Your communities are active on both networks but not necessarily at the same time.
Why is it important to post on Facebook and Twitter at different times and how can you create maximum impact?

We asked our community on Jelly to answer the following question:
“Do you publish your content on Facebook and Twitter at the same time?”

For 70% of respondents, the answer was “no”, and when they gave a reason it was because their communities on Facebook and Twitter were different and had two distinct profiles.
For the 30% who answered “yes”, their reason was that their Facebook and Twitter accounts were linked.

We are going to try and persuade you or assure you of the importance of publishing your content on Facebook and Twitter at different times by answering this first question: “Why post on Facebook and Twitter?”

Facebook and Twitter are unavoidable

Brands today have the option of addressing their target audience in a precise manner and of getting their instant responses via feedback. Social media enable brands to communicate, create communities, and to organize and entertain them to increase loyalty.

Brands now have access to a range of different networks. A new network comes on stream every month or even every week, but how many have managed to achieve the importance of Facebook and Twitter?

Source Statista

In the second quarter of 2014, the number of acive users registered on Facebook was over 1.3 billion and 271 million on Twitter!

This means that if a brand wants to set up communications on social media, it is essential to establish a presence on Facebook and Twitter.

“What are the best times to post your content and to generate engagement?” I’m sure you’ve heard this question asked before.

Amongst the many options, there are two that recur frequently:
To post when your communities are active, when they will be more likely to see and interact with your content.
To post when other sources of news are not posting, when there is a greater chance of standing out from the crowd.

Both options achieve two different goals: ‘reach’ for the first one and ‘engagement’ for the second.

At Over-Graph, we favor the engagement option. We have observed a trend, as have many others, i.e. content and the engagement resulting from it, have become proof of the quality of a brand’s communications on social media. Facebook’s distribution algorithm for the information in the news feed takes into account the social interaction and now even the time spent on a link and its content.

Although Facebook users may ‘Like’ a brand’s page because they feel a connection to it or an affection for it, they will stop following it if the content it posts doesn’t meet their expectations.

If you’ve been following us for a while now, you must have heard of our ‘Forecast Engagement’ feature. It’s already available for your Facebook posts and now for your Twitter accounts too. The score shown for the same content is not the same!

 
This means that although the audiences on the two networks may be similar, the best times to post your content are not necessarily the same, because the activity of other news sources also differs.

In a study of the longevity of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram posts, we saw that the lifetime of tweets was three times shorter than that of a Facebook post - 4hours and 4 minutes v. 14 hours 42 minutes.


So, to reach your community and increase the number of impressions of your content on Twitter, we would advise you to tweet the same content several times (we’re currently working on the recommended frequency for postings). However, remember that the same content doesn’t necessarily mean the same tweet. You can vary the format of your tweets with Twitter-Cards which you can use directly on Over-Graph.

Conclusion

As you can see, several elements tend to favor the staggered posting of content on Facebook and Twitter particularly because your communities aren’t active at the same times on both networks and your best times for posting will differ.

With our ‘Multi-Api’ solution you can schedule your posts on Facebook and Twitter at different times, on the same screen, and apply our recommendations with ease.

Article published by Maïté in SocialMedia,usersOG

the 17 October 2014