Study: Retweets happen most often at 4 p.m., weekend mornings
If you want your tweets to get noticed, update your Twitter feed at 4 p.m. and on weekends, a new study revealed. Dan Zarrella, a social media researcher, unveiled his findings in a report he calls The Science of Timing (above). In his three-year study, he found retweet activity to be highest at 4 p.m., although anytime between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. will generate more retweets than during other time periods.
Weekend mornings are also prime times to tweet, because “users have more time and attention to devote to content on the weekend, even if the content isn’t fresh, and fewer distractions compete for attention,” Nieman Labs quotes Zarrella saying.
The researcher created a simple online tool called TweetWhen to display the most popular days and times for a feed’s most retweets per tweet. (We tested the tool – @futureofmedia gets the most retweets on Tuesdays at 5 p.m.).
Zarrella also advises retweeting the same tweet more than once, mentioning how your followers won’t likely see the same tweet twice, especially if they follow hundreds or thousands of feeds.
He touched on how to best implement Facebook in your social media strategy. His study found engagement with Facebook links during the weekday is quite minimal, likely due to many workplaces blocking Facebook during the week. Weekends are ideal time to post content on Facebook, since people often check their accounts on Saturdays and Sundays. Nieman Labs adds, “Postings on Facebook also tend to ‘stick around’ longer, re-emerging when people post a comment or like.”
How often should you tweet? It depends on your intention and your outlet. Zarrella says accounts that push out two or more links an hour show a “dramatically lower clickthrough rate than those who share no more than one.”
What other news sites can learn from MotherJones.com’s record-breaking traffic spike
If only Steve Katz had some magic elixir to offer other news outlets looking to boost their online traffic…well, he’d share it with this reporter. But the publisher of Mother Jones, a non-profit news outlet based in San Francisco, can’t pinpoint exactly why February 2011 traffic to MotherJones.com surged 420 percent from February 2010′s number.
“Our reporters kicked out stories people were interested in,” he says in an phone interview. “They hit the zeitgeist when it was hot.”
In February, the site raked in 3 million unique visitors. Pageviews increased by 275 percent – to more than 6.6 million - compared to a year ago. Mother Jones had never seen this kind of traffic before.
“But the real challenge is to keep the traffic up past February,” he says, “and we have our fingers crossed.” The company publishes a monthly magazine and also provides daily content on its website.
So what did Mother Jones do right? Known for their sharp political reporting, they expanded their Washington coverage and also covered the Wisconsin protests, with the latter articles attracting significant attention.
The news outlet also credits its “explainer” articles that offer comprehensive info on current affairs, such as the Libya uprising and the Wisconsin issue. They act almost as topics pages. Nieman Labs sees value in this content: “…it’s news material catered to readers’ immediate need for context and understanding when it comes to complex, and time-sensitive, situations. The pages’ currency, in other words, is currency itself.”
Katz says February’s traffic spike should also be credited to their embrace of social media. One of the first alt-news companies to go online in the late 1990s, Mother Jones now asks all its writers to use Twitter and Facebook to engage with their readers. The strategy seemed to have culminated with glowing stats last month: membership to its Twitter feed increased by 28 percent and Facebook “fans” increased by 20 percent. The overall result? Around 29 percent of MotherJones.com’s traffic came from social media sites, nearly three times the amount attracted in the same period in 2010.
“Twitter and Facebook communities turned out to be interested communities in their own right,” Katz notes.
Social media integration is all well and good, but if they don’t point to compelling articles, what’s the point? Luckily for Mother Jones, readers were driven to stories they cared about, as evidenced by the 630 comments in Kevin Drum’s article on “What Wisconsin is Really About.”
You might recall Mother Jones won the “Colbert bump” due to their income inequity charts being featured on the Comedy Central show The Colbert Report; but that occurred on Mar. 1, after the February traffic numbers were collected.
Katz says February wasn’t the only highlight of the traffic success story. In fact, 2010 was a record year for Mother Jones: monthly page views and unique visitors to MotherJones.com in 2010 increased by more than 50 percent over the previous year, a press release states.
“We still have so much to learn,” Katz says, before offering some advice to news sites in a similar position. “It’s smart to invest in digital early, and to really invest in social media to see where it’ll take you.” Katz also commended their decision to give full-time reporting decisions to writers providing content instantly for the website and later for the print publication.
“Our staff are comfortable working in a digital environment,” he adds.
The spike in February 2011 traffic for MotherJones.com
Katz doesn’t see a big traffic drop coming soon; in fact, he envisions steady growth, thanks to early GOP meetings to determine the front-runner in the 2012 primaries.
The area Mother Jones is most cautiously circling is mobile, Katz reveals. They optimized their website for smartphones but they have yet to launch a dedicated iPhone or iPad app. “We’re not sure if there will be financial gain for us [to invest in mobile] so there has to be another reason for us to move in that direction.”
For an overview of Mother Jones’ February traffic figures, go to this press release.
We’ve moved on Twitter
For those of you who follow us daily on Twitter, we wanted to post a quick note to let you know we’ve moved. Thanks to the kind support people at Twitter HQ, we finally get to use the official @futureofmedia account.
If you previously followed us @djfom, please update and follow us @futureofmedia.
Twitter CEO says 40% of all tweets created on mobile
By Chris Hogg
If you ever needed a bigger sign of where content consumption is heading, look no further than Twitter. The micro-messaging service that saw more than 25 billion Tweets in the last year says its users are increasingly moving to mobile platforms.
In an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed nearly half of all Twitter posts are made from a mobile device.
“Mobile is a more and more and more common use of Twitter–40 percent of all tweets created on mobile devices,” Costolo told Kara Swisher of All Things D. “That might seem low, but it was 25 percent a year ago.”
Costolo also said 50 percent of active users are also active on mobile, indicating more and more people are consuming media on platforms other than a computer.
Costolo credits the increasing mobile usage to the launch of apps launches for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry.
According to a 2010 blog post from Twitter’s co-founder former CEO Evan Williams, Twitter’s mobile website, SMS, Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for BlackBerry are the most-used Twitter apps after the company’s website.
Twitter recently announced a new round of funding with investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as well as existing investors. Swisher revealed the round brought in $200 million with a valuation of $3.7 billion.
In his interview at CES, Costolo said Twitter now has more than 350 employees, 100 of whom were hired in Q4 of 2010.
Mobile usage is on the rise across the board, and companies like Google are betting their future on it. According to Search Engine Land, Google’s AdMob unit is reporting more than two billion ad requests on a daily basis (more than quadrupling over the last 12 months).
Recent data released by comScore also indicates big mobile growth; 234 million Americans aged 13 and older used mobile devices for the three month average period ending in Nov. 2010 and 61.5 million Americans were said to own a smartphone (up 10 percent from the preceding three-month period).
The following is a breakdown of the most popular mobile operating systems:
For more on the future of mobile, check out how media companies are harnessing the mobile space or the 11 key elements for the future of mobile.
Video spoof sheds light on journalism’s obsession with social media
By Chris Hogg
If you were to sit in on a meeting with the digital media team of any news organization, you’d hear discussion about Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, YouTube and just about every other hot tech start-up that is playing a role in redefining the media landscape.
While the benefits of using social media are obvious, there comes a point where we have to ask: How much is too much? How much should a news organization rely on social media in its newsgathering-process, and how much should the “old-school” methods be utilized to gather info? The answer depends on the news organization, but KDFW has produced a spoof video (below) that is going viral. The video pokes fun at social media obsession in newsgathering.
Posted to its Facebook page on Monday, the video pokes fun at every social media tool and journalism’s increasing obsession with each. Some of the video highlights include a reporter who doesn’t say a word on TV, instead choosing to share news by sending tweets from his mobile phone; it showcases a reporter taking a picture with a corpse so she can post it to her Facebook page; and a reporter who checks-in on FourSquare to get coupons while reporting on-scene.
According to the Dallas Observer, the video looks to have debuted at the Lone Star Emmys. Here it is:
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This blog post is part of the Future of Media‘s ongoing coverage and examination of what’s happening in the media around the world. If you have a story idea, please contact us. This blog post was originally posted on chrishogg.me.