When is the best time to post on Facebook?

Understanding when the best time to post can have a huge impact on your engagement rate and consequently increase the reach of your content. A recent study by social campaign management company OfferPop looked at approximately 500,000 Facebook posts by major brands using their platform, examining the day of the week and time of the post to look for how engagement levels were affected.

They found that engagement level – calculated by the number of fans who liked, shared or commented on a post – on a Friday was 64% higher than posts added on a Monday. Continue reading

Facebook launches search Engine with “Graph Search”

Yesterday it was announced the Facebook are launching their own search engine known as “graph search” which is designed around the concept of discovery and making it easier for Facebook users to find information. This is designed to allow users to make “natural” searches of content shared by their friends for example “photos of Tom in 2000” or friends who live in Brighton. At the moment Search Graph isn’t going to be available on mobile but once it does there’s going to be one of the most powerful search moderators in history available ‘near me’.

Watch Facebook’s introduction video for an overview – It’s all a bit euphoric for my liking but you get the idea of their bigger vision.

“One way of thinking about Graph Search is less like a search engine but more like a super-powerful filter of the newsfeed of the past.”

Facebook Search Engine

Continue reading

Twitter launches Archive function

Today Twitter announced a fantastic new service that allows you to access all your old Tweets.

Your Twitter archive will be downloadable and allows you to view your Tweets by month, or search your archive to find Tweets with certain words, phrases, hashtags or @usernames. You can even engage with your old Tweets just as you would with current ones.

To get your archive, go to the Settings area and look for the new “Your Twitter archive” feature. You can then request to access your archive – due to high demand at the moment there is a bit of a back log so you might receive an error message first time around. As I said, this hasn’t rolled out completely yet and I haven’t been able to have a play but It’s promised to go global over “the coming weeks and months.” Watch this space!

Using Social Media for B2B

I just came across this interesting infographic from based on the results of a survey of more than 500 B2B marketers conducted by Eloqua. The results highlighted that 64% of UK businesses use social media as a marketing tool, with the most popular reasons being for brand awareness (83%), encouraging social sharing (56%) and gaining trust and followers (55%). Less than a third (32%) said they use social for lead generation and just 16% use social to assess market perception of their brand.

In my experience using social media for B2B can be more of a challenge and requires an effective content strategy to ensure you are able to establish thought leadership or add value to what you are saying and gain the attention of your audience.

Eloqua have created a rather sexy micro site to show the results but the main one have been summarise in the infographic below. I thought it was interesting that 43% of companies still have no strategy in place for their social media activity. Come on now!

Continue reading

Social Round Up – Facebook Special

So I’ve been meaning to write a weekly post on all the useful things I’ve learnt each week as I’m constantly reading blog posts and news articles on all things social and I’ve finally got round to it!

This time it seems to be pretty Facebook focused as Facebook HQ appear to be having something of a shake up and there a few important updates to be aware of. I also came across the following Social Media round up summarising global trends in social usage.

Social Media Round Up 2012

This week Insights consulting released their ‘Social media round the world’ report which highlights some great insights into how we are using social media on a global scale and what the key trends are.

To summarise This year’s main conclusions are:

  • The social media landscape has stabilised: the large sites are getting larger and the small ones are getting smaller. Consumers are only prepared to create new accounts for sites which offer unique functions (such as Pinterest and Instagram).
  • The mobile (r)evolution increases the adoption and usage intensity of social media.
  • Consumers just love to link with (a limited number of) brands.
  • 80-90% of consumers want to be involved in co-creation, open innovation and structural collaboration with brands they love. Brands are not yet sufficiently open to this.
  • Consumers are major fans of market research communities where they can collaborate with companies. After Facebook a research community is the second most preferred platform. Reason is that consumers want their feedback to have an impact; and they are convinced that research communities can have such an effect.
  • Continue reading