There’s a cool post over at Buffer about surprising social media statistics, and while a few different things stand out — for example, about 91 percent of your mentions on Twitter will likely come from a user with less than 500 followers (thus don’t chase the big game, per se) — there’s something on Facebook engagement by days of the week that’s pretty cool:
As you can see, Friday is the best day. Honestly, this probably says more about people checking out mentally at work on Fridays than it says about Facebook — it’s probably a reason to consider adopting a 4 x 10 work schedule — but it’s interesting to note as organic reach continues to decline. For example, it’s been long held that it’s bad to send e-mail marketing efforts on Fridays, but apparently it’s good to Facebook share therein. This rolls up with the idea that people feel they’re slammed on Fridays — things to close up before the weekend — but as the day wears on, they’re feeling checked out too.
The Facebook engagement stats came from Adobe’s “Social Intelligence Report” for Q1 of 2014, which analyzed 225 billion FB postings and also found that nearly 25 percent of all video plays on Facebook occur on Fridays. Again, as a Friday wears onward, people feel checked out and need distractions; that seems to be more what this is saying — but from a marketing standpoint, rather than worrying that “saving your best stuff” for Friday will get it buried, you should actually consider embracing Friday as a concept for posting (but not e-mailing!).
At a broad level, I’ve been thinking recently about social and whether its powers in terms of real-time and connectivity can someday be disrupted because the space is becoming too noisy (and as brands clutter it, which was bound to happen, “real users” might leave — which will then make the brands leave, right?). Decent read on some of that stuff here. The ties between social media and employee engagement — two major buzzwords of the last 3-5 years — are no doubt pretty interesting, though: a consistent decline in engagement at work can lead to more engagement on social. So in a way, brands are rooting for other brands to internally not be engaging their people — so that those other employees are instead looking at their brand on social. Hmm. Kind of meta, in a way.
Overall lesson: don’t be afraid to post to Facebook on Fridays. And try to keep your people engaged at work.
