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.
Jeremy Waite, 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.