With Twitter and Facebook, Timing is Everything

The half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes. The half-life of a tweet is just 24.

This means that after less than half an hour, your tweet has already been seen and re-tweeted by half the people who will ever see or re-tweet it.

By the five-hour mark, a Facebook post will be 75 percent of the way to expired. A tweet passes that threshold in less than three hours.

This data comes from Benjamin Rey who drills down into the data and explains the methodology over at Wiselytics.

If you’re a social media marketer, then, timing is critical. The last thing you want to do is publish anything on your social media channels at midnight.

If you’re posting content on your own web site, it doesn’t really matter when it goes live unless you publish new content constantly. If you’re only publishing one to three times a week, you can drop a fresh blog post or article onto your page in the dead of night in the middle of a weekend. It’s fine.

Your tweets, though, and your Facebook posts need to debut at just the right time.

If you’re marketing locally or regionally, the best time is shortly after 9:00 am. The vast majority of your customers will be awake. Your post will be live and near enough the top of their social media feeds that it will be waiting for them and still visible whenever they decide to take a break from work and check out the Internet.

If you’re marketing nationwide, though, you might want to hold off on pressing the publish button until a bit later. You could wait until noon eastern time to ensure that customers on the west coast will be awake and caffeinated, but some of your customers on the east coast will head home and unwind offline before they see what you’ve published.

Best to aim for 10:30 am eastern. Your audience reach will be a little more balanced. You’ll only miss a small number of people on each coast—a few in the morning out west and a few in the evening back east.

If you post material to Facebook and Twitter all day, aiming for 10:30 am isn’t going to work. It’s never a good idea to dump a bunch of posts on your web site or social media channels all at once. So make a decision. If your customers will only see one posts all day, which would you like them to see? Post that one at 10:30 am eastern. Post half the others earlier if possible and the other half later.

Whatever you do, don’t tweet the same material more than once. Twitter expressly forbids posting “duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account.” If you do this, the service may flag your account as spam and will consider removing it.