Best Days To Tweet

Sat & Sun see a 17% Increase in engagement rate compared to weekdays
Yet only 19% of all brand tweets are published on Sat & Sun
Weds & Thurs have the lowest % of engagement

Best Time of Day to Tweet

Tweets published between 8am and 7pm see a 30 percent increase in engagement rates over twitter content published outside of that timeframd, this includes Sat & Sun

64% of brands take advantage of this trend

Length of Tweet

Tweets less than 100 Characters = have a 17% higher level of Engagement than longer tweets do

Twitter Hashtags

Tweets that use Hashtags see two times more engagement than tweets without hashtags

Most brands do not utilize or properly utilize hashtags, infact only 24% of tweets from brands studied used hashtags

There is a 21% increase in engagement when using 1 or 2 hashtags and a 17% decrease in engagement when more than 2 hashtags are used

Retweets

Retweet Rate increased 12 time when a tweet asks for people to “Retweet” or “RT”

Only 1% of brands studied ask their followers to Retweet, 99% did not

- There’s a big differece in results depending on how you ask

Asking people to “RT” increases the retweet rate 10 times

Asking people to “Retweet” using the actual word “Retweet” increases retweet rates 23 times!

Study conducted by Salesforce

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Being that we are a unique firm specializing in Celebs, Athletes, Music Industry & mid size companies to Fortune 500 size companies and focus on aggressive and advanced campaigns alot of the time we find our selves having to recommend other smaller companies to other SEO & Social media firms.  I usually personally spend quite a bit of time trying to educate these companies on what to look for and how to sniff through the B.S that most firms & their sales people spew. It blows my mind as to not only how many so called over night SEO & Social Media experts pop up over night, but how virtually NONE of them even practice what they preach.

Listen, to me it’s common sense.  If you’re a mechanic and you say you’re the best at tuning cars, but when I see you pull out of your shop your car you drive is smoking & backfiring then I’m guessing you’re really not the best mechanic are ya?  Same applies to Social Media & Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is going to be alot tougher for that average person or company to do their due diligence and will require an entire in-depth post on it’s own, which I will try to get to at some point.

Social Media to me is pretty simple to analyze and atleast do a basic qualification to determine who is the best Social media agency or firm for your company.

Using Twitter as an example platform here are some things to look at

1. Does the social media company have a custom design for their page i.e a background and unique icon/photo
2. How many Followers do they have? (more on this below see Follower Ratios)
3. How many people are they following? (more on this below see Follower Ratios)
4. What kind of things do they Tweet? What is the content of their discussions
5. When was the last time they Tweeted
6. How often do they Tweet?
7. Do they engage with people?

1. It’s important to BRAND your page, it’s what represents your culture.  If a social media company doesn’t have their own page branded with a custom design and a smart easy to use user photo they probably don’t really get it.

2 & 3 How many followers.  Here is where it gets interesting and many people don’t get it. So you may be scoping out a few social media companies and seeing different levels of followers and audiences they have built.  One may have 3422 followers. one may have 722, one may have 97,232, and one may have 382,622 followers.  But here are a couple of things you need to look at.

- Are their followers real people? Believe it or not people think they can go out and buy followers and that for some reason it will benefit them in social media.  FALSE. 99.9% of the time you buy followers they are absolutely fake Bot accounts.  These are account with real looking picture, real looking bios, they may or may not be following a bunch of people, and there are a handful of tweets that usually make no sense.  To the average Joe it may be difficult to pick these out but after doing it for awhile you get good at picking them out.  These types of followers are an ABSOLUTE waste of money, time and effort.  They do nothing to bolster your social media reach or engagement which is the purpose behind having a social media account.  Social media companies that do this are a sham, and more than likely they will flood your account with the same garbage and claim victory and greatness.  What good is 100k fake followers if they are not real people who can see, read your messages, reply, ask you questions or retweet your tweets?  Worthless. Steer clear of any company doing this.

- FOLLOW RATIO  This is something really overlooked and not often understood.  So say we are looking at Social media firm X and wow they have 382,622 followers and they look like they are mostly or all real people! WOW these guys or girls  know what they are doing right? Well how many people are they following? Oh.. They are following 412,264 people. So what exactly does that mean?  It means they have a terrible follow ratio.  What it means is all they did was go out and follow as many accounts and random people as they could possibly find in hopes of getting followed back. See twitter is a funny thing, I’d somewhere between 40%-70% of the time when you follow someone they follow you back. Not because they are interested in who you are, what you do for a living, or the things you have to say.  They follow back because for some reason people believe or have been led to believe it’s proper social media ettiquete to “FOLLOW BACK” and if they don’t they will be unfollowed by you.  This is partially true many people troll Twitter following people, then tweeting them “hey I followed you, follow me back” so they follow them back in hopes of keeping that follow.  To me this is another sham. What you want is real people who choose to follow you because they are interested in what you have to say, who you are, or what you do etc.  A social media company or so called social media expert that goes out and follows 400k people so that they get alot of followers doesn’t get it.  These are followers who could care less about your message or engaging with you, they simply did the follow, follow back crap. I follow only people who i find inspirational, interesting, who are in my industry, I like, am friends with, or I think I can learn something from.  Stay away from companies & social media gurus who have bad follow ratios.  If they are following 20k people and have 100k followers fine.. not terrible.. but I look at it like this If someone has 100k followers and are following 80k people, they really only have about 20k people who choose to follow them on their own not because of a follow back. Of course there are exceptions to this, but it’s a good general way of looking at it. One last note on this subject there is also a method that shady people use called follow, unfollow.  They follow a bunch of people, wait for them to follow them back then they unfollow them so their ratio looks good.  Another shady low level tactic. – end rant

4. Look at what they are tweeting about!  If all they tweet is I just went to the bathroom, I just ate a sammie, or hey @soandso follow me back; then they really don’t understand quality content & engagement.  You want to look for people who are thought leaders in their industries, people who provoke though, inspire & motivate, ask questions, answer questions or simply discuss things related to their industry and what they do.  Makes sense right?

5. Pretty simple if it’s been 3 days or 3 weeks or 3 months since they last tweeted or made a status update depending on their fav social media platform … Then they aren’t all that social, or plugged in.  You want a social media firm or social media consultant that gets it and is plugged in.  Always engaging, always involved in social media.  Look for atleast some participation on a daily basis.

6. The more they tweet, engage & discuss the more social they are and the more they get it.  Now you don’t want some maniac that tweets 287 times a day when they really should probably be working on their clients social media strategies, but you definitely want a firm or someone who is ACTIVE!

7. ENGAGE! This goes along with many of the other stances and comments I’ve made.  But look at if they are just talking to themselves and tweeting meaningless stuff just to tweet and look like they are active, or if they are actually engaging with people, having conversations, being a resource, provoking discussions or tweets headed their way etc

Bottom line is if a So called Social media expert or company doesn’t practice what they preach what makes you think they know how to or will do it for you at a high level, and ethically? Do you due diligence

How often have you plugged in a phone number that was on your caller ID to see who it is, or looked up a phone number in your phone because you didn’t remember who it was and you got pages like this in Google?

It’s called phone number spam or phone number stuffing.  Believe it or not companies did SEO for phone numbers, millions of phone numbers.  Basically a ploy just to gain traffic or to mislead people. Can’t imagine any reputable seo firm being willing to work on something like this, but apparently some did. These pages were frustrating and absolutely worthless.  Well Google after years of it being a problem has finally addressed it in their most recent update.

After doing a few quick tests , while the sites coming up related to phone numbers are still pretty junky, there are now massively phone number stuffed pages coming up in the results any more. Def a step in the right direction! Kudos Google

In this update Google targets

• Keyword Stuffing
• Link Schemes
• Cloaking
• Duplicate Content

Most interesting to me is Google gives a specific example of Links inserted within the body of content not making grammatical or topic sense to the theme or topic. Which means they are TRULY analyzing and making an effort to understand the theme of a paragraph and whether the link to a site within that text has any sort of content match itself.

Here is their example of that:

Google goes on to say that these changes are geared towards upholding the quality guidelines and to promote quality content. Both of which have always been the case. I think they have gotten ebhind the ball here for awhile on webspam, and are chasing their tales now. Hopefully they will continue to be proactive and in addition confront and admit to Negative SEO being a reality due to their webspam signals being easily abused for evil as well.

The bottom line is the same as it’s always been and that is: CONTENT IS KING! High quality original content that entices engagement, shares and is relevant to your topic will help more than anything.  Google is sending a clear message, a long overdue one and I hope they continue.

Google states that the initial update will effect about 3.1% of queries in English

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You’ve heard about the all new Facebook look & layout called the Timeline but how do you see it, and test it out?

Here’s the fastest & easiest way since it hit beta testing!

Go to https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline

And at the bottom right of the page you will see a button that says Get Timeline.  that’s all there is to it!

Warning, it’s going to take ALOT of getting used to, and alot of playing around with it.  It’s going to seem overwhelming and complicated at first, but I feel eventually it will really be worth it.  Heck you get a cool large banner sized pic up at the top now

Basically what the study shows is what I suspected all along.  G+ users consist of early adopters, nerds & tech geeks like myself.  I also suspected it to be mainly made up of people either trying to land grab, be known as an early adopter or people who needed to be familiar with it for business i.e internet marketing or journalism.

Yes there seems to have been an influx of students in August but I assume it was out of curiosity as they don’t appear to be using it too much.  I’m trying to like G+ and use it myself but it’s FAR less social then say Facebook, and my stream is mainly filled with people sharing articles and news, that’s really about it.

Interesting observations in this study

• 83% of Google Plus users were classified as inactive
• Female users rose from 28% to 30%

Top 5 Companies with the most G+ users

1. Self Employed
2. Google
3. IBM
4. Infosys
5. Accenture

Source: Google+ User Statistics Part II – BimeAnalytics.com

Thought this was very interesting.

Here is the page it directed me to

https://support.twitter.com/articles/20156423

Essentially now when you click in your text box to tweet you will see the Camera Icon & Location Icon appear

Looks like they are limiting photos to 3MB or smaller.  I wonder what this will do to some of the dedicated twitter photo sharing services?

According to their support page

“Why can’t I upload images yet?

We’re rolling out this feature on Twitter.com over the course of a few weeks. If you don’t see the camera icon under your Tweet box, bear with us! You’ll get access to image uploads very soon.”