Brands have learned how important visually rich media is to social marketing. Tweets, Facebook statuses and Google+ posts are seen more often if they include some kind of image or video, but they also see higher engagement rates than text-only content. As Brafton reported, a study of Twitter content indicates posts with images receive 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more favorites and 150 percent more Retweets.
However, businesses are now trying to figure out how they can dive deeper into data to optimize their posting. Thankfully, that’s where CMO and Adobe’s Social Intelligence Report comes in. The study looked at what kinds of media brands post to Facebook and tried to quantify how successful they were in terms of views, clicks and engagement.
Photos win at the end of the week
Unsurprisingly, businesses fill their followers’ News Feeds with photos the most often, or 63 percent of the time. Links come in second at 16 percent, with videos taking up 12 percent of branded posts. Plain text brings up the rear at 9 percent.
However, the most interesting nugget of information may be the analysis of success rates per day. Apparently, Fridays are far and away the best time to be posting pictures and videos. In fact, 25 percent of all the video plays on Facebook take place on one day of the week: Friday. Impressions and engagement in general are also at their highest as the workweek ends, so brands should save their most immersive media until then.
Give content a structure on social
As Brafton reported, brands that produce daily content see an uptick in pageviews – and this correlation also applies to social posting. So there’s no doubt marketers need to be consistent in terms of the content they provide to social connections and prospects. In short, don’t save all your social content for Friday in hopes to maximize results.
Instead, slant distribution for maximum effect. Posting videos and pictures on Fridays is one way, but another is making sure LinkedIn thought leadership pieces go live before lunch, when professionals are apt to read them. One more trend to be aware of is Tweet density. According to the BufferApp blog, Twitter sees more traffic as the week goes on, but it actually peaks on the weekend.
Ultimately, the best content marketing strategy that takes advantage of these phenomena might be to create a regular content calendar. When posts are regularly optimized for maximum visibility and engagement based on certain days of the week or times of year, you can make sure the content you worked hard to create doesn’t fall by the wayside because of user habits.
