Did you know how scary the half-life of your online comms is?

5 practical techniques to help get your message through...

Value: [rating=4]

Recommended link: Research from Bit.ly Blog

Our commentary on online attention spans

I remember reading a while ago in Tim O’Reilly’s book on Twitter marketing that most people most responses or tweets happen within 5 minutes of the original tweet - scary! Much worse than Email marketing where at least you have responses for hours rather than minutes.

I’m not sure companies using social networks realise this unless they’ve looked at specific social media marketing reporting tools like Bit.ly which give hourly reports. The reason is obvious, most people have so many sources they follow in their stream and if they don’t see the message while browsing their stream then it’s gone. Life is too short to browse your whole stream

To show how big this challenge is URL shortening service Bit.ly published some interesting research across different media. It's useful too, since it shows the need for repetition of key messages through social media using the type of techniques at the end of the post.

It’s based on the half-life of 1,000 popular links shared in Bitly. The results for the half-life which, which is the time it takes for the communication to get half its clicks are:

• Twitter = 2.8 hours
• Facebook = 3.2 hours
• Direct sources (Email or IM) it’s 3.4 hours

Take care with the last one, email marketing actually does better than this - I still think it’s half-life is more than 24 hours typically. I don’t know whether anyone has any data to support that?

Here’s an example from a single tweet which shows the typical pattern:

How does Email response over time vary?

It used to be that Email had a long response over several days with half the response within 24 hours or so. But I hadn't seen any recent data, so thanks to Mark Brownlow for flagging this more recent recent data on Email campaign response through time from Mailer Mailer. The answer on half-life for Email is 6 hours, that's 50% of opens within 6 hours. So its seems that email gives much more sustained reach than social which shows the value in my recommendation 5 below!

Marketing implications and actions of the short half-life

So what to do about this phenomenon to make communications more effective? Here are some ideas.

1. Repeat communications. Sure, you don’t want to repeat every message, but if you share content that resonates or is a key message it worth re-sharing, say AM and PM and on different days.
2. Put a different spin on your original message Of course, you can simply repeat, but express it differently may engage others who didn’t find the original interesting. Maybe ask a question encouraging a response.
3. Reshare other people’s messages It’s good to engage with others and not just broadcast, so maybe add the link in your reply to others.
4. Share content on different networks at different times If you use a service or apps to share your message across all networks simultaneously, there’s less chance of your message getting through than at different times when other people may see your message in their stream.
5. Use email marketing to share your good stuff Email marketing has a longer half-life and likely reaches a different audience, so make sure your email marketing is up-to-speed.

You can go too far and share too much, but I think others (us included) don't repeat social shares sufficiently. Do you have other ideas to counter this issue?