A new research study from Lithium Technologies and Klout reveals Twitter is the key platform for quick audience engagement, with reaction times differing greatly by continent.
, now head of digital strategy EMEA at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, famously said in his ‘80 Rules of Social Media’ that the average half life of a tweet was between six and seven minutes. Given this was put up more than two years ago, that number has probably gone even further down since then – but this new study, completed in June and written by four academics, has added a little more meat to the bone.
The problem statement read simply: “For a user on a social network, find the best time to post a message within a specified time period in order to maximise the probability of receiving audience reactions.” Perhaps not altogether surprisingly, Twitter exhibited a much higher speed of reactions compared to Facebook.
25% of reactions take place in the first three minutes – giving credence to Waite’s line – while 50% take place within the first half hour. This is swift compared to other networks; Facebook, for fan pages, and Google+ on average have 50% of reactions take place within two hours.
The researchers separated Facebook personal pages and Facebook fan pages because of “significantly different dynamics” – or, in other words, different content strategies between the two. “Interestingly, we see that the Facebook Pages network shows more similar reaction times to Google+ rather than Facebook, indicating that similar responses can be elicited from users belonging to completely disjoint user sets, if the underlying dynamics of interactions are similar,” the paper notes.