Next month it will be November, and for many marketers across the U.S. that means preparing for yet another winter freeze. Inside the office, however, marketers should be preparing for the turn of another year—one full of opportunities to better engage customers, bolster brand awareness and create stronger, more relevant and share-worthy content.
To get more eyes on the content your team is producing, it needs to be strategically pushed out through an array of social media platforms. And one of the biggest platforms for sharing content is Twitter. As your content marketing team prepares for 2015, have them glean the following findings from a new study commissioned by ExactTarget, which reveals key insights about Twitter engagement rates:
Tweet more in the first few months of the year: You would think that brands would still be reverberating with energy following the end of the year, which is simply filled to the brim with unique, searchable, timely stories (like end of year recap pieces, industry predictions for the year ahead, etc.). But instead, the study revealed that brands tend to send fewer tweets early in the year, with their activities picking up significantly in the second half. So, while your competitors are currently shooting off innumerous tweets—as should your brand—fight the temptation to take a break after you ring in the New Year. Start strategizing now on how you can align content creation with your Twitter campaign and start 2015 off with a bang.
Brand tweets peak in October: Maybe it’s the serenity of the harvest season or the thrill of mid-October fall festivities, but something about the month just makes brand tweets "pop." That likely means companies are ramping up content creation this month to push out more valuable, shareable content on Twitter. And your competitors are likely tweeting like crazy as you read this. So how are you going to close out the end of the month for 2014? Also keep this in mind come next year when your team is fine-tuning its content creation strategy.
Schedule tweets to post outside of office hours: Social interactions are a critical content marketing metric to measure. Many studies have been conducted to determine when tweets are most impactful and engaged with throughout the day, but ExactTarget found that tweets sent between the hours of 1 AM and 5 AM EST garnered the most replies and retweets. While this may seem shocking, consider that this time period represents 10 PM to 2 AM on the West Coast—a more reasonable time frame. So, be sure that tweets are embargoed or scheduled to post during times outside of the office and even later into the night.
Click here to review the study in full, as well as to review Twitter engagement rates by industry.
