Month: April 2011

blogging

Blogging Advice for Writers

Another piece of advice I learned from this “Social Media Scientist” is that you should blog on specific days of the week according to what you hope to accomplish with your blog. For instance, if you are trying to generate comments, blogging on the weekends is shown to be statistically better since people have more time to comment, and there is less competition for their time.

On the other hand, if you are trying to generate click-thrus, blogging during the weekdays is better because people are more pressed for time, given their own responsibilities, and are therefore more likely to click-thru on a link you have in your post than comment on your blog.

Well, that’s a no-brainer for this blog, since I’ve already discussed the logistic reasons why I don’t have “commenting” enabled.  But for your own blog, the goal may be different…

blogging

Social Media Scientist

So rather than writing one long posting on the days on which I post, now I will — hopefully — post 2-3 somewhat shorter postings all on the same subject.   I say “hopefully” because there’s a chance this concept is more than I can chew; I already lack the time to devote to this blog the amount of time I do already.

According to Dan Zarrella, the “social media scientist” who was recommending this, the reason this is more successful is that the majority of blogs are only posted to once a day — if that.  Statistically few blogs are posted to more than once a day, and any time you do something “different” than the majority, you give yourself a competitive advantage.

He was probably summarizing a more complicated idea, so I will attempt to enhance that idea a  little bit with an example as it pertains specifically to this blog.  Every time this blog is updated, my account on HootSuite is programmed to automatically update our Outskirts Press Twitter feed with the subject of the post, a link to the post, and relevant hash tags.

Therefore, by only posting once a day, our company’s Twitter account is only updated with my posting once, unless I manually retweet it — which I admit I should do, but simply lack the time. More on that later.

But, by breaking a larger posting into smaller posts throughout the day, each posting receives its own Twitter tweet, thereby multiplying the potential exposure for the blog by three.

That’s just once example of the benefit. I’ll discuss more soon…

blogging

Social Media Energy

I learned in the recent webinar I attended that the “energy” of social media is dependent upon the time of day, and the day of the week.  One graphic in particular that was shared during the webinar demonstrated that blogs that are updated more frequently than once a day are many times more likely to be read, shared, and subscribed to. 

I’ve already discussed the fact that I “squeeze” this blogging effort into an already-overloaded schedule, so while I was listening to this “social scientist” tell me I had to blog MORE each day, my immediate reaction was, “Yeah, right!”  But then it occurred to me that I could post approximately the same amount of content, but I could also accommodate this “multiple-postings-per-day-directive” by  “splitting it up” through-out the day.

So… that’s what I’m going to try to do, at least for a while, and we’ll see how it works.

blogging

Social Media Marketing

Starting in April I will attempt to follow some “social media scientist” advice I received from a webinar I attended recently.  The webinar was held by Dan Zarrella in which he discussed the science of timing as it relates to social media marketing, blogging, and emailing.   Over the next few posts I’ll share the advice and employ it with this blog.

The first change starting in April is the timing of the posts.  Up until now, I was scheduling these posts to go live in the afternoons. The main reason for this was to keep from “bumping” into the release times for the Outskirts Press blog postings, which usually go live in the mornings.    Why did I care?  Because our Twitter account tweets automatically when either blog is updated, and we attempt to spread those tweets throughout the day — as best as we can, at any rate. I’ve discussed the logistic difficulty of that in the past.

But many of those concepts have changed now, and I’ll discuss that next time…