when you need to explain a concept or demonstrate some type of process or product.
5. Email Introductions Ignored. In e-newsletters, the studies found that most users ignore the introductory text. Sixty percent of users look at just the first two words and then skip down the page.

If you’re interested in reading more, check out these sites:

• http://usability.gov/pdfs/guidelines_book.pdf
• http://useit.com/eyetracking
• http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/methodology

For email to remain a relevant marketing tool, it needs to become “social” as well. Whereas email was merely a means to delivering a message, email is now a way to interact with and engage your customers. For example, an email from Starbucks promoting its new VIA Ready Brew invites customers to tell the company what they think of the new product—in writing, with a photo, or on video.

In 2008, 40 percent of email participants used social sites to collect product-related information and recommendations. There’s a natural intersection occurring between email and social media. If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, etc., then you should be promoting those in your emails. Interestingly, only about half of online retailers are including links to their social media presences in their email campaigns.

So, it’s no longer enough to simply include a “forward this message” link in your email messages. You need to make them shareable. If you consider that the average social networker has between 150 and 200 friends, then combining email and social sharing means your message is reaching a much wider audience and resulting in increased click-throughs.

I was going to unsubscribe, but they offered this handy option to “receive fewer emails” instead. Brilliant, I thought. I do still want to know about sales, but once a week or so would be plenty (I don’t even shop at J.Crew once a month). So I adjusted my newsletter subscription, or so I thought, and went on my way.

Fast-forward a few months and dozens more absent-minded email deletions. Today is Wednesday and I just received my third email from J.Crew this week. Monday was about new arrivals, yesterday was another “free shipping for purchases of $195 or more” (they send these every week), and today it was a message about their fall sale (false advertising, in my view—the sale applies only if you open a J.Crew credit card). So that means that someone on the J.Crew marketing team considers three emails in three days “fewer emails.” Seriously?

This afternoon I clicked on the unsubscribe link again and took myself off the list entirely. I was prepared to vent about the reason, if they asked me, but they didn’t. They only gave me the following generic line: “You have been unsubscribed from all the J.Crew emails.”

Not asking me the reason was just another email marketing mistake from this company. —Julie Jares, managing editor