The world is full of coincidences. Once in the airport of Salt Lake City, I ran into Natalie Cook on her way to Romania to do missionary work there. I had met her in high school, so we had a brief conversation and I wished her luck. Didn’t think anything of it, but just over two years later after she returned from Romania we met again by chance and we are now married with three kids. Some things are serendipitous that way. By being in the right place at the right time, amazing things can happen. How can this help you with your social media sharing? Every share you make online gives you a chance at serendipity, a chance for a potential client or an old friend to read your content and hire you. New data we’ve collected at Clearview Social can help you maximize your chances for more of these fortuitous collisions.
We’ve specifically collected data on when professionals view business content shared via Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. This is not the same data you will see in the surveys from Hootsuite or Buffer – both of which are outstanding surveys of millions of tweets and shares, this is data highly focused on viewers of content related to law, accounting, insurance, recruiting, and other professional services. We will refer to these types of shares as pro-shares, short for professional social media shares.
The results are not surprising, almost nobody reads pro-shares over the weekend. Very few read pro-shares on Fridays or late at night.
Perhaps the most important finding, that we would like to shout from the rooftops is this: shares on Twitter and Facebook on average get more than double the clicks than shares to Linkedin alone. I know Linkedin is serious, professional and safe–but it is also often boring. Linkedin isn’t really where the fun is, so you are less likely to see your potential clients bumping into your content on the LinkdedIn homepage. It’s more likely, that they are catching up on the latest Trump-gif on Twitter when they see your article that can actually help their company make more money, reduce risk, or improve performance.
For users of the Clearview Social platform, rest assured we are constantly tinkering with our sharing algorithm to make sure that when you send out emails for your team to share, and they click “share,” those articles will be scheduled to be shared at the best possible time of day to maximize clicks.
For the rest of you, feel free to take advantage of the best windows of time to share professional content to your network. You never know what serendipitous event might occur, maybe you’ll find your ideal client or your ideal client will find true love.
Notes on the data collected: It is important to recognize one area of potential bias in the data. In the first year of Clearview Social, our software didn’t suggest any particular time to share. In year two, we began suggesting times to share based on all of the data collected in that first year. Also in the second year, Clearview Social automatically scheduled shares based on the pattern of clicks in the first year. Approximately 50% of those sharing through Clearview Social in year two chose to override our suggested time and either chose to share immediately or scheduled shares for a different time. Why does this matter? If you make pro-shares outside of our suggested times, your clicks per share may be substantially lower than the ones we have reported because almost half the people sharing in our sample use the times we had suggested.