If you haven’t been reading the Buffer Blog, you need to start now. Without a doubt the most accessible, most data-driven social media resource online, Buffer is my favorite place to learn the latest tricks and information to make my (and KillerStartups’) social media presence, well, killer.
For those of you with limited time (i.e., all of you), here’s a recap of some of my favorite Buffer blog posts about how and when to post to all of your social media networks for max results. Bookmark this one; you’re going to want to keep referring back to it.
When to post:
Posting to social media is a very fine balancing act between “informative” and “annoying,” according to the social media experts at Buffer. They – like all of us – have to do more than a little bit of guessing and trying and adjusting in order to figure out the right amount of posting they should be doing.
Luckily for us, they’ve done a lot of guessing and have shared their results with us so that we don’t have to just stab wildly in the dark. Here’s a quick summary of how much Buffer shares on social media:
- Twitter – 14 times per day, from midnight to 10 pm CST. They don’t post more than once per hour and on weekends they post 7 times daily, from 3:00 am to 9:00 pm.
- Facebook – 2 times per day, seven days a week.
- LinkedIn – 1 time per day at 8:14 a.m. and no posts on weekends.
- Google+ – 2 times daily on weekdays, at 9:03 am and 7:04 pm.
While we don’t recommend that you follow Buffer’s schedule exactly, it does give you a general idea of what’s works on social media. Use it as a baseline to set up your own guess/try/adjust system and check out the full article on the Buffer blog for more info.
How to post:
When it comes to analytics, Buffer rocks. The latest from the social media management tool outlines what the ideal lengths are for posts across platforms. Here’s a summary of their findings:
- Twitter: 100 characters. This allows people to retweet and add their own commentary.
- Facebook: 40 characters. Although it’s not much, 40 character posts on Facebook receive 86% higher engagement than other post lengths.
- Google+ headline: less than 60 characters. This length keeps the entire title on one line.
- Blog headlines: 6 words. KISSmetrics found that we only absorb the first and last three words of a headline, so keep it short.
- Blog post length: 7 minutes, 1,600 words. This one comes from Medium and it’s important to note that, more than the other metrics, ideal post length can really vary from blog to blog.
Want to know more? Check out the full article on the Buffer blog.
How to make it go viral:
While there’s no one way to make content go viral, there are certain moves you can make that increase the chances of your post being very popular. One very important thing to take into consideration is the title of whatever you’re posting. What words are you choosing? How many? How are they ordered?
The viral content kings over at Buffer recently analyzed 3,106 headlines from 24 top content sites including BuzzFeed, ViralNova, UpWorthy, and Wimp. The data from those four came from a study by Ripenn but Buffer added 20 more tech, social media, and productivity sites to the list.
They found that the words “you” and “your,” as well as “this,” “what,” “which,” “when,” and “why” were among the most used in viral posts. Want to know more? Check out the full article here.
